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Visual Depiction of Who Is Suing Who in Mobile
Although the graphic itself won't win an award for design,
Norman submitted a story about who's suing who in the mobile universe. From Apple to Qualcomm and pretty much everyone in between, it's a pretty impressive mess.
Pigs at the trough.
......
... represent baby.. yeah!
You should see the homes of some of these guys...
Take that! That'll teach you to compete with me.
It would be far more informative if the "balloon" for each company was sized based on gross sales, or some-such. That would at least differentiate between a large company with serveral lawsuits, and a tiny company with an inordinate number.
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Just saying
its been a few years, and we are at this point. compare the rate and think what a bigger mess it will be in 5-10 years.
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All this money and time wasted in the courts could be used to make better products and improve innovation. How are patents are suppose to promote the progress of useful arts again? We should just change the text to "to promote the progress of lawyers".
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It would be interesting to correlate this to how successful companies have been in recent years. Just looking at the diagram, it appears that businesses that are floundering tend to sue, or even moreso the opposite, businesses that are successful are getting more heat.
How is it that nobody is suing Microsoft? I mean...its Microsoft: Digital Evil since 1985. They've constantly been in one form of litigation or another for decades.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Another thing to consider is who's charging exorbitant licensing fees from whom. Example: RIM is charging Microsoft a per-seat licensing fee for any Blackberry user whose account resides on a Microsoft-hosted email solution. I'm sure there are other examples, but my google-fu is weak.
If you can't innovate, litigate.. right?
have they fallen so far they aren't worth or can't afford lawyers?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Whatever happened to punching someone in the face and just saying 'no, you can't do that to me'. Oh well, insanity ensues.
And then you have NTP who is suing everybody.
Can you imagine if what is going on now in the mobile space had been happening as personal computing took off during the 80s? We'd have gotten just short of nowhere, what with all the patent suits crippling things and walled garden lock down forcing people to find exploits so they can regain basic levels of control.
I can't help that this piss poor, anti-user behavior in the mobile market is going to ripple up into the general computing space in the next few years and generally make life hell for anyone who shows an interest in computers beyond Facebook, e-mail and the latest console game.
If you stare at that diagram long enough, you can see a whole bunch of lawyers swimming in piles of cash ala Scrooge McDuck. (If you're having trouble, it helps if you cross your eyes a little bit and back away slowly.)
It appears the US has lost it's edge even in the number of people to sue.
Its a bit like the wild west when gold prospectors shot it out to decide who got dibs on what plot of land. Except in this case bullets are words and property is intellectual. I vote for a return to the good old days.
"Artist rendering of actual patent thicket"
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Nokia is suing 5 companies and is being sued by 2.
Kodak is suing 5 companies and is being sued by none.
Microsoft is suing 2 companies and is being sued by none.
Apple is suing 2 companies and is being sued by 3.
Motorola is suing nobody and is being sued by three companies.
Sharp is suing nobody and is being sued by 3 companies.
LG and HTC are being sued 2 times apiece.
So, is Nokia the worst offender as it watches its profits tank in response to fierce competition?
Is Kodak, the king of failed business models overtaken my new technology, the next worst offender?
When companies start suing, it seems to be because they have stopped competing.
the land of the fee.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
I agree. I struggle to understand how they are arranged. At first glance it appears to be in some sort of vertical groups but when you see Google and Oracle on a diagonal crossing some other thing for no reason, the deliberate obfuscation is apparent. Come on people....arrange by performance or to enable easy comparisons!
Basically, whenever you get successful, someone is going to sue you for something. Litigation, in the USA anyway, has turned into a business strategy. It's a pretty extravagant burden on taxpayers these days since the economy is already screwed. Look how long the SCO debacle has dragged on: Mar, 6th 2003. I Wonder how much just that one case has cost taxpayers. And no, I don't think SCO will not pay those costs if they file (have filed?) for bankruptcy. These stupid lawsuits gotta stop.
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Remember to maintain your supply of
Nokia and Kodak(?!?!) are basically suing everybody while Motorola and Sharp(?!?! again) are taking it in all holes.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I don't think that's accidental. a clean, uncluttered diagram would make the story uninteresting. Nobody wants to read a story titled "several companies suing each other in orderly fashion".
Looks like patents aren't as useful a tool for innovation as they are lauded to be.
I remember, in a past discussion, someone described the patent situation similar to the cold war but noted that it's likely ending in an explosive way. Previously, companies held patent portfolios to hold other companies at bay in a defensive stance similar to the stockpiles of missiles. Now, however, the portfolios are being used offensively - the missiles are starting to fly. As more and more start to get unleashed, this is only going to get uglier, in my opinion. While I may not like seeing my favourite companies targeted by lawsuits, I'm ok with the cold war ending because, maybe, just maybe, these companies will get fed up with the hundreds of millions that will start flying about as well and start to lobby for patent laws that make more sense because, gawd knows, the current ones are pretty messed up...
Well, one can hope, at least...
http://simplepenart.com/misc/whos%20suing%20who.ods
i do not think that image is correct. nokia settled with qualcomm long ago.
Whenever a new technology or standard is proposed, there will inevitably always be overlapping patents that someone else owns. This is why big companies like to hold patents like poker cards. Nobody knows exactly what/how many/how effective the cards the other players hold, which is why most of the time nobody plays the litigation game. It's like saying "I'll hold on to my King because I'm afraid that guy has an Ace" unless that other guy already played a Queen against you in another game and then... well it's revenge time!
It's kind of like the mutually assured destruction of the litigation world.
I saw that comment in TFA and thought, 'how great that is for Microsoft'.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
That graphic is deliberately fucked up, with edges crossing where there's no need for them to do so.
What it shows when you decode it is that Nokia and Kodak are the most litigious, while the most frequent targets are Apple (no surpised), Sharp and Motorola.
9 of the bubbles are suing nobody, 5 are not being sued, and 3 are suing and being sued.
Nokia is involved in 10 cases, suing 8 companies and being countersued by 2 of them. I guess that's what you get for being a longtime pioneer and suddenly having your industry jumped by a bunch of linux-based hacks and an iPod with a phone chip in it.
I wonder if there's a relationship between a company's stock price and the number of lawsuits it files. Nokia's stock has dropped about 30% since April.
By indemnifying WP7 manufacturers against patent infringement suits, MS is basically assuming any legal threats itself - on behalf of its manufacturers.
Whom do you say does not care anymore?
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
wait, aren't Nokia, LG and Samsung all on the Symbian board? Why the hell are they suing each other?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
All the whining about Apple being sue happy when they are only countersuing Nokia and suing HTC. Meanwhile, Nokia is suing Qualcomm, LG-Group, Motorola, Apple, Sharp, Hitachi and Samsung. What a joke. Don't let the FOSS world find out. They just can't stomach Apple and won't shut up about Android. Since Google makes zip in hardware it makes sense that their hardware partners won't sue them.
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I assume the name "Qualcomm" in the diagram has a dotted red underline because MS PowerPoint thinks it's mis-spelt?
Ah, this is the Grauniad we're talking about. Ignore me.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The business of government wins. Billions of dollars each year are being raked through the business of government merely for the administration of the IP racket. After all, who do you think designed and implemented the process? It sure wasn't the players -- it was the founders and owners of the game.
Don't for a second think that government doesn't benefit from all this.
Probably because we've seen something similar to it before. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-mobile-patent-lawsuits/
Rent-seeking: It's the new innovation!
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I think they purposefully made more lines criss-cross than necessary, just to make it look more complicated. For example, if you move Oracle down to where Toshiba is, then move Toshiba to above Google, that bottom-left corner would be pretty simple.
for me was to see who was NOT suing anyone.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
mod parent up please, his graph, while less colorful is more informative than the one in the article.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I've been making a list of the better articles and the most important lawsuits:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Phone_patent_litigation
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
There are, at a glance, at least four places where arrows cross, but shouldn't have to if the circles were moved. The worst case is the Oracle-to-Google arrow that has no reason to cross Nokia-to-Toshiba.
Move HTC above ELAN and Microsoft to the upper left corner.
Swap Sharp and Samsung.
Hell, just put the thing through dotty and nothing really has to cross.
I admit its is a legal pile-o-crap, but the dishonest way the graphical designer "tangled" it is either willful inflationary manipulation of opinion, or its just plain incompetence.
Who made this graph? Fox News?
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
According to the diagram Microsoft is suing HTC, but I haven't heard of such a thing. Instead they have a patent pact and HTC is paying Microsoft. Perhaps it could be said that if HTC wasn't paying Microsoft then there would be a lawsuit.
Someone has reworked the diagram to give a clearer picture of what's going on
http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209
I'm not surprised that Nokia is number one, but I never would have figured Kodak for number two. I never would have considered Kodak in this space at all.
Motorola is now suing Apple.