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.

Comments

The Lawyers win

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

You should see the homes of some of these guys...

... who is suing whom ...

[mkawick]

Just saying

Abolish patents already.

[unity100]

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.

All this money and time

[devent]

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".

Business Success

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Microsoft..

[Quantus347]

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.

Re:Microsoft..

[Caerdwyn]

Microsoft doesn't have anything anybody wants to emulate.

Re:Microsoft..

[dattaway]

Microsoft isn't delivering a product, so they can't be sued.

Re:Microsoft..

[Rockoon]

Because Microsofts patent portfolio is so large and varied that its preferable to enter into a cross licensing deal.

The end result is that most companies *do* cross license with Microsoft without the muss and fuss of a legal battle, because by all rights Microsoft does have some patents of value that you want.

A non-comprehensive list of companies that Microsoft has cross-licensing deal with:

Alpine, Amazon, Apple, Autodesk, Centrify, Denso, Epson, Fuji, Funai, HP, JVC, Kenwood, Lexmark, LG, Lotus, Nikon, Olympus, Onkyo, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, TomTom, Toshiba, and Xerox.

..thats just the short list of companies I found in the first few pages of a google search.

Re:Size?

[Dogers]

And even better if they sorted it out so that the arrows didn't overlap..

Why on earth does the Oracle-Google arrow overlap with the Nokia-Toshiba one? Specifically added confusion, that's why.

Re:Size?

[duranaki]

Also I'd like to see some dotted lines to connect companies with cross-patent licensing agreements. For instance I know Kodak and Nokia have them, which is why Kodak is suing Apple and not Nokia.

The Era of Stupid Computing

[Microlith]

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.

Re:The Era of Stupid Computing

[tool462]

I had to question your assumption that patent suits were less common in the 80s, so I did some googling. Turns out the 80s were pretty bad too:
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/papers/HallZiedonis07_PatentLitigation_AEA.pdf
The pretty and relevant charts are on page 24 (Figures 3 and 4)

The excerpt from the paper that describes those charts (page 10-11):

Figure 3 shows that litigation has risen along with the increase in patenting, and also that
there has been a substantial increase in suits involving non-rival entities during the past ten years,
supporting the claims of some in the industry (FTC, 2003). Figure 4 shows how litigation
probability for our firms has changed over time. As suggested by interviews reported in Hall and
Ziedonis (2001), the overall probability of litigation on a per-patent basis rose steeply after the
creation of the CAFC and the strengthening of patent enforcement that followed. However, it then falls again to the pre-1982 level, possibly because of the success of the defensive portfolio
strategy in reducing litigation between rivals.

The number of patents in the mid 80s was quite high, only about 1/3 less than ~2000. As Fig 4 shows, lawsuits per patent peaked in the mid 80s. The most interesting change to me is the increase the number of patent lawsuits between non-rivals. It would also be interesting to see data from 2001 to 2010 to see if the trends continued.

The message to take from this though is that 80s were hardly a time of free IP love and openness.

If You Stare at the Diagram...

[D Ninja]

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.)

Re:Size?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, considering that Qualcomm is underlined for misspelling in the graph, I don't the author was particularly concerned with spending time on polish.

Re:Hey Microsoft

[RapmasterT]

so out of a chart showing 17 companies suing each other, you've only got a pithy comment aimed at Microsoft?

Does that reveal a knee-jerk anti-microsoft bias, or an inability to comment on the actual subject matter...I guess that's not really an either-or question. never mind.

Re:competition

[jgagnon]

It's not anti-competitive... the competition just moved into the courts.

Re:Better title:

[wembley fraggle]

Even better. "Who is suing whom". Because grammar matters.

Re:Size?

[clone53421]

As a matter of fact, I did just that. Theirs is a hopeless mess of spaghetti.

http://ompldr.org/vNXFndg/lawsuitmap.gif

Re:Size?

[JMZero]

If you're wondering, there is a planar embedding for this graph (ie they could have avoided all crossing). GO MS PAINT!

But yeah, not sure whether they're dumb, or just wanted it to look more imposing.

Re:Hey Microsoft

[maxume]

Microsoft does, on an annual basis:

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar09/10k_fr_dis.html

If you read through a bit, you will see that they currently incur legal expenses of about $500 million a year and spend about $9 billion a year on R&D.

(Of course, those legal expenses include settlements...)

Actually, Microsoft is almost offering to be sued

[Motard]

By indemnifying WP7 manufacturers against patent infringement suits, MS is basically assuming any legal threats itself - on behalf of its manufacturers.

Re:Hey Microsoft

[Locutus]

no other company has 'touched' me so much as they have over the past 25 years so yes, they and their tactics always get my attention.

And as far as everyone else goes, these kinds of things have been going on for years but it is Microsoft who continues to do the most damage to competition. The others tend to figure out how to work thing out without initially destroying each other. Microsoft's business methods and practices are always based on protectionism as opposed to competition and their market position makes them the largest threat in the ring. They've lost 10s of billions on the Windows CE based productline yet it still exists. As with Internet Explorer they effectively pay vendors to ship their products until the competition has lost enough income they are easy pickings. That makes them the elephant in the room.

As for it being knee-jerk well if it were a demolition derby, when a competitor shows up in a armored tank, who but the blind isn't going to point that out?

LoB

Re:Nokia, LG and Samsung?

[pavon]

Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. It has nothing to do with patents.

Re:Looks like NOKIA is the king of suing

[pavon]

I won't defend the lawsuits against Apple, and Qualcomm, as I think they are crap, but the graph does seriously misrepresent the situation against Nokia.

Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others not on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. Government probes have found those companies guilty of doing so, and it is perfectly legitimate for Nokia to seek damages as a result of those.

I have no idea what the lawsuit against Motorola is. The closest thing I can find is Motorola is suing a previous exec who took a job at Nokia.

Does that diagram look familiar?

[doronbc]

Probably because we've seen something similar to it before. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-mobile-patent-lawsuits/

Re:Size?

[clone53421]

*blushes*

MS Word

Re:Size?

[Art3x]

The author of Information Is Beautiful also tried his hand at a better picture: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/