Motorola Sues Apple

rexjoec writes "Just a week after Motorola Inc. (MOT) itself became the target of legal action by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), it sued Apple Inc. (AAPL) for the alleged infringement of 18 of its patents. Motorola subsidiary, Motorola Mobility Inc. also filed patent suits against Apple in federal court in Illinois and Florida."

Comments

Just great!!

[udoschuermann]

This is great! If this madness continues, companies will spend 90% of their revenue filing or defending dozens of lawsuits, get nothing done anymore, and will clamor at the doors of congress to save them from the patent madness they once thought to be such a great idea.

Or maybe we're all doomed.

Re:Just great!!

[WrongSizeGlass]

In the end we'll all pay more for phones because these companies can't learn to get along. Who knows, they may each have patents for the same things issued by the infallible USPTO.

Re:Just great!!

[gtirloni]

When things are just bad enough, nothing changes. I'm also in favour of complete madness. Perhaps when we hit the bottom, these companies will be the ones advocating against software patents or at least to reform the current system.

Re:Just great!!

[Bucc5062]

You assume there will be intelligent or semi-intelligent people in position to construct a new structure from the ruins of the current system. Ha! The current crop of the body politic is on the fringe of being in touch with understanding the common sense view of the majority. Their primary concerns are about power as it relates to a political office, not the concerns of either the People, Constitution, or the corporate interest.

If the United States loses a centrist, reasonable approach to politics then little will fix the problem. Republicans cheer at the failure of our economy for they feel it will bring them into power and they will "fix the problem". Democrats (for disclosure, I am registered Democrats) will then perform that same acts so they then credit republicans with failure and as the two parties tear apart the country, the middle and lower classes will melt into something between indentured servitude or at the least, little chance at a comfortable life as less then 5% of the population enjoys "The Game".

To stop the madness of A suing B who sues C who sues A and B who sues ... would require the ability of government to respect the "right to fair trial" while revamping laws relating to patents and IP...

Sustainable?

[MozeeToby]

Is this really sustainable for the industry? It seems like every mobile company has patents that every other mobile company is either stepping on or tiptoeing around. I have to think that by this time next year all the major companies involved will have set up a meeting somewhere and agreed to cross license with each other. All these patent suits are just wrangling for a better position in the agreement that they all know is coming eventually. Of course, such an agreement would make it next to impossible for any new companies to enter the market, which I'm sure none of the current manufacturers would be sad about.

Re:Sustainable?

[TheRaven64]

It seems like every mobile company has patents that every other mobile company is either stepping on or tiptoeing around

Nope, most companies have cross-licensing agreements. Apple is in trouble because they didn't bother to set these up when they entered the market. Nokia fired first and now everyone else in the same position has decided that they can get some money from Apple, or force them out of the market.

Re:Sustainable?

[Skuld-Chan]

Motorola and Nokia have a distinct advantage over Apple too - as they (and their partners) invented the vast majority of the technology that makes cell phones work at all, and Apple never paid.

No matter who loses, the lawyers win

[macwhizkid]

A diagram in the Guardian from last week nicely illustrates the insanity that is the mobile phone litigation business. With the vortex of lawsuits surrounding both hardware and software, it's amazing that anybody is able to innovate at all.

Patent wars

[vagabond_gr]

It's pretty hard to keep the graph up-to-date.

Business as usual...

[Penguinisto]

I think we're seeing something different here. Company A gets sued by Company B, because B wants a revenue stream from a stupid patent (especially since it's rather obvious that B is struggling in the mobile market pretty badly). Company A, also struggling, doesn't want to have to pay for the eventual licensing out of its own funds, so it sues Company C to get a revenue stream that it will in turn use to pay B with (and maybe get a bit of extra besides). Eventually everyone is suing everyone else to, well, pay everyone else.

It all looks good on paper, though, and it'll confuse the hell out of shareholders enough to make them look profitable.

Laughable

[Moby Cock]

These patents are absurd. We've debated the frivolousness of many patents here for a while, but a patent for "Receiver having concealed external antenna" is just laughable. It makes me wonder if there is a patent for have an non-concealed antenna.

Re:Laughable

[gad_zuki!]

Except prior art of on internal antenna is at least 40 years. Its not an innovation. Its an EXISTING AND KNOWN feature but crammed in legalese and put in conditions like "cell based receivers" so that the patent passes without adding any innovation to the world. Its your typical "narrow enough to pass but broad enough to do damage" patent that these companies specialize in for the sake of litigious action against competitors.

The USPO's take on this is that the courts will work it out. Thanks guys for letting any patent go through and letting me, the end user of these phones, pay extra for all the laywering.

Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple

[RingBus]

Apple still has an army of fans in the media who will proclaim every new product as 'innovative' and 'amazing' regardless of the actually quality which will help less the blow of Android dominance. However there is now an air of acceptance from Apple fans that the iPhone is on its way to a Mac like marketshare and quite a bit of revisionist history of "Apple never wanted to dominate the cellphone market" rationalizing going on.

Re:Armageddon!

[Carewolf]

No, it seems destruction is not assured, so it is not MAD, unfortunately it appears to be MAX - Mutually Assued Crosslicensing :(

Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful posting in Apple stories. There is an army of Mac/Apple zealots who will lash out with their mod points at anything remotely perceived as 'anti-Apple' and 'smite the unbeliever'...

Crazy to think Slashdot has turned into a hive of Apple fanboyism. No one would have believed you 10 years ago if you would have told them what was to come.

Re:Armageddon!

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Oh, if only this were true. If only Patentgeddon were finally here, and Mutual Destruction was truly Assured. If only the big players would unleash their full arsenals on each other, in wave after thoughtless paroxysm of retaliations, until the silos were all exhausted and the landscape were littered with piles of the bodies of slain lawyers. Perhaps then, the starving, horribly disfigured mutants who were never part of the original conflict, yet somehow managed to miraculously, accidentally survive, could try to eke out a peaceful subsistence living, at long last free of the Shadow of Mordor.

Or something like that.

In an off the record meeting ...

[PinkyGigglebrain]

MS: You know, we could "misplace" the lawsuit MS has going against you.
Motorola: That would be great, but what would we have to do?
MS: Nothing much, just mess with Apple a bit. We could do it ourselves but it would attract the kind of attention we don't want right now.

First thing that when through my mind when I read the headline.

NO IT IS NOT

[brunes69]

The "whole point of patents" was to enable someone to come up with an idea and have a brief exclusivity period so that they could get the idea to market.

The whole premise of patents was that it ACTUALLY TOOK time to get ideas to market, and that an average person COULD GET THEM TO MARKET. Thus they would encourage INNOVATION by allowing small players a way to compete with already entrenched players, via innovation.

Patents were not created so that giant mega-corporations could use them to gain further market share, they were SUPPOSED to be there for the little guy.

The "whole point of patents" is totally meaningless in today's business world. Patents do not serve to encourage innovation, the limit it, because everyone and every company who has an idea has to spend enormous amounts of money just to see if their idea is already patented, and the only ones who can really afford it are the players who are already entrenched. It is not just software and IP patents that have this problem either. With facilities like mini-fabs and Alibaba.com, anyone who has an idea for a product can have it prototyped and have mini runs done of it overseas for very minimal cost. For many inventions It actually will cost more for you to get your patent investigated and filed, than it will for you to make your first 10,000 units and start selling them. How is this supposed to encourage rapid innovation again?

Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also an army of anti-Apple people who will up-mod anything tearing Apple apart. It's like a car with most of its weight at the front and back ends -- most of the time it balances out, but it does tend to go into a ditch a fair amount.

Does anyone still care about this?

[Arancaytar]

Suing is how you say "hello" in the cell phone business.

Re:Business as usual...

[catmistake]

Well at least somebody wins... (the lawyers)

Banks and lawyers. Two totally unnecessary services getting the most money from everything for nothing?! Great! :D

Let's not forget the roles of the paralegals, court reporters, bailiffs, court clerks, gavel carpenters and those pretentious robe designers! They're benefitting as much as anyone in this litigious patent machinery.