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ITC Investigates Xbox 360 After Motorola Complaint
FlorianMueller writes "The US International Trade Commission, which is increasingly popular as a patent enforcement agency, voted to investigate a complaint filed by Motorola against Microsoft last month. Motorola claims that the Xbox infringes five of its patents. In October, Microsoft complained against Motorola, alleging patent infringement by its Android-based smartphones. Apple, Nokia and HTC are also involved with ITC investigations as complainants and respondents. A new one-page overview document shows the ongoing ITC investigations related to smartphones and the products that the complainants would like to have banned from entry into the US market. The good news is that any import bans won't be ordered until long after Christmas. The ITC is faster than courts, but not that fast."
While patents, on the one hand, provide a measured amount of protection against aggressive and litigious competitors, they are only useful in bulk. This leaves many little guys hamstrung and at the whim of big guys like Motorola and Microsoft. Here we see to goliaths go at each other, and it's interesting because both sides have deep patent portfolios that they can wield against each other. The ultimate solution will be some sort of cross licensing deal, no doubt.
But for the little guy, a company like Microsoft can extinguish in short order due to a limited amount of leverage. Where Moto can respond with a set of infringed patents, the little guy won't have that type of MAD defensive position. As a result, the big guys get bigger, and the little guys get snuffed, and the consumers get screwed.
Patents were meant to foster competition and promote a plethora of ideas. It has not done that at all in the software sphere. Perhaps it is time to rethink the whole software patent system.
Well I don't like these ridiculous patent claims, but seeing Microsoft as a victim makes it worthwhile
So, is Motorola suing because the xbox uses upnp/dlna, wmv-vp9, and RDP for the media extender control channel? I don't get it...
Can I have some money please? Promise I'll split it with you ITC.
With all the trouble they cause we should call them Stupid phones.
The constitutional justifcation for patents is the line "[Congress is empowered] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
...products that the complainants would like to have banned from entry into the US market.
I can't help thinking this is not how patent law should be used.
It would be nice if a lot of this could be struck down on grounds of constitutionality, or on monopolistic behaviour grounds (a patent is a monopoly by definition after all, although i have no idea if this means anti-trust laws apply).
Should I support patents & oppose Microsoft?
Or should I support Microsoft & oppose patents?
Or: How companies fight like petulant little children. With hair pulling.
To me it seems more and more like these companies with their huge patent pools are bored and now play a game against each other. ..."
...Ad infinitum...
company1: "Hey company2, I hold a patent vaguely describing what you do with product X"
company2: "Hey company1, I have two patents even more vaguely describing what you do with product Y"
company3: "Hey both of you, I hold ten patents that you both infringe on"
company1: "Oh yeah, well guess what, I have twelve other patents, that
It's getting ridiculus...
Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line, 1939.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why innovate when you can litigate?
Patents in corporate world are bargaining chips; I used to work for Motorola and one of my performance goal is to file at least 2 patents a year. Corporate giants have tens and thousands of patents--when we get sued by patent infringement, the first thing is to counter when one of our patents. I remember Bill Gates coming in to a meeting threatening with a patent infringement, but before the meeting was over, one of our patent lawyers reminded him that they are infringing with some of our patents, cutting the meeting short.
This is just part of corporate chess playing. I bet that this suit will be settled behind doors with the outcome of nothing more than handshake between lawyers.
All the legal teams from all these corporations need to just converge in some back alley somewhere and settle this patent crap once and for all, Anchorman-style.
Here's what I think.
The big Corps don't actually like patents anymore. So some of them, mainly hardware/software makers, figure out if they start suing each other, and putting in patents for blatenly obvious stuff, that sooner or later the gov will stop sucking the MIAA & RIAA's dick long enough to invalidate all patents.
Or at least, that's my spin on some obvious greedy corporations.
Be seeing you...
If you want an idea of how little R&D spending is, you only need to look at medicine where you would think that R&D costs would be huge and they would want to protect their work fearsly. You might be surprised to know that R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more of the sales of drugs. It is urban legend that medicine companies spend huge portions of their budgets on R&D, they simply don't. You should also realize that the government gives out a lot of grants to these companies for medicine research as well, and they get to keep anything they can patent and they get to sell the end results. Then to really piss you off, all that R&D is 100% tax deductible. So the public is double paying the drug companies to develop medicine.
Now I seriously doubt that the technology industry is any different. I would bet that R&D is a very very small percentage of the total budget of most tech companies. Very few companies due pure research rather than developing something to fix the problem at hand. When you are only fixing the problem at hand, there is no way you will come up with something so unique that no one else will think of it. Sorry, but if your trying to solve a problem I can guarantee you someone else out there is trying to solve the same problem and is going to come up with basically the same thing as you do. Software patents are a terrible idea as anything you can think of to do in software someone else will think of doing the same exact thing. You see it over and over again people coming up with the exact same solutions to programming problems. Software patents don't advance the level of computer science, they hinder the advancement of computer science.
Currently in the tech industry, the bio industry and the medical industry if patents were totally abolished not one thing would change in the market place. Companies would still figure out new products to sell to consumers, and companies would continue to do their minimal levels of R&D to develop new products.
All R&D is tax deductible in every field, so the public is very much paying for all these patents twice. Once in taxes and supposedly again in the price of the product. I personally think if you take government money in the form of grants or loans, and/or you take a tax write off of your R&D that you should not be able to apply for patents on those items. The public paid for it so the public should have free access to them. All of this is just another form of corporate welfare and I seriously doubt it will ever change in the near future.
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Look at how much time and money big companies have been sinking into patent litigation lately? Their intention is to lock out big companies out of markets, but they just result in a counter attack. Eventually someone settles, and the lawyers are sent home with nothing to show for it.
I feel like we're on the brink of some sort of patent reform, once the big companies realize that the system is no longer beneficial to them.
As for the little guy, nobody cares about the little guy. politicians might talk about defending the little guy to win some votes, but they never manage to do more than talk. I think us little fish just have to hitch a ride on the backs of the big fish and try and steer them towards some compromise that benefits them and hopefully us.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
in the tech industry it is more difficult to measure. much of the R&D is done by start-ups. The ones that succeed are acquired by bigger companies, the rest are liquidated. This is how Cisco operates for example, they scoop up good companies on the cheap for their patents and employees.
If you want to measure tech industry R&D budgets you'd need to consider all investments. And not just look at the accounting sheets of a few large companies. And there are some companies that are large and spend little on R&D, like Oracle. And some companies that are large that spend a fair amount on R&D, like Intel, HP and IBM. And there are some companies that are small that spent proportionally a very large amount on R&D, such as VMware.
Much as I'd like to believe you're right, you should never underestimate the power of the literal interpretation.
I, for one, have a hard time believing that fundamentalists actually believe in a 6000 year old Earth (and most of the rest of it). Surely, they must just think that 'people are inherently selfish and they need our stories to keep them in line'. And that could be true of some of 'em. But unless they come clean, it's impossible to know. May as well deal with them as though they mean what they say.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
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