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."

Comments

Patents are terrible for the little guy

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Patents are terrible for the little guy

[AlecC]

Patents exist to motivate inventors to invent, and then to put the inventions into the public domain after a due period.

Would any of these companies have decided not to develop their phones, and hence do the R&D that led to these patents, if there had been no patent system? I very much doubt it. And the fact that the other companies are, allegedly, infringing means that the first inventor has not been able to keep it secret - or, as is often the case, the idea was "in the air" as a result of the way the industry was developing.

The patent system is severely broken for the IT industry as it now is. For the industry as a whole, it is a zero sum game: no R&D is being done because the developer hopes to profit from license fees. On the contrary, it is a burden because to the time and effort filing patents, the effort of working around other people's patents, and the cost of fighting patent wars or negotiating patent armistices. Of course, interested parties (patent lawyers, including trolls, and the Patent Offices, insist that it is invaluable. But show me an engineer who would not like the whole thing swept away. (I speak only for the IT industry, though I think it apples much more widely).

Heinlein springs to mind

[symbolset]

There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line, 1939.