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Apple Ordered To Pay $8M For Playlist Patents
An anonymous reader writes "A federal jury in Texas has decided against Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit and ordered it to pay $8 million to Personal Audio LLC, a patent licensing company (aka troll). The lawsuit started in 2009. Last year Apple's three fellow defendants (Sirius XM Radio, Coby Electronics and Archos) settled. Apple said the patents were invalid and not infringed. The patent holder demanded $84M and will now get about 10% of that amount. Juries in East Texas frequently rule in favor of patent holders. In the same district court Lodsys has already filed four lawsuits. In one of them it targets seven app developers and Apple has moved to intervene. The first two developers were already given a deadline: they must answer Lodsys's complaint by July 21, unless they request an extension."
Even kids these days know not to feed the trolls.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
At the notion that you could get a patent on the idea of transferring a playlist from a computer to an MP3 player(ie. a second computer, but smaller...)
M3Us have been around for ages, and playlists generally are really just a special case of programs accepting lists of files as arguments, which is downright ancient. And transferring a set of commands from one computer to a second, more embedded, computer? I'm pretty sure I was FTPing postscript to some HP from back when they knew how to build them properly(only print commands that went through the windows spooler system were caught by the billing system, you see...) back in highschool...
Instead of wasting silly amounts of money on licences, legal fees and patent portfolios wouldn't it be more cost effective to lobby the law makers to change patent law to mean software couldn't be patented?
Wouldn't that be the fiscal duty of CEOs to do so?
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Some of our MoDevDC members have been hit by LodSys for including 'buy now' buttons in their apps, others by Macrosolve for building "forms". Simply ridiculous. We're hosting a panel discussion on the subject of patent trolls:
http://www.meetup.com/modevdc/events/24893801/
This kind of stuff keeps a lot of people from getting into business.
To avoid the jurisdiction of unfriendly district courts in Texas, would it be enough not to allow products to be shipped to Texas?
Oh boy, here we are again. All I had to read was
A federal jury in Texas has decided against Apple in a patent infringement lawsuit
It's too early on a Monday to go any further; I think I just might be sick to my stomach if I do.
emphasis mine
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
EU doens't recognize software patents, US patent trolls can try to sue me.
I have zero sympathy for these tech companies. Apple, MS, Sony, all of them troll those waters, and sue each other as often as they can. The actually seem to want to protect this and continue this practice. So when one of the big guys that file 1000's of these things each and every YEAR, actually get boned by some little troll somewhere, I can't exactly get too worked up about it. They built the house, they get to live in it.
.. Apple has been also doing its share of patent trolling, eh? Granted, they do produce some pretty functional and shiny hardware, fully plug and play, but they are not saints and they do employ armies of lawyers for the sole purpose of "Sued you! Now your shit is mine!"
Zoom out a little bit, and both of them (Apple and Personal Audio LLC) seem like trolls fighting over something that is not theirs. Playlists? Seriously?
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
What about the interstate commerce clause? Can you sell the "used" stuff in Texas?
There is this wonderful invention, called the internet. Should try it one day.
8 million down... countless billions left.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I can't remember the term for it, but isn't there a patent defence if the patent holder intentionally delays attempting to enforce a patent to maximise damages that invalidates the patent?
Given the patent was filed in 1996, and this sort of functionality started to appear in audio apps in early 2000, it would seem like a prime candidate for this defence...
patent law is killing infotech innovation. i recommend folks check out Connections, a wonderful television series from PBS where the lineage of one invention to the next is traced, sometimes in surprising ways. lawyers suck, but patent lawyers are especially damn-worthy.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
I can't remember the term for it, but isn't there a patent defence if the patent holder intentionally delays attempting to enforce a patent to maximise damages that invalidates the patent?
No, you're only prevented from receiving damages for the time after you became aware of the infringement. If your patent is granted in 2000, someone starts infringing that patent in 2002, you become aware of the infringement in 2004, and you file a lawsuit in 2011, you're only entitled to damages for 2002-2004.
Patent cases are Federal cases
I agree with this, except that the decisions of the Court of Appeals of one circuit aren't necessarily binding on another circuit.
and it does not matter much in picking a specific Federal court venue whether a defendant that does business globally and is based in the US has any operations in a particular district.
If what you say is the case, then why do so many companies choose to sue in Texas rather than elsewhere?
There is this wonderful invention, called the internet.
If an EU manufacturer sells a physical device containing a copy of patented software to a customer in the US, the patent holder can (and often does successfully) request that the shipment get stopped at the US border.
You're probably thinking of the doctrine of laches. I've never heard of it being successfully used though.
So, you ship physical devices that don't have any software installed on them, and customers are free to download the software from anywhere via the Internet.
If a company recommends a source of infringing software, it induces infringement. If a company fails to recommend a source of necessary software, it has failed to fulfill an implied warranty of merchantability.
Juries in East Texas frequently rule in favor of patent holders.
Juries frequently rule in favor of the plaintiff.
You could say the same for any case that goes to a jury verdict.
If you can't persuade a judge that you have a factual argument worth presenting to a jury you have no business being in a trial court.
Why don't they just make it so if you have a patent but no product on the market using the patent, then you can't prosecute someone that gets to market first with it? Give them a period of 1 year buffer to get to market over their competitors to secure the patent.
Look at what happened to the small aircraft industry in the USA. It has completely vanished. No smaller-than-huge company can survive a law suit anymore. Just one stupid "cat in the oven" suit can completely ruin a company and deter all the others in the field. In the end, it is only the big companies that survive.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
How are internet trolls and patent trolls the same? And you're suggesting lawsuits should be dealt with by ignoring them?
Moron.
Could you not just sell a EU and US version of your product, that conveniently can run the same software, but sold with a different feature set?
Playback for three major codecs (MP3, WMA, AAC) is patented, and I know of no store that sells Vorbis downloads of major label recordings. So if even the most basic features are patented, what would the US version be capable of? If nothing, then the manufacturer has failed to fulfill an implied warranty of merchantability.
I was just wondering something. If you specifically were to put terms in your EULA that prohibits the use of the software if you are in East Texas, would you then be able to (most likely) successfully argue that East Texas is not the appropriate venue if you are sued for patent infringement?
The patent was filed in 1995, long before iTunes et al. existed, before most people even knew what an MP3 was.
The patent is truly innovative (for 1995).
The fact that it's only being enforced now doesn't necessarily mean they're patent trolls. It probably means that the patent sat forgotten in some large portfolio, unused for a long time, until these guys bought up a bundle for cheap and re-discovered this one.
Allow me to rephrase: How do you expect millions of refugees from the US patent regime to obtain lawful permission to permanently reside in an EU state?
Do any of them suddenly have new cars, bass boats, or houses that seem rather beyond their incomes? HAS ANYONE LOOKED? Hell, I'd be curious if the area around this cash register in the form of a federal courthouse is seeing an inexplicable boom in new residents.
Seems like a lot of people would try to play games with the date of first awareness. Perhaps by terming it "suspicion" in 2004 but requiring a lengthy (and expensive, of course) legal review before the infringement could be confirmed. Thus they don't become "aware" of the infringement until, say, 2009 in your example, for an extra five years of damages.
How could they justify that? "Your honor, we were simply doing all necessary due diligence to ensure that we were not bringing a frivolous lawsuit before you. In the court's best interests, we took on the expense and risk of fully validating our complaint prior to taking any legal action."
The CB App. What's your 20?
To me, a playlist is just a form of mixtape, so the "invention" should be invalid anyway.
Rule in favor of the troll, and award $1 in damages. Since they won, they can't appeal the verdict, and the loser will gladly pay $1 to be done with it. Do that a few times, and the patent trolls will find it's not a viable business model anymore.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
But we aren't speaking about physical goods, but software. Just look at Ubuntu, they're located in South-Africa, so they don't give a shit about the mpeg* software patents. All they asl is that if you don't have licenses for the patents then click cancel. You can bet most US users don't have licenses and still click "ok".
On the other hand Red Hat doesn't host codecs in their repository, so the media players they ship won't work out of the box; I spent quite a bit of time getting them work, but I just gave up and installed MPlayer with the codec bundle from the MPlayer website. (Which is hosted in Hungary, which also don't recognize software patents.)
You can bet most US users don't have licenses and still click "ok".
If worse came to worst, the patent holders could sue any U.S.-based mirror that includes the patented parts of Ubuntu. Or they could sue Canonical for not adding a geolocation feature to the default install of software-center that discovers whether a license is required at the place of installation.
Like it or not, Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries
I am aware that Indiana and Michigan and Alaska and Texas are not different countries. But as I understand it, if I do no willful business in Texas, the district courts of Texas lack personal jurisdiction, and I can have the suit moved to a different venue whose juries don't always find in favor of a patent holder.
When patent trolls regularly collect triple the amount of damages awarded to practicing entities in patent litigation, it is certainly no surprise that more NPEs ("patent trolls") are springing up and becoming ever more aggressive. They have everything to gain and relatively little to lose by filing patent enforcement actions. I fear that the only way to minimize the threat that PAEs pose to small businesses is by eliminating their incentives to assert patents -- i.e., by limiting the damages that they can collect. In the meantime, you can't really blame a company like Intellectual Ventures for taking advantage of weaknesses in the legal system.