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Barnes & Noble Names Microsoft's Disputed Android Patents
Julie188 writes "B&N is really blowing the lid off of what Microsoft is doing and how they are forcing money from Android. It has accused Microsoft of requiring overly restricted NDA agreements from those even entering into patent license talks. Because it is disputing Microsoft's claims, and the restrictions of its own NDA signed with Redmond, B&N has gone public. It has named in detail six patents that it says Microsoft is using to get Android device makers to pay up. Plus, B&N is also trying to force open Microsoft's other plans for stomping out Android, including the agreement Redmond made with Nokia, and Nokia's patent-troll MOSAID."
Time to fire up the old Nook Color and make a purchase.
This is the only way Microsoft can make any money on OPEN SOURCE. and of course the best kind of money made is from someone else.
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Those who can compete, do; those who can't, litigate.
What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds. A parasite asks "Where is my share?"
recognize that they are valid patents that are being infringed on.
Yeah, and those 99 percenters also realize that there are reams of prior art and these patents are pure junk. I'd "infringe" a patent too if it was pure crap that had no right being granted in the first place. These "innovations" are not the property of MS. They were ideas thought of long before MS decided to rape the system by getting them attached to a piece of paper.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Although you provide a compelling argument. There are a couple of facts that you overlook here:
1) Microsoft wouldn't disclose which patents were the problem to the vendors, nor Google. As stated in the articles here, B&N had to break an NDA to show the world what Microsoft was leveraging for the lawsuits. That's piss poor behavior in my opinion, and a sign of operating in "bad faith."
2) The licensing fees are comparable to the entire cost of a Windows Mobile OS license. This is not a "reasonable" fee which is what patent law calls for.
3) The licensing agreement includes provisions that prevent the licensee from making changes to the product, and reach far beyond the scope of the patents that are owned by the patent holder. Specifically, by allowing Microsoft (in PJ's terms) veto power, Microsoft is attempting to assert full control over a product that they are trying to compete against. That is highly anti-competitive.
And of freaking course Google is releasing the OS for free. It's called OPEN SOURCE. The OS is freely available. Honestly, I can't blame Google for trying to procure patents... It's a defensive measure against cabals like this. The whole point of the lawsuits against Android makers is to use the courts to gain market share. This does great harm to the consumer by stifling competition and innovation (see Internet Explorer 6... That was a hideous mess and web technologies were stagnant until the Mozilla foundation released Firefox). That's why these licenses are problem, and that's why I don't agree with your statement that Google is the problem.
Google licenses Android for free, because they get paid in different ways and have a strategy that stretches beyond next quarter. They don't have any kind of monopoly in any of their businesses, so the comparison with MSFT of the 90's isn't a great comparison.
It's a little like Mozilla giving Firefox away for free because they get paid in different ways. Should they be stopped because others who want to charge money for the browser can't figure out a way to compete?
Software and process patents are just a way to funnel money from innovators to lawyers.
Ah, yes, the surely-objective opinions of "WinSuperSite"...which find that Google is stifling competition by providing an open-sourced smartphone kernel to anyone who asks, and is oppressing the poor, abused coalition of every other smartphone vendor who banded together specifically to pay an exorbitant price for smartphone-related patents and immediately as a group set about suing over Android devices (exclusively). Curiously, they did this when Android's marketshare started to make theirs look rather foolish. Yes, they just want to protect their intellectual property, such as the milestone achievement "No. 6,339,780 placing a loading status icon in the content area of a browser." By precisely duplicating the functionality of "placing a loading status icon in the content area of a browser", Google is oppressing competition, necessitating the actions of Microsoft in demanding license fees in excess of their own product's cost for infringements that they refuse to disclose before being paid.
TL;DR: give me a break.
OK, let's look at the claims Apple is making:
a rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded;
the front surface of the product dominated by a screen surface with black borders;
as to the iPhone and iPod touch products, substantial black borders above and below the screen having roughly equal width and narrower black borders on either side of the screen having roughly equal width;
as to the iPad product, substantial black borders on all sides being roughly equal in width;
a metallic surround framing the perimeter of the top surface;
a display of a grid of colorful square icons with uniformly rounded corners; and
a bottom row of square icons (the "Springboard") set off from the other icons and that do not change as the other pages of the user interface are viewed.
The phone you linked meets everything there except what, that it's white instead of black and the icons are square instead of having rounded corners? You can try to claim that the similarities between Apple's device and Samsung's are more than what's listed, but all that means is that the trade dress claims are overly broad.
The fundamental problem is that all touch screen phones have similar characteristics for purely functional reasons. All the similarities between Apple's device and Samsung's come down to a simple calculus: In any market with similar devices competing, you can always evaluate each of your various competitors' products to determine which one is most like yours, and (absent a tie) there will always be one that is. Naturally, a company intent on doing some lawyer-based chest thumping will choose that one as the target of their aggression. Subsequent comparisons between that competitor's device and other devices on the market will always show that device to be the most similar, because it is, and that's why they picked it as their target.
But none of that proves that Samsung did anything wrong. Having the most similar device and having a device that is too similar are two completely unrelated questions. You can have neither, both, or either one without the other. And pointing out a list of generic similarities doesn't prove anything. Pick any two modern cell phones and I'll be able to give you a list of a hundred characteristics they both share.
Apple is making trademark and trade dress claims. The point of those things is to identify the product to the customer when they're purchasing it. Nobody is buying a Samsung phone thinking it's made by Apple.
This seems like a really foolish thing for a convicted monopoly to do.
Microsoft started it's Android patent protection program in full, and their judicial oversight just ended Both events are April 2011... clearly coincidence and happenstance.
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