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IPCom Trying To Ban HTC's 3G Phone Sales In Germany
An anonymous reader writes "Patent firm IPCom announced today that it wants a ban on sales of HTC's 3G smartphones in Germany, after HTC dropped its appeal to a patent ruling IPCom won. HTC says the appeal was dropped because another patent court partially invalidated the patent in question, but IPCom is pressing forward to try to dampen HTC's holiday sales. 'IPCom, based in Pullach, Germany, is seeking royalties from a family of mobile-technology patents it acquired in 2007 from Robert Bosch GmbH, the world's largest automotive supplier. IPCom bought the patents after Bosch failed to license them to Nokia in 2003.'"
I must say this: These patent lawsuits among mobile OEMs are surely getting out of hand. Troubling.
Should I read it as IP in terms of IP address or Should I read it as Intellectual Property Com ??
ENOUGH OF THIS! It's time for the governments to step like they once did for automobiles and institute a compulsory license (including removing all of the invalid patents) scheme for everyone. Otherwise it will soon either be impossible to build anything that we, the people as a whole, wish to purchase, or we will have to purchase it from the monopoly builder at extortionate rates. Waiting for all of these patents to expire is not an option.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When the ruling classes find they can't buy their toys, then there will be action on bogus patents.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If the patent in question was already invalidated, then WTF are these bozos suing for? They don't have a valid patent to sue with!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
25 years ago - I was mucking around on my Commodore 64 thinking how cool it was to be able to code my own synthesiser, and get sprites to float around on screen. So much so, that I completed a Degree in IT in the mid 90s and have been writing software ever since.
TODAY - I can honestly say that I FUCKING HATE the vile and vicious legal cesspool that the technology industry has become.
You only have to go through a daily serve of stories on Slashdot (news for "news for nerds", remember) to see how utterly fucked up the world of IT is.
The same scenario is repeated ad nauseum on every IT blog / news site around the world.
Billion dollar legal fights, corporations exerting undue and unrestrained influence over governments; content and media giants orchestrating campaigns across all facets of media and public forums, playing on insecurities and manufacturing dissent; governments around the world increasingly tightening the reins on its citizens through advances in technology - its a total cluster fuck.
And the sad, sad, reality of the situation is that ITS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.
Technology empowers those who are prepared to use it as a weapon against others.
I should have been a cabinet maker...
>The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand,
>and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the
>same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
>
> Quoted in "John Carmack: Knee Deep in the Voodoo" Voodo Extreme(2000-09-20) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack
As I said in the past, here is a simple solution: Make the patent ownership non-transferable.
The original purpose of patents was to provide limited protection for inventors for their time and effort, NOT as a weapon of dubious litigation among megacorps which routinely "acquire" patents and have nothing to with the original inventions.
In that case they are all patent trolls - which I would agree with. This is what the patent system leads to. Every time someone actually uses it we see the negative and weird consequences of it.
There is something to be said for getting rid of all patents. There is, however, also something to be said for keeping them.
Patents should serve their primary purpose, which is protect and acknowledge original art, and should serve it well. But they should never, ever be allowed to be used to ban products from the market. Why? Because the customer is king, not the other way around.
So far, it has only been about banning the sales of specific products, but there comes a time when the litigation escalates to such an extent that the customer will be left with inoperable hardware (because the automatic update of his favorite tool has invalidated its use), or even that the company that built the device goes bankrupt.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
what a freakin twat IT IS APPLE that needs the slap down friggin junk box trash apple crap
In years from now we'll all be referring to the current time as the time of the "mobile patent wars" that finally brought down the current patent system once and for all.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.