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.'"

Comments

Things are surely getting out of hand

[bogaboga]

I must say this: These patent lawsuits among mobile OEMs are surely getting out of hand. Troubling.

Re:Things are surely getting out of hand

[larry bagina]

IPCom is a non-practicing entity aka patent troll.

ENOUGH OF THIS!

[Nom du Keyboard]

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.

Re:ENOUGH OF THIS!

[Nom du Keyboard]

And if you're not building a product utilizing your patent, you lose it.

Re:ENOUGH OF THIS!

[chrb]

If a patent holder needs to satisfy some rule about "having a product on the market", they will just contract someone to build a really crappy prototype, and put it on the market at a stupidly high price.

Re:ENOUGH OF THIS!

[chrb]

Get rid of patents. China has shown that patents are not necessary for a growing economy. Europe (officially) has no software patents, and yet there are plenty of software developers in Europe, thus proving that patents are not necessary for the industry. Innovation? X-Prize style awards. If the prospect of a $10 million prize can get private companies competing to develop a space vehicle, then the same principle can be used to encourage innovation and competition in any industry. The government giving a monopoly to one manufacturer does not encourage innovation and competition - it does the exact opposite, anyone with an understanding of communist-era industry could clearly see that.

Re:ENOUGH OF THIS!

[KDR_11k]

But at least that means they've built something practical, i.e. something that likely violates a dozen patents owned by other people.

We need iPhones and Blackberries to be banned

[whoever57]

When the ruling classes find they can't buy their toys, then there will be action on bogus patents.

Re:We need iPhones and Blackberries to be banned

[chrb]

Unfortunately the large companies appear able to play the system, and don't seem to care about patent losses as long as they are able to threaten others with their own patent portfolio. How many large awards have we seen against Microsoft? Sun won $20 million, SPX $62 million, Eolas $521 million, VirnetX $106 million, i4i $290 million, Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion (overturned by judge!), reduced to $70 million, Uniloc $388 million. That isn't pocket change, and yet Microsoft is still a big supporter of patents.

But the threat of a product ban is a big one. I wonder what would happen if some holder of a fundamental patent won a case against Microsoft Windows and refused to license the patent *at any cost*. It's a shame they could work around the i4i patent.

It was already invalidated, wasn't it?

[msobkow]

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!

Bad Career Move

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:IPCOm

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

Irschlöcher aus Pullachcom.

John Carmack on patents

[BlackSupra]

>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

Simple Solution

[InfiniteZero]

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.

Re:Simple Solution

[Darth]

This is trivial to get around. You incorporate, file the patent as owned by the incorporated entity, then sell the incorporated entity to the person who wants to buy the patent. The patent is still owned by the original owner, but the original owner is now owned by the megacorp.