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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.'"
And if you're not building a product utilizing your patent, you lose it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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