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Apple Transfers Patents Through Shell Company To Sue All Phone Makers
New submitter dell623 writes "A patent lawsuit (PDF) by patent licensing firm Digitude Innovations curiously targeted all mobile manufacturers except Apple. A TechCrunch story has revealed that the patents used were transferred from Apple via a shell company to DI, and appear to cover features found in virtually all smartphones. The lawsuit even extends to companies that don't make Android phones, like Nokia and RIM, and to Android OEMs that Apple have not directly sued yet, like Sony. The business model of DI clearly implies that Apple would benefit financially from the lawsuit as a company that contributed patents to DI's portfolio."
Truly this is American Innovation at work.
FWIW, "This American Life #441: When Patents Attack" lays out the problem with patents very clearly. Apple is just ONE company.
Are you so blind as to think that this is some brilliant plan by Apple to end the patent wars? If that's the case, then why didn't Apple sue everyone directly as they have done in the past? Why does Apple continue to litigate against anyone who even comes close to their designs? Why hasn't Apple simply used it's massive pile of cash to buy a few senators and congressmen and make them pass a law crippling the patent trolls? This is nothing more than a monopolistic power grab by Apple.
Fuck Beta
OMG. Yep, our god Steve could never do anything wrong. He must have been trying to do something altruistic. Yep, never mind the fact that Apple outright sued several other companies over phone patents already. This time they must have been doing something good. I'm not sure why he would try to do this good deed secretly so as not to draw positive attention to the company, while at the same time doing the not-so-good deeds very publicly and drawing negative attention, but I'm sure he has his reasons. All hail Steve.
So Digitude Innovation is the new SCO, which makes Apple the new Microsoft.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Of course that bull since they only targeted their direct competitors. Money is NOT the only outcome of patent suits, blocking products is another outcome and is something Apple is directly aiming for.
The logical reason? Simple, GREED. ALOT of damage can be done before those patents are nullified, assuming they even will be. You make it sound as if lawsuits doesn't benefits the company suing when in fact it does immensely. Otherwise, patent trolls and massive lawsuits wouldn't be so common place.
As for shutting everyone down, they don't have too. They only need to delay products and damage the companies enough for Apple to run away with more profit. Block basic features from competitors, block/delay products, and weaken the companies; even a partial success is still a success to a company.
They probably got the idea from Google.
The difference of course being that Google gave patents to HTC to help mount a counter-offense against the already pending lawsuit from Apple. Whereas Apple gave the patents to a patent troll to start entirely new lawsuits against Apple competitors.
Otherwise, yeah, exactly the same.
The outrage is right here - or are you missing the large number of comments calling out Apple for the crooked, non-innovating, patent-abusing company they have turned out to be?
I am reminded of the parable with the snake and the turtle - the turtle doesn't want to carry the snake across the river because he is afraid the snake will bite him, but the snake convinces him to do so anyway, with the comment "Why would I bite you in the middle of the river? I would drown!"
The turtle agrees to carry the snake across the river, and the snake bites him halfway across.
"Why would you do that?!?" the turtle cries as he sinks.
The snake replies, "I'm a snake, what did you expect?"
The big problem with massive corporations is that they are designed to acquire profit. When we expect them to act in a fashion that is anything other than self-serving and greedy, we are expecting the snake not to bite.
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It didn't involve giving patents, but when Immersion sued Sony and MS over controller rumble, MS settled with Immersion, giving them money to fund their lawsuit against Sony on the condition that Immersion pay MS from the profits from that lawsuit and took part ownership. It was to remain confidential.
Later MS sued Immersion for not paying MS their money from the lawsuit. No honor among thieves I guess.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/27/microsoft_settles_with_immersion_again/
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
It's not an act of desperation. It's an act of Machismo, to match every other company (mainly Google, as a countermove to the Motorola purchase and subsequent attacks).
The whole thing is insanity really, there are no white hats here - Google, Apple, the whole lot of them suing each other in ridiculous ways over silly things with absurd demands.
I think there is a purpose for patents, I don't want to see them all go. But plainly something is utterly wrong with the system as it stands, where consumers all sit in the eye of the patent hurricane and hope it doesn't affect some fragment of our lives...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This should be illegal. Not just the transfer of patents solely for the purpose of litigating with them, but patents in this field - and maybe patents in general.
This post rambles a bit, but please bare with me as I explain that Intellectual Property is a large component of the destruction of modern society and civilization.
Originally, copyright was a big deal. I understand that. A couple hundred years ago, there weren't a large number of printing presses "in the field". Since then, technology has progressed to the point that not only can we print documents immediately upon desiring a hard copy of them, but there are entire publishing houses based on the idea of "print on demand" for books, periodicals, and other similar products. Humans have even developed a three-dimensional printer, allowing the production of any single plastic object that we can make a CAD document of. "Copying things" was not a personal concern when these laws were instituted, it was to prevent CompanyA from stealing CompanyB's work and printing a couple hundred copies, so that CompanyA would make money by stealing CompanyB's market. At that point in the technology curve, big companies were the only means of production for these products.
Let's think about the here and now, where nearly every home has a printing device. Where paper and ink are available to anyone who has access to a vehicle, and even to those who do not, if they live close enough to a Walmart, a Kmart, a drug store, a grocery store, or in some places even a convenience store. At this point in the technology curve, it becomes obvious that "protecting intellectual property" really means "creating an alternate revenue stream in the guise of monopoly".
It has been said over and over, but I'm going to repeat it one more time to be sure my point is clear:
Patenting software is like patenting a recipe, or an algebraic equation. You cannot patent the number 7, you shouldn't be able to patent "a method for obtaining the number 7 as output from a specific sequence of calculations". Recipes are protected under copyright law, because there is an artistic expression in listing ingredients and instructions for mixing them together... Wait, what?
So-called "design patents" are even worse - they attempt to make it illegal to do what any layman could do with no more tools than their eyes. "Rounded rectangle" should not be patentable, any more than "cube" should be patentable. Apple suing Samsung for making a smartphone that happens to be white was one of the most retarded, idiotic, moronic things that I have ever read, until I came across this article, describing how Apple sued a teenager for making "conversion kits" to turn iPhones white before Apple was ready to release the white iPhones... The appropriate thing to do in that case would have been to tell Apple they should have gotten their product to market sooner, and stopped using an artificial shortage to inflate sales figures. That is to say, Apple built the hype for a specific product, but hadn't made it to market with that product yet. Someone else made a product that allowed a cosmetic change to Apple's existing product in response to the apparent demand, and they sued the crap out of him.
I am sick and tired of seeing people arguing about implementations of ideas. I am sick and tired of seeing people trying to claim a monopolistic chokehold on the technology industry, simply because they were able to get to the patent office first. I am sick and tired of being afraid to publish my own software, due to the fact that someone out there will claim I'm infringing on some obscure, obvious "to one skilled in the arts" method of doing something that they have a patent on... like clicking a button, or scrolling a text field.
These intellectual property laws are stifling innovation, doing the exact opposite of the original purpose of the system; patents were desig
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If it's dickish or deceptive it is evil. The fact that it's allowed by the system doesn't magically make it non-evil.
Apple could easily continue 60% growth rates year after year just from the growth the phone ALONE
Lovely; This is exactly the logic which used to predict that the dot coms would soon be larger than the entire world economy. With your prediction Apple's revenue will be larger than the entire world GDP today in less than a decade and a half. I'm assuming that by then the aliens will have made themselves known and put in some extremely large inter-galactic orders?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
"It's nice to see them copying Microsoft's innovation for a change."
Where have you been?
Microsoft is the new IBM.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
Google is the new Apple.
(Oracle and Facebook are the new SCO)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I think they've been watching Microsoft rolling in the dough from all the android sales and they want in on the fun too.
No, they want to kill Android. There was an interview with Steve Jobs where the interviewer asked how he lost the OS war. Jobs said, "We didn't see it as a war, we just wanted to make things people liked." Then he stopped and said, "maybe that's why we lost."
Apple doesn't understand that Microsoft won because they were very responsive to what customers wanted. They bent over backwards to give what (the biggest segment of) customers wanted. They were on top of it all throughout the 80s and 90s. Of course, they didn't have a problem playing sharp business games (ie, all their unethical stuff), either.
Apple still doesn't get it. They don't get that enterprise wants backwards compatibility, for example. Who would ever build an enterprise app to run on OSX, when it may be obseleted and ejected from OSX (like Carbon was in Lion, and a bunch of others)?
Apple did see the unethical stuff Microsoft did, and they thought that is why Microsoft must have won. So they decided to follow the unethical stuff.
They would do better if they were more responsive to customers (like, ok, remove Carbon if you must, but provide a downloadable compatibility layer, or open source it! Some people need this stuff).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You mean Xerox PARC's innovations?
I need a little advice.
I am looking to purchase a smartphone, but with all these lawsuits it has become exceedingly difficult to determine exactly which phone will allow me to join the highest possible amount of future class-action suits. I am hoping the sum of settlement payments will exceed the actual cost of the phone and result in a net profit.
Any suggestions?
HTC is a company that makes phones, it needed the patents to defend its business.
DI is a company that trolls patents, it needed the patents to have a business.
This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all.
This is a total non-sequitur. It's not like the Congress is Almighty God and gets to say what is right and wrong. It's legal to buy congressmen, as long as you have the resources to mount a complex campaign of money laundering. That doesn't mean it's not evil.
Neither is faking a pass and then running the ball right down the middle.
OK, if you need the difference spelled out for you, I'll do it. (1) In football, the two teams meet voluntarily. In lawsuits, the defendant is not a willing party to the affair. (2) In football, the by standanders benefit from the fake play *even when it is attempted against their own team*. A deceptive play is a test of defensive skill and a thrill when it is thwarted. In a lawsuit, the customers of the defendant have to pay higher prices.
But wouldn't YOU like to get paid for all the sales your competitors get?
Another non-sequitur. I'd like to have all the money in the bank vault. That doesn't excuse me dynamiting my way in.
Let me explain why what Apple is doing isn't necessarily as LEGALLY kosher as you think it is. It comes down to two words: anti-trust law. It's legal to be granted patents that give you an effective monopoly on a type of product. It's not legal to conspire with another company to restrain trade. The intersection of patent laws and anti-trust laws is a gray area, but the conspiracy angle adds a new wrinkle that's more than just PR.
So: is there any substantive difference between Apple using its patents to establish a monopoly itself, and having a third party do it for them? YES!
If Apple tried this itself, Motorola, Google, and others would retaliate with their own defensive patent lawsuits, forcing a settlement. By assigning their patents to DI under and agreement that exempts themselves, Apple has secured a de facto right it doesn't have under patent law: to be immune from countersuits. DI's legal attack can't be turned aside by counter-suit because DI doesn't make anything.
Let's get back to morality again and apply the categorical imperative here. What if *everyone* did this? What if everyone assigned their legal rights to third parties who do nothing but threaten lawsuits and have nothing to lose by being as aggressive and over-reaching as possible?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I read the whole list of comments and did not see a single person mention the fairly important part of the article that seems left out by he summary and headline:
The alternative is that Apple has given some of its patents to Digitude because the patent troll came after it first. The dozen patents Apple has handed over may have been part of a settlement with the firm, along with the license agreement (which would presumably give Apple the rights to its patents, and additional Digitude patents). This seems more likely.
How is it with over a hundred comments no one seems to have RTFA and seen the analysis by Kincaid that says this is most probably a case where Apple was sued by the patent troll and transferred patents as part of a settlement for the lawsuit? Mind you Apple probably could have and should have fought back and demanded a cash only settlement in order to prevent the patent trolling form propagating, but then I can understand not doing so. Microsoft has certainly transferred its patents with trolls several times so paying hard cash to protect competitors seems like a losing strategy in our very, very broken market.
Corporations exist to make money. Therefore, they'll make money however they can. This is entirely allowed by our patent system and isn't evil at all.
You could argue that people don't have any duties towards other people or the society and each should just try to gain as much money as legally possible. You could even argue that if everyone tries to do that, things end up better for all of us. I would disagree but I could at least understand both the ethical and economic principles behind those claims.
Corporations, however, aren't something that "just exist". They're tool that we, as the society, came up with and gave certain exclusive rights to. To be more exact, corporations are tools through which we grant certain people (CEO, Shareholders, etc.) certain rights that they wouldn't otherwise have (e.g., when the company earns money, it can direct it to shareholders but when it can't pay back its debts, we don't hold shareholders personally responsible).
You can say "You don't whitelist rights! Government/Society/etc. don't GIVE rights" but in the case of corporations, society really has created some rights that don't have any ethical reason to exist. They've been created because we believe that if we create them and give them to people who use them responsibly, society becomes a better place and everyone wins. That being the case, we have all the right to say "You either accept BOTH the rights and duties (=some social responsibility) of this corporation-thingy or we don't give you either of them" and thus expect some social responsibility from corporations.
So far from the tree has Apple fallen,
Burning their karma patent-trollin';
So committed to this course of action,
And to alienating every smartphone faction,
They've even set up a patent troll proxy --
Can't fix their broken rep with a ton of epoxy.
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
"every few years" is being disingenuous. Here in the "real world" we like to debate using accurate language.
Carbon was the state of the art, so to speak, in OS 8.6 (and released before then). It was finally killed off in Lion (and strongly limited during the push into 64 bit with Snow Leopard).
To say that, if your app relied on the Carbon API, that Apple was "forcing you to rewrite your code every few years" is to just be laughably dishonest. It was in use on the Mac (in the current latest OS version) since 1997 to 2011 - that's hardly a rewrite "every few years" - that's longer than the entire lifetime of OS X itself (not including its time as a NeXT product).
Cocoa was introduced with OS X and worked alongside Carbon for many years until finally taking over as the sole player in mid 2011 (and slightly earlier in Snow Leopard for 64 bit apps, it was still there just in 32 bit only).
If you can't manage to alter your code to transition to Cocoa in the TEN YEARS that OS X has been around (and the same amount of time you've known that Carbon was deprecated) and you're whining that Apple is making it hard for you then you need to get a different fucking job. Perhaps something with a little less "time pressure" like Bonsai tree gardener or continental plate drift measurer or something. I know ten years is barely enough time to make changes to your code.
I am of course, assuming that your code existed on the Mac in OS 9. If it started its life on OS X and you still used Carbon then... well, I return to my point about getting a different job. Clearly reading the documentation is too challenging.
You probably missed the main difference here - HTC is Google's partner that is being sued over Android by Apple, while Apple transfered their patents to a patent troll.
To all Apple app developers under fire from Lodsys - this is what the company that you develop for* thinks of patent trolls.
* - Yep, you develop for them, notice how your hard work resulted in their successful ad campaign "There's an app for that"
A) You numbers are wrong.
B) You must be an economist, since you think that there is no limit to growth.
C) If we apply the same projections to Android's explosive growth - then in 1 year everyone on this planet will have at least one Android device.