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Patent Troll Now Armed With Thousands of Nortel Patents
dgharmon writes in with a story about the final outcome of thousands of Nortel patents that were bought last July. "You may recall last summer that Apple, Microsoft, EMC, RIM, Ericsson and Sony all teamed up to buy Nortel's patents for $4.5 billion. They beat out a team of Google and Intel who bid a bit less. While there was some antitrust scrutiny over the deal, it was dropped and the purchase went through. Apparently, the new owners picked off a bunch of patents to transfer to themselves... and then all (minus EMC, who, one hopes, was horrified by the plans) decided to support a massive new patent troll armed with the remaining 4,000 patents. The company is called Rockstar Consortium, and it's run by the folks who used to run Nortel's patent licensing program anyway — but now employs people whose job it is to just find other companies to threaten." On a semi-related note, there is a new petition to the White House to make a law that patent lawsuits that find for the defendant automatically fine the plaintiff three times the damages they were seeking."
...patent lawyers are rubbing their hands with glee. I should have gone to law school after all...
So a group of companies band together to buy patents and they create a single organisation to handle it. What else would they do? It is hardly likely that any company would be happy with the whole lot being overseen by one of the other member companies, and they would be in negotiation for years if they tried to split them all up.
So the question to the submitter is: what other outcome did you expect?
You can only get money from a patent if you actually produce something that uses that patent.
Otherwise, you can hang it on your wall and look at it.
Privacy is terrorism.
A civics lesson for you: the Whitehouse does not have the power to make laws. That is the exclusive domain of the Congress. You see, we have this little thing called "separation of powers"...
Very true ... but the devil is in the details. The White House can draft legislation that is then sponsored by a member of congress just like 100's of lobbyists do.
Right, because corporations as people isnt a silly overreaction. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Obvious and wanton abuse of the legal system for profit should be a punishable crime, severe enough to discourage others from trying it. We put people to death for less.
Good-bye
Until Europe, India and China overtake the US.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Uhhh...why exactly are you bothering? After he basically said "Yeah LOL go fuck yourself" over the pot petition all should know you'd get more results by writing it on a piece of paper and promptly burning it. For all his bullshit he is just as big if not a bigger sellout that Dubya was, personally I'd say he's worse as Dubya actually believed a lot of the shit he was saying whereas this one is just cashing the checks. But if you think he is gonna give a flying shit what the "people" think I have some swampland you may be interested in. If you manage to get the requisite number all you will get is a flowery "Ur not rich so fuck off' speech, so why bother?
As for TFA...is anybody surprised? With every move Forbes gets proved right on Ballmer being a shitty CEO, hell if the man had an original thought his head would asplode. And as for the rest of the list, Sony and Ericson are doing lousy and could probably use the cash, same with RIM, and Apple just plain old hates to have ANY competition other than MSFT. See Job's comments on how he would use his fortune to nuke Android for instance.
So how anybody could look at THAT list of names and no figure out they were gonna do something nasty I'll never know.
Stop shooting them down with little things like facts.
Okay, this petition is stupid and will only hurt the small guy. Say for example I work really hard on something and get a patent. Time goes on and I'm making money with the patent and all is well until a big company starts infringing on it. I could sue the company. I have the 100k it takes to even start the case. but unfortunately I my lawyers aren't as good, because I don't have the 10 lawyers they have working on it. They end up wining and it would put me out of business.
In the current setting I'd be out lawyer fees. In the new setting I'd be completely screwed even if I was seeking a reasonable amount. A reasonable amount could add up to quite a lot if the infringement is big enough. For example I'm selling my product and license out the technology for say $100 per reproduction. If they only infringed 100 times it's not that bad, but if it's mass infringement with millions of reproductions it's quite a lot, but still a fair number.
I could get behind this if there was a stipulation of "Unless you're actively using the patent in a product" or something along those lines. That would be enough to stop the trolls and not completely screw people who are using patents the way they should be.
I didn't pull the $100k number out of my ass either. I'm in the process of getting a patent on some items and I was told by more than one lawyer that's the starting fee (it varied a bit but that was the lowest figure) for litigation. I wanted to see if it was even worth pursuing, because if I can't afford to defend it what's the point in getting it? I guess I could have my name on a patent and that's pretty cool, but I don't know if it's $12k cool. I think I'm going to end up applying, because even if everything goes to heck I can always put it in my resume and it might be enough to make it standout.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
The rotten system just got a tad more rotten. Rockstar is the king of all patent trolls, funded by the big two software IP honchos, known for their shakedown schemes and patenting the trivially obvious. The other partners are opportunists and a few badly ailing companies seeking a hail-mary pass to avoid utter extinction. It got its approval under the guise of playing by "reasonable terms", only to disobey said promise as "not applicable to the new construct" as soon as the deal went through. With a start like that, I don't have much hope left for any ethics to be involved in their way of thinking.
Rockstar has all the latest weaponry of an extremely litigious tech company, wealthy backers, plus the enormous advantage that it can't be countersued. It can start case after case without even batting an eye. The sheer amount of cases it can start can probably put a company out of business even before the first patent in play is reviewed.
If you thought Oracle vs Google was perfidious, wait until Rockstar here takes aim at Android. It's only a matter of time, and to me it seems like Android was the reason this abomination was formed. They've sealed up the LTE patents, so they'll surely squeeze them on that front, while trying keep on adding layer after layer of patent licenses, with the penultimate target of drowning it and scaring the manufacturers away.
Innovation is about to get its teeth kicked in.
Use it or loss it should be the way to go. You get granted a patent or buy it and if in say 2 years you don't have a commercially available product that uses that patient it goes into public domain. You can't sue someone unless you have an actual product that customers could have bought instead after that period. Before that period you can sue as normal since it might take a couple years to spin up production. But sitting on it and hoping someone infringes is BS.
Non-american speaking:
Somehow, the fact you have to refer to a previous president through the use of "Dubya" either says a lot about yourself, or the state of American politics.
Or both.