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Posner Dismisses Apple/Motorola Case, With Prejudice
whisper_jeff writes "Judge Posner has dismissed the patent case between Apple and Motorola, with prejudice (meaning they can't refile), putting an end to this patent dispute between the two companies. Posner wrote, 'Both parties have deep pockets. And neither has acknowledged that damages for the infringement of its patents could not be estimated with tolerable certainty.' I know many on Slashdot will be happy to hear Apple's lawsuit failed; I am happier to hear that Motorola has been prevented from abusing FRAND patents, a situation I feel could set a very bad, very dangerous precedent for the entire industry."
And that's a good thing. The Free Software community shouldn't get suckered into using proprietary formats. We're here for the long haul, not to line some turtleneck sporting CEO's pockets.
Apple doesn't want to pay any fees at all, let alone a fairly standard 2.5%. They see FRAND and think 'free'.
That's a goddamned lie.
Apple participates in many patent pools themselves, and they have no issue with paying the same license fees as anyone else. Motorola didn't want to license the radio patents to Apple like they do to everyone else, because they want to use them to get Apple to give up all of the iPhone UI patents.
Isn't this bad news for all of those companies who think they've built a huge defensive portfolio of patents to use in countersuits? Even fairly legitimate patents at that. The disinterested observer doesn't have to work very hard to conclude that Motorola's patents are fundamental to cellular phones and are therefore very valuable, while Apple's software patents are worthless duplicates of other people's ideas that shouldn't even be eligible for patent protection in the first place. Despite this enormous disparity, Motorola's countersuit, intended to defend themselves against Apple's foray into legal brigandage, is also dismissed with prejudice. So the fundamental hardware patents they own are useless to them as a defensive mechanism.
Motorola has to be very unhappy right now. Even if their fundamental hardware patents are legitimate and valuable, one of the world's largest smartphone manufacturers has successfully avoided paying royalties for them, forever.
So giant patent portfolios are worth... what, exactly?
I'm guessing not all of the money in the software development budget so to the software developers salaries - you have the overhead of hiring the employees, including desk space, HR, etc. You have expenses related to software development including test infrastructure, external testing, etc. Furthermore, you would also have parts of it going to any contractors that would not be counted in the headcount.
For me, I use Firefox a lot and I'm glad that they are financially healthy. Mozilla is tiny compared to the behemoths and it's nice to know that it's not going away soon because of mismanaged finances.
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