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Apple Loses Patent Case For FaceTime Tech, Owes $368 Million
beeudoublez writes "Apple was ordered to pay $368 million today to a software company named VirnetX over patents related to Apple's FaceTime technology. Apple engineers testified they didn't pay attention to any patents when building FaceTime. 'The jury, which had sat through the five-day trial, ruled that Apple infringed two patents: one for a method of creating a virtual private network (VPN) between computers, and another for solving DNS security issues. ... It's not the first time VirnetX has won a payout from a major tech firm: the company bagged $105.7m from Microsoft two years ago, and it may not be the last either. VirnetX has a separate case against Apple pending with the International Trade Commission and it has court cases against Cisco, Avaya and Siemens scheduled for trial next year.'"
It's not all bad news for Apple today, though — according to Ars, they've won a new patent for a rounded rectangle (D670,286).
Patent trolls don't make anything. They simply hold patents and sue others to make 100% of their profits. This keeps their overhead down, and ensures that they can't be counter-sued by their victims who might want to use their own patents to strike some kind of cross-licensing deal.
Apple isn't a patent troll.
Say what you will about Apple, but without them we'd still be the slaves of the cell carriers, who kept cellphones painful for decades. Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, et al, deserve a pox on their houses for going along with the carriers all that time. Finally, Apple stood up to the carriers and now people expect to get phones that work conveniently and do a lot. Google, by way of contrast, doesn't make products for consumers but rather makes Android for manufacturers and CARRIERS. And Google doesn't fight real patent trolls because Google doesn't make products: they make all of their money by spying on you, so there's nothing for patent trolls to gain injunctions against.
We haven't even gotten into the other kind of patent abuser (Samsung, Motorola -- now Google) who get their patents inserted into international standards which everyone is required to use. They promise to charge reasonable (small) fees and not use the patents against other companies, but those are the patents that are being thrown at Apple in an attempt to force Apple to cross-license its patents that no one is forced to use. Yeah, that's bullying.