Slashdot Mirror
iPhone Infringes On Sony, Nokia Patents, Says Federal Jury
snydeq writes "A federal jury in Delaware has found Apple's iPhone infringes on three patents held by MobileMedia, a patent-holding company formed by Sony, Nokia and MPEG LA, InfoWorld reports. The jury found that the iPhone directly infringed U.S. patent 6,070,068, which was issued to Sony and covers a method for controlling the connecting state of a call, U.S. patent 6,253,075, which covers call rejection, and U.S. patent 6,427,078, which covers a data processing device. MobileMedia has garnered the unflattering descriptor "patent troll" from some observers. The company, which was formed in 2010, holds some 300 patents in all."
A company that makes no products has no need to cross-license patents.
The *point* of this company is cross licensing. Nokia, Sony etc could establish a complicated network of cross licensing deals, or they can put it into one pool and then take out the rewards relative to their contribution to the coalition.
Apple can just pay the license fee, or contribute enough intellectual property to the pool such that it gets back a share equal to a share of the patent group.
This is how the MPEG group works. MPEG is a collection of dozens of patents from tons of people. If you have something that can make MPEG better you can simply sell your patent to the group and make a nice little royalty. Or you can get your royalty and buy MPEG licenses gaining you access to the rest of the patents.
This is how the patent system should work for complicated systems. You build a cell phone patent pool. Then if you want to create new OS you pay the license fee without having to negotiate with 50 different patent holders.