China's ZTE and Huawei Join the German Patent Fray

An anonymous reader writes "Germany has pretty much become the new Eastern District of Texas, the world's most popular patent battleground. After Apple, Samsung and Motorola, the Chinese are now going to Germany as well to sort out their domestic patent squabbles. Huawei and ZTE, arguably the People's Republic's leading wireless tech companies, started suing each other in April last year. On Friday the Mannheim Regional Court held a Huawei vs. ZTE hearing, reports a local patent watcher. Huawei says ZTE infringes a 4G/LTE handover patent and wants its rival's base stations and USB modem sticks banned in Germany. More clashes between the two are coming up in the same court and in other places in Europe, including France."

Comments

Re:Enough patent posts already!

[Bearhouse]

Agree, but how about submitting something interesting, then? For example...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/google-maps-for-ios-may-violate-european-data-protection-law/

Pot calling the kettle black?

[Aereus]

Anyone else find it ironic that Huawei is going after another firm for infringement after the number of articles about Huawei stealing and/or reverse-engineering competitors equipment in order to compete with them?

Re:Pot calling the kettle black?

[houghi]

No, I do not find it ironic. All steal. All reverse-engineer. All sue.
One solution to all of this. Get rid of patents or at least see to it that they are reshaped so that they protect the individuals, not the companies.
e.g Dyson is somebody who these things are intended for. I am talking about is vacuum cleaner.
Now the bladeless fan is another matter and he should NOT get the patent for that,

Re:Pot calling the kettle black?

[Aereus]

Yes, but do you notice how the Chinese companies didn't start producing their own bladeless fans until AFTER Dyson had popularized it and sold a physical product? Yes, it's not a cut and dry case with companies as concerns lookalike products. But clearly Chinese firms are amongst the most unapologetic and blatant copycats on the world market. They wait for other companies to do the R&D, then leech off the public demand for said products while hiding behind the shield of poor/non-existent IP laws in China.

There's a big reason they're suing them in Germany and not China: They know it would be useless to attempt it in Chinese courts. It's the same reason the RIAA/MPAA don't bother prosecuting all the blatant infringement that goes on in China.

Re:Pot calling the kettle black?

[martin-boundary]

Patents shouldn't protect individuals either. We need to get away from this idea of the sole genius who discovers something, that if he hadn't been born it would never have been discovered by anyone.

Newton said it best "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." He also _experienced_ this first hand when Leibniz discovered the calculus independently.

Who screwed up?

[SuricouRaven]

ZTE is state owned. Huawei is officially private, but the Chinese government is still certainly a major influence on the company, enough that the US government is concerned about espionage. This is akin to the time Fox News threatened sue another Fox division over a parody of their copyrighted ticker style. Except in the Fox case, someone higher up the chain quickly took notice and told the offending executive to knock it off and play nice with their ally before it went to court.

Those Chinese...

[TheDarAve]

They're even copying our frivolous patent lawsuits now! They learn quick...

Re:We dont need patents

[SuricouRaven]

Patents are not a fundamentally bad idea - they encourage research. Some new technology costs so much to develop that it just won't happen without some way to ensure a return on investment. Drug development, for example. The problem is that the patent system as it currently exists is terribly broken. Patents are ridiculously easy to get over even the most trivial things, to the point that it's almost impossible to work in technology without infringing on something, and when a patent case can easily involve hundreds of claims it is often decided by who can afford to throw the most money away in legal costs.

Re:We dont need patents

[Anonymous Coward]

Specifically, it makes the case that patents and other forms of intellectual monopoly encourages rent-seeking behavior rather than innovation, and also slows adoptation of new ideas. And most importantly, it backs this up with empirical evidence from many different fields, from steam engines in the 1800s to information technology. Too often, discussions of patents and copyright are based only on arguments that boil down to "I'm sure it works like this, but I'm not going to bother to check". But it is possible to test these hypotheses by looking at what changes when a new field suddenly becomes applicable for patents. According to the authors, the typical result is that progress in the field slows slightly, and becomes more expensive to operate in. The most recent such example is software, which until recently could not be patented.