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Judge Invalidates 13 Motorola Patent Claims Against Microsoft
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft scored a victory against Google-owned Motorola Mobility this week after a judge scrapped 13 of the latter party's patent claims in a years-long dispute over H.264-related royalties. Waged in U.S. and German courts, the battle involves three patents (7,310,374, 7,310,375, and 7,310,376) that Motorola licenses to Microsoft for several products, including the Xbox 360, Windows and Windows Phone. PJ is commenting on the case over at Groklaw.net."
This is good. No, it's bad. No, its good. Wait, no, it's bad. Is Apple involved? It's bad. No it's good⦠Jesus, who the fuck knows. As a fanboi, what the fuck am I to do?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Just a simple plan to help you survive these times of financial strife.
1. Stop wasting money on lawyers.
2. Start making quality products.
3. ??? (actually you can skip this step)
4. profit.
A Seattle judge rules for Microsoft. How shocking! This will be appealed elsewhere and decided by a judge that hasn't accepted contributions from Microsoft.
Some claims within the patents were invalidated.
Go RTFA.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
If a Judge (not a Jury) can invalidate Patent claims (are they THAT skilled in the science of these things?) then what the heck's the Patent Office for?
Is there any point in lodging a complaint to the Patent Office, when a Judge appears to be able to do it quicker, and knows the parties involved?
So in future, don't waste time with going the usual route, just get a Judge to decide on complex matters, and then the Patent Office, now with more time on it's hands, can start ruling in criminal trials.
What a mess.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
For Apple, and the rest of the corporate world, it's bad news, because it seems it's getting harder and harder to use patents as weapons.
For Apple it's great news.
No Apple lawsuit has had any real effect to date. The biggest one is a not negligible 1 billion dollar payout by Samsung - but that's not even certain yet.
So by with all these patents folding like a house of cards, it saves Apple a lot of money that would otherwise go to "fruitless" lawsuits.
Basically corporations (not just Apple) kind of have to sue to protect patents. It''s like a legal reflex. With that need removed, they will spend less on litigation.
Apple (and other companies) have done just fine competing in a world where companies are making using of technologies patented by the other side. So the weak patents being thrown out will have no impact.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft is arguing that as a 'means plus function' patent, it isn't specific enough because it doesn't specifically give an algorithm. Surely if this goes through it will invalidate the vast majority of software patents?
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Software patents are so problematic because if you expose your essential algorithm which uses code blocks then all someone has to do is code to it with different variable names.
It is the same problem as why technology stagnated during the times before the renaissance and then industrial revolution, methods were kept secret by guilds.
We are placing far too much monetary value upon "the intellectual property of software" and if too much software is granted "a Royal Monopoly" like status. Because that status can then be horded we are headed for a technological dark age.
Who can blame the Chinese for employing industrial espionage when much of the technology they seek to achieve is being bartered by those who would squirrel it away in medieval style corporate guilds.
Queen Elizabeth the First at the end of her reign had the foresight to abolish the monopolies, we are reversing the trend and it will eventually cause stagnation and strife in the advancement of technology if left unchecked to run amok. The same as the imaginary mortgage security products market did to us all.
We either open up the patent system and let the best engineers and manufactures win or have a bunch of coders at desks trading ideas for imaginary devices in a ponzi scheme of so called intellectual property rights for products and services.
You have perhaps overlooked the fact that plenty of companies would love to 1. Stop wasting money on lawyers, and 2... make quality products.
However, OTHER companies would rather use lawyers to steal from their betters, like Apple for instance, whose MO since forever has been to steal other people's ideas, polish the hell out of them, then pretend the ideas were theirs to begin with, and sue anyone for using an idea that wasn't ever actually theirs. They did it with the Macintosh interface, the mouse, the metaphor for data that is the desktop icon, all the way to and I'm sure they'll continue well past the "slide to unlock" nonsense and rounded rectangles...
Thanks to the insanity, almost 50 cents of every dollar you spend on any of your technology goes to the parasite of the modern age, lawyers. Companies now have to pay armies of the goddamned cocksucking motherfuckers for it even to be possible to produce anything or operate in this indescribably legally hostile environment. It's amazing that anything gets made anymore, given how sue-happy everyone has gotten. They're basically vampires, and they're feeding on us all. Am I the only one who sees this and is sick and fucking tired of it?
Microsoft had already agreed to license the patents, so the real fight was over the RAND rate for those, and the possible penalties for willful infringement. Seems like that part is mostly over.
Why not invalidate Apple patents? At least once, dear judge.
I consider Groklaw to be an extremely reliable source of fact, insight and opinion. The patents are NOT invalidated, but the claims cited within are. It's a software patent, after all.
I think this could have a positive effect including for the corporate world. The end of patents-as-weapons will make it easier to introduce new products without getting sued, and mean companies spending less time in expensive courtroom battles.
If I want to introduce the next iPod or Xbox 360 or just about anything, someone out there has a patent that covers something on it, from simple stuff like "the power button flashes twice when the power goes on" to the inner workings. Having less patent power could be a good thing.
Then again, I'm not sure that's what this case is about. The patents themselves were found to be improperly constructed at trial. Thus, this case deals with those patents alone, although I like your spin on it :)
Futurist Traditionalism
This is from the PJ Comments link:
Update: Attorney Matt Rizzolo at The Essential Patent Blog explains what this might mean for the future and what it does not mean (and provides some background here):
Given the fact that Microsoft has already committed to the court that it will take a license to these patents as part of Motorola’s entire H.264 portfolio, and that Judge Robart already issued an order preventing Motorola from seeking injunctive relief on these patents, the only thing this ruling might prevent is enhanced damages for willful infringement (in the event the litigation even got to that point). It’s also possible that Judge Robart could take his invalidity finding into account as he determines the RAND rate for Motorola’s H.264-essential portfolio, on the theory that invalid claims may reduce the value of any given patent — but it’s worth pointing out that this ruling does not invalidate any of these patents in whole, but only in part (a handful of means plus function claims in each) . It’s hard to imagine his RAND-setting opinion getting down to that granular level, but I guess we will just have to wait for Judge Robart’s upcoming RAND ruling to find out.
Is there some sort of timeline that correlates Hitler' rise to power with changes in the German judicial system? Seem I recall reading he gained power more through legal maneuvering than anything else. To a judge the law is interpreted as the law, to person the law is intepreted as "to how will this effect me?".
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
If a Judge (not a Jury) can invalidate Patent claims (are they THAT skilled in the science of these things?) then what the heck's the Patent Office for?
The Patent Office doesn't make law or decide legal issues - they decide factual ones. The patents in this case were not invalidated as obvious or anticipated by some prior art, which would be a matter of fact. Instead, the judge determined that 35 U.S.C. 112(2) requires disclosure of an algorithm when claims utilize the means-plus-function format of 35 U.S.C. 112(6). That's a matter of law. In other words, the "science of these things" is the science of jurisprudence, not the science of video encoding.
Or, short version: the Patent Office applied the law as it was properly understood at the time. The judge has now said, "no, that's not the proper law, it's this instead."
is the shear number of patents that are constantly invalidated. It shows how broken our patent office has become. The reason is that we are hiring individuals that were born outside of America (or the west for that matter). Few of them have any real knowledge about the past. In addition, add to that the fact that many of them are weak technically, and well, you see what is going to happen, is happening.
It is long past time for US to fix our patent system. It was broken back in the 80s when reagan came in and 'fixed' things. Time to restore it to being an honest system.
1. Stop wasting money on lawyers.
Wasting? Are you kidding? Apple's investment in scam lawsuits have paid off tremendously for Apple.
2. Start making quality products.
Apple already does.
3. ??? (actually you can skip this step)
4. profit.
Apple does profit - huge profits, unheard of profits. What's $100 million a quarter in legal fees, if you making about $15 billion a quarter in pure profits?