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Patent Suit Leads To 500,000 Annoyed Software Users
ciaran_o_riordan writes "A rare glimpse at the human harm of a software patent lawsuit: company receives 500,000 calls complaining about video quality after a video call system was forced to change to avoid a patent. That's a lot of people having a bad day. We don't usually hear these details because the court documents get ordered sealed and the lawyers only say what the companys' communication strategists allow. However, for VirnetX v. Apple, Jeff Lease decided to go the hearings, take notes, and give them to a journalist. While most coverage is focussing on the fines involved, doubling or halving Apple's fine would have a much smaller impact on your day than the removal of a feature from some software you like. Instead of letting the software patents debate be reduced to calls for sympathy for big companies getting fined, what other evidence is out there, like this story, for harm caused directly to software users?"
Inconvenience, perhaps. Inability to fill the retina display with enough pixels, maybe. But "harm"? I think some perspective is askew here.
John
noone is alone in hating software patents except the patent trolls. consumers and even software developers at large companies all hate them, thats why software patents are being eliminated country by country.
I am not going to cry for Apple over software patents. Software patents are a crime against humanity but they are in that fight using them to commit their own atrocities. There is nobody to root for in this fight. A pox on both their houses. Nice /. banner ad though.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Why not rename this site \dup?
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/09/01/1233230/apple-now-relaying-all-facetime-calls-due-to-lost-patent-dispute
Couldn't happen to a nicer company.
i'm a huge fan of their products but i'll be the first one to say they borrow and copy like Microsoft did in the 80's and 90's
same with facetime, the court decided that apple used someone's work without paying. most likely they even had email evidence saying to engineer facetime this way and face the consequences later.
the tech is real software that a government contractor developed many years ago and that people took with them to a new company
if the work is so easy and obvious apple should have no problem coding a peer to peer video solution in such a way as to invent a different way to do it. with all their money it should be no big deal to hire a few engineers to do it
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Steve Jobs.
Well, sometimes that comes back and bites you.
"the data will bolster VirnetX's arguments that its patents are technologically significant, hard to work around, and deserve a high royalty rate."
None of this would have happened if IPv6 had been deployed by now, and everything had a static IP address. Then peer to peer services just work.
"As I walk through my Dupedom..."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
As noted in the comments the first time this was posted, this story doesn't mention the number of complaints received BEFORE the change, making the number 500,000, and the entire article, almost completely meaningless. Apple has millions of customers and, as with every company, a shocking percentage of them are either imbeciles or spend their days and nights pining for minor slights to write angry emails about. This could be perfectly average. The entirety of the information provided for the story comes from a party to the dispute.
Inconveniencing folks so they can't use technology until they give you money is the whole point of patents.
I find it hard to feel any sympathy for Apple.
Rounded corners, indeed.
the # of complaining users doesn't mean it's OK to violate patents in the meantime. (granted i'm largely against software patents, but just saying)
.. by competitors. Instead of doing R&D and very likely discovering things independently, the competitors are forbidden to innovate on their own and have to license the patent instead. The patent holder does not need to innovate either, they have the market locked down and can prevent anybody overtaking them.
A truly evil thing.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This seems to be similar to asking the question "how many bank robbers families went hungry because the Fed's confiscated the money the bank robber stole." I'm not a big proponent on software patents, most of them aren't really novel. But company A invents something cool. Company B likes it, copies it, and sells it. Of course it was a cool invention, so company B's customer love it. And of course the B's customers are going to hate it, and complain when B can no longer provide the invention. That is kind of like the whole point behind patent protection. If B doesn't want to license the invention then they need to come up with some other solution, that might not be quite as cool.
Apple like many other especially large companies use patents to screw up the competition. No sympathy from me. Apple is playing the patent game. They lost. They need to pay up too.
Both a PITA and both whining about each other and /. And the facepalm cannot be understated!
The complaints are because Apple refused to pay for a legal patent and not because of the suit.
Apple purposely CHOSE to go down this path knowing a lawsuit was possible.
Hmm...I wonder which company Apple will be buying out next?
I wonder what'll happen to their stock share price?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Patented Suit
Silence is a state of mime.
Seriously, what is the point of communications software that only talks to devices from one brand???
I was under the impression that Wii Speak could talk only to other Wii Speak users, Xbox Live voice chat could talk only to other Xbox 360 users, and PS3 voice chat could talk only to other PS3 users. Is this true? And I know two wrongs don't make a right, but still, how is it any better or worse than the proprietary nature of FaceTime?
Look, sometimes these software disputes are crap. But sometimes someone stole another person's code. And in those situations, I don't really care if you're customers were unhappy with a loss of service due to stolen software being pulled.
Stop it. Pay for it.
How the hell is anyone supposed to make a living at this if everyone steals? Its madness.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Apple isn't complaining that it costs $2.4 million a month to work around the patent or that there are 500,000 complaints after the workaround was instituted. The patent-holder brought up these facts to show that their patent should carry a hefty royalty payment because Apple could not work around them--not only do you have to pay $2.4 million a month you also have to lower quality to the extent where you have 500,000 complaints even after paying that money.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The article looks like a propaganda piece for VirnetX. "Look, Apple is not playing fair, they would rather annoy their users than pay us royalties." Yet the VirnetX patents are very dubious. They are based on a special purpose design that SAIC did for the CIA, then sold to VirnetX. VirnetX argues that they cover pretty much every form of VPN and every form of secure name server, which seems like a broad overreach. In fact, Cisco's lawyers were able to beat them in court (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-14/virnetx-loses-patent-trial-to-cisco-over-private-networks.html) and the patents are currently "subject to review." Let's hope that sanity prevails, that the scope of the patents is narrowed to their actual invention, and that this trolling stops!
It seems to cover the creation of a vpn based on domain name service. This exists and works with openvpn since it's creation as it has a protocol mechanism to recover change of ip address which is a clear case to handle dyndns based vpn connections. Prior art as they say ...
noone is alone in hating software patents except the patent trolls. consumers and even software developers at large companies all hate them, thats why software patents are being eliminated country by country.
There is nothing wrong, in principle, with "software" patents. Why should they be any different from, say, HW patents which, in this day and age, are coded in a software-like language?
No, IMHO, the problems lie with
a) allowing some "stupidly obvious" patents to be granted in the first place, which is the fault the patent office. (FWIW there are HW patents which also fall into this category.)
b) allowing the claims to be re-interpreted more broadly than how they were interpreted when the patent was granted.
Whenever you hear stories like this, it's easy for people to call out for the elimination of all patents (just need to take a cursory look at the comments above). However, while the patent system needs reform, we still need patents. In many industries, companies would a lot of resources into R&D to come up with new inventions. If you let everyone random person/company come afterwards, reverse engineer the end-product, the company that invested all that R&D money will be at a complete loss. This situation is somewhat similar to the "legacy costs" of the big 3 auto manufacturers. They incurred all those labor costs (e.g. pensions, etc.) which is not an issue for the new companies, and as such are at a significant disadvantage in the market place. Similarly, if a company spends a lot of R&D money, but have to compete with other companies that DON'T have the R&D costs, but make the same product (due to no patents), the initial company will go belly up very quickly. Of course, this doesn't mean that all patents are good. MOST patents that I've seen are very obvious and get granted only b/c the patent examiner doesn't have enough time to really fight it out. The point system in the USPTO is a farce - when it comes to filtering out crappy inventions. While I completely agree that we need reform, calling for the all out elimination of the patent system is not any less foolish than continuing with the system we have now.
Reading the claims from the patents involved.
I just had to stop after reading the first claim of the 759 patent.
If this claim has stood up after a thoughtful review, software patents are only a small part of the problem.
Patent 6,502,135 has 3 independent claims
Claims 1 and 10 appear to be some contortion of the DNS server to provide help in setting up a secure channel is response to a DNS request.
Claim 13 appears to cover clients connecting to a central server with an authentication table, where the connection is something called a 'virtual private link'.
If telnet qualifies as one of these links, then Unix remote login qualifies. If it needs to be an encrypted link, then SSH.
Patent 7,490,151 has 3 independent claims
Claim 1 looks like claim one from the patent above.
Claim 7 appears to be claim 1 except not a 'data process device' instead a 'computer readable medium'.
Claim 13 another similar twist.
Not sure how teaching the same lesson five times (135-1, 135-10, 151-1, 151-7, 151-13) advances a useful art.
Patent 6,839,759
Claim 1 claims a method for enabling and establishing a 'virtual private network connunications link' without a user entering cryptographic information.
What's interesting about this claim is that while it says it claims a method, it appears to be claiming the simple act of setting up the link by pretty much any method as long as the user doesn't have to enter something. Perhaps if ET were to provide the necessary keys, this patent would cover it ever though the inventor had no clue as to how to find or communicate with ET at the time of the invention. This claim seems a poster child for how silly the patent system has gotten.
Tha above sillyness aside, the thing about software patents is that they are not advancing the useful arts by providing incentives to do hard things.
Instead, they are retarding the useful arts by making it hard to do easy things.
This seems contrary to the charter for patents in the Constitution.
lol
1) Google released new text to map for Google Maps on Samsung.
2) Apple says "Gimmie!"
3) Google says "Sorry not part of your current licence."
4) Apple says "Gimmie!"
5) Google says "OK, but Google requires increased branding." (aka not asking for money, more more prominent branding of "Google Maps")
6) Apple says "FU!!1111 we will just make our own lamerz! How hard can it be!"
7) Hilarity ensues.
"the thing about software patents is that they are not advancing the useful arts by providing incentives to do hard things. Instead, they are retarding the useful arts by making it hard to do easy things."
Aside from the other helpful information about the patent details, that's a beautiful quote right there - wish my mod points hadn't just expired. Did you come up with that yourself, AC? If so, very nicely put, it concisely sums up the whole software patent problem. Maybe someone else can mod parent up.