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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
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
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
None of this would have happened if IPv6 had been deployed by now,
The patent trolls would just refile all the existing stuff as 'do X in IPv6'. And the USPTO would grant the patents, resetting the term to start at the new filing date.
Patents are supposed to be non obvious. Unless someone can show where Apple had tried (and failed) to implement the protocol in question until VirnetX published. And suddenly Apple succeeded. Then I'd buy the argument that Apple swiped their idea. But if Apple sat down on its own and built the same damned thing, I'd say the solution is a)obvious and b)trivial. Add any third parties coming up with the same thing and I'd say there's no way it is patentable.
'Hard to work around' doesn't mean something is patentable. The wheel is pretty hard to work around as well.
Have gnu, will travel.
it's not a dupe, it's a continuation of an evolving story. to clarify the summary, the company that is mentioned in the first sentence is Apple, and the video calling system is Facetime. Also, I didn't know you could call someone to complain? I guess it's nice to vent, but I usually just go to the genius bar.
Inconveniencing folks so they can't use technology until they give you money is the whole point of patents.
.. 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.
What's novel about peer to peer communications? Isn't that what the internet is built of?