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Jury Finds Google Guilty of Standards-Essential Patents Abuse Against MS
recoiledsnake writes "A federal jury in Seattle ordered Google to pay Microsoft $14.5 million in damages for breach of contract for failing to license at reasonable terms standard essential patents covering wireless and video technology used in the Xbox game console. Motorola had demanded Microsoft pay annual royalties of up to $4 billion for use of patents that are part of the H.264 video and 802.11 wireless standards, which are baked into Windows and the Xbox video game console. Microsoft said it was willing to pay royalties but not at the 2.25 percent of the product price that Motorola sought. We previously covered Motorola's exorbitant demands."
We should all care about patent abuses from any party and care about what the USPO clowns allow to be patented in the first place.
That is a general principle.
MS - yeah, fuck 'em
is my personal one
with some real reporting
Which is more than 2.25 PERCENT!!!!
Another example of the loaded, pro-MS language that has become the standard in Slashdot lately. :(
"Exhorbitant demands"? Really?
In other words, one giant evil corporation misused a broken system to extort money from another giant evil corporation. USA! USA!
I thought MS was making a killing off of Android sales because of their licensing deals. It would be pretty simple for MS to just say, "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
"Microsoft has also fought numerous legal battles against private companies. The most prominent ones are against:
- Alcatel-Lucent, which won US$1.52 billion in a lawsuit which alleged that Microsoft had infringed its patents on playback of audio files. This ruling was overturned in a higher court.
- Apple Inc. (known as Apple Computer, Inc. at the time), which accused Microsoft in the late 1980s of copying the "look and feel" of the graphical user interface of Apple's operating systems. The courts ruled in favor of Microsoft in 1994. Another suit by Apple accused Microsoft, along with Intel and the San Francisco Canyon Company, in 1995 of knowingly stealing several thousand lines of QuickTime source code in an effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows. After a threat to withdraw support for Office for Mac, this lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997. Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock, and made a quiet payoff estimated to be in the US$500 million-$2 billion range.
- AOL, on behalf of its Netscape division. Netscape (as an independent company) also was involved in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust suit.
- Be Inc., which accused Microsoft of exclusionary and anticompetitive behavior intended to drive Be out of the market. Be even offered to license its Be Operating System (BeOS) for free to any PC vendors who would ship it pre-installed, but the vendors declined due to what Be believes were fears of pricing retaliation from Microsoft: by raising the price of Microsoft Windows for one particular PC vendor, Microsoft could price that vendor's PCs out of the market.
- Bristol Technology Inc., which accused Microsoft illegally withheld Windows source code and used its dominant position with Windows to move into other markets. A ruling later ordered Microsoft to pay $1 Million to Bristol Technologies (see also Windows Interface Source Environment).
- Caldera, Inc., which accused Microsoft of having modified Windows 3.1 so that it would not run on DR DOS 6.0 although there was no technical reason for it not to work. Some claim that Microsoft put encrypted code in five otherwise unrelated Microsoft programs in order to prevent the functioning of DR DOS in pre-releases (beta versions) of Windows 3.1. Microsoft settled out-of-court for an undisclosed sum.
- Opera, which accused Microsoft of intentionally making its MSN service incompatible with the Opera browser on several occasions. Sendo, which accused Microsoft of terminating their partnership so it could steal Sendo's technology to use in Windows Smartphone 2002.
- Spyglass, which licensed its browser to Microsoft in return for a percentage of each sale; Microsoft turned the browser into Internet Explorer and bundled it with Windows, giving it away to gain market share but effectively destroying any chance of Spyglass making money from the deal they had signed with Microsoft; Spyglass sued for deception and won a $8 million settlement.
- Stac Electronics, which accused Microsoft of stealing its data compression code and using it in MS-DOS 6. Microsoft eventually lost the subsequent lawsuit and was ordered by a federal court to pay roughly $120 million in compensation.
- Sun Microsystems, which held Microsoft in violation of contract for including a modified version of Java in Microsoft Windows that provided Windows-specific extensions to Sun's Java language; Microsoft lost this decision in court and were forced to stop shipping their Windows-specific Java Virtual Machine. Microsoft eventually ceased to include any Java Virtual Machine in Windows, and Windows users who require a Java Virtual Machine need to download the software or otherwise acquire a copy from a source other than Microsoft.
- WordPerfect
- Zhongyi Electronic, which, having licensed two self-designed fonts to Microsoft for use only in Windows 95, filed suit
The moral of the story is to never license your patents as FRAND. Or, you know, fix the patent system.
As far as I know thins is the sequence of the events: Microsoft asked Motorola for a quote on a licence for the patents in object. Motorola quoted a 2.25% licensing fee on the product price. Microsoft sued motorola. Now, generally here someone acting in good faith would at least first complain that the fee is too much, and ask for a renegotiation. Microsoft just sued, as if this was their intention right from the start. (IIRC at this point Motorola countersued in Germany and won a temporary injunction on sales, that was overruled by an US judge. Apparently the US justice system overrules the european courts, but that's nothing new, I guess.)
in the mean time microsoft has no issue charging a similar percentage to android manufacturers
http://bgr.com/2013/05/01/microsofts-android-licensing-agreements-earnings/
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Somehow I'm unable to interpret this article the way I should. Could someone give me a quick summary which is written a bit... easier? (now don't go kindergarten on me!)
Motorola requested royalties up to $4 billion, sure.
But "demanded" does not reflect that this was their initial offer.
Standard practice for licensing is
1-owner offers to license for $x
2-potential licensee offers to pay $y
3-owner lowers price
4-potential licensee raises offer
5-haggle over what is covered and what it's worth
The impression given is that this was after step 5.
It actually was after step 1; Microsoft sued before they made a counter-offer.
I really miss Groklaw's coverage and analysis of this whole thing.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
The headline says Google was ordered to pay, but the article talks Motorola...
2% of the console's price is pretty exorbitant for open standards patents. The whole deal with (F)RAND stuff is "Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory". Now you don't have to license your stuff under that model, but that's how open standards like MPEG-4 and 802.11 are done. Companies pool their patents and set up a standard, and the licenses are fixed. The idea is that anyone can license it for the same amount, and that amount is fair and reasonable.
The reason companies do that is to get their patents used and licensed. I mean if I develop some cool new video compression, but I won't set licensing terms, everyone has to come to me and I decide if you get a license, and if so what it costs, well that will hamper adoption. Many companies will give that a miss since they don't know why it'll cost them. However if it is all out in the open, then it is much more likely to get used and licensed.
Also a lot of standards agencies require it. If you want your IP to be part of whatever standard they make, you have to disclose it, and license it under RAND terms. You don't want to, then it is excluded from the standard.
Well, if you decide to do that, you can't then go and decide to try and stick it to a company you don't like. You can't say "Yes, all our stuff is available under this fair license for all to use, oh except for you, we don't like you so you pay more." Sorry, you gave up that ability when you decided to do the open standards thing and RAND licensing.
Hence, the court decision. Google wanted to play hardball with MS, but they were doing it with patents they'd said they wouldn't do that with. So they got slapped down.
So ya, exorbitant demands. Particularly in context of what we are talking about. Remember Google doesn't own H.264 or 802.11. They only have a small number of the patents on it. So if their share was like 2%, then total cost could easily be 10-20%. If that was the kind of money demanded for those standards, they'd not be used. Google just wanted to screw MS.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/09/motorola-wanted-free-license-now.html
Go read the write up,
"The reputational cost of this finding far exceeds the $14.5 million damages verdict. And it's also a clear signal to other standard-essential patent (SEP) holders: there's a potential liability if you renege on your promises, and damages could be much greater in cases in which someone actually does obtain and enforce injunctive relief, or in which an implementer, at point blank, bows to threats. "
BS"
Google: Now Certified Evil.
As it turns out the courts care.
Motorola.
If you bought a company that did something prior to your buying it, are you evil?
In any case, Microsoft is the evil one in this case because, if you followed the case at all, you would have noticed that Motorola actually asked for a reasonable amount by industry standards but Microsoft didn't even attempt to negotiate and, instead, went straight to a court challenge arguing things that aren't quite even law.
Microsoft filed this suit in 2010, Google bought Motorola Mobility (and the patents and lawsuits that come with them) in 2011.
ROFLMAO!!!!
This has nothing to do with the USPO.
Motorola filed the patents which is perfectly in their rights, however what they choose to do was try to extort a lot of unreasonable royalties and licensing fees out of Microsoft which thankfully the courts have found in favour of Microsoft. Yes Microsoft ain't no saints, but thankfully the courts are waking up and stopping this kind of anti-competitive bullshit.
The USPO is not involved in setting the conditions of licensing, royalties, or any other arrangement or agreement for two parties to share or exchange patent IP. A patent filed does not come with a set of conditions on how it should be used, shared, or what fee schedule is applied for royalties or licensing. I am tired of people ignorant of the patent process just throwing out stupid diatribes about the patent office and patents in general. Sure if the USPO grants a patent in the first place that is trivial in nature or duplicates existing work, then by all means slam the USPO. This case is not the time for that.
There is nothing wrong with a patent. Someone that "invents" something has full right to protect their IP. They have a right to be compensated for the effort, time and money that went into creating the idea. I don't care if its a trivial bit of nonsense, or some elaborate mechanical wonder, everyone has a right to invent and turn that into a money making enterprise. The alternative is communism where all your ideas belong to the state and you just get some stale bread for all your effort. Do you want to live in that communist state? Keep slamming patents and decrying for their absolution and everything to do with capitalism and democracy in general.
However what has happened to the humble patent today is they are now are used in a cold war of stockpiling of ideas in a direct effort to prevent competition. The company that succeeds today will have the largest patent portfolio and hopes that the only way for their competition to survive is to have to pay them obscene royalties, or go out of business. Companies like Apple rarely even share their patents, they just make so much obscene profit that they patent every little stupid idea that comes into their heads and hope that each one cuts a tiny slice out of the ability for their competition to create a successful product.
The patent has been weaponized.
There is nothing about the patent that needs to be changed, but the laws surrounding how patents are shared, exchanged, that is the business surrounding the patent, needs to change and its up to courts to start setting precedent that extorting ANY company using and anti-competitive pricing structures or withholding a patent that is necessary to support the standardization of products and services should no longer be tolerated.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The alternative is communism where all your ideas belong to the state and you just get some stale bread for all your effort. Do you want to live in that communist state?
That's nothing whatsoever like communism. It's also not "the" alternative.
$4Billion/2.25% isn't reasonable. Nobody thinks that it is. Even Motorola or Google.
The court agreed with Microsoft. Are they also evil?
Patents can ONLY be used for anti-competitive behavior. They are a government granted monopoly.
... the $14 million is what Motorola owed for the money lost per XBox ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Microsoft is the evil one in this case because, if you followed the case at all, you would have noticed that Motorola actually asked for a reasonable amount by industry standards but Microsoft didn't even attempt to negotiate and, instead, went straight to a court challenge arguing things that aren't quite even law.
I hate Microsoft with every ounce of my being, but even I think you're full of shit here. Demanding large royalties for standards-essential patents on a small part of a large product is the road to hell for the technology industry.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
What if Motorola are charging Samsung 2.25% of the device's price for the same patents?
If that were true Microsoft would not have won.
The fact that they did means no-one else is being charged that level of fee.
There's NO WAY that in the low-margin cell phone business Samsung would be able to pay 2% of the total system price just for a video codec!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you bought a company that did something prior to your buying it, are you evil?
The takeover was apparently completed in May 2012; the story above links to another that goes back to *November* 2012, and the filing date on the PDF of the court filing that original story links to is also November 2012. (*)
That said, even if it had been, I don't like the principle of absolution of guilt by takeover. If being taken over absolves the company of moral guilt, that raises the possibility of moral hazard, since a company can do evil stuff and get taken over by another who don't have to worry about its reputation- hence the original owners/managers still get paid a high market value for their actions. If the immorality of the original company is more likely to tarnish the purchaser, that will reduce its market value and hence punish the original owners.
(*) I was almost going to say the PDF was dated July 2012- which seemed quite a long gap- which I might have taken to mean the chain of events was possibly set in motion before the takeover. Then I realised "11/07/2012" was in the ass-backwards US format and it *was* November!
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Someone that "invents" something has full right to protect their IP.
No they don't. In neither law nor philosophy does anyone have a "right" to the exclusive use of an idea. Patents are justified because they are believed to be a net benefit to the public. The US Constitution states this explicitly.
The alternative is communism where all your ideas belong to the state and you just get some stale bread for all your effort. Do you want to live in that communist state?
This is a ridiculous argument. Capitalism has existed without patents in the past, and totalitarian communism is not the only alternative to our current IP laws.
> I hate Microsoft with every ounce of my being, but even I think you're full of shit here. Demanding large royalties for standards-essential patents on a small part of a large product is the road to hell for the technology industry.
Yeah, and Microsoft is the worst offender here. They certainly don't deserve any sympathy in this case.
Although just as the patent system is broken, so too is the system for creating and enforcing national or industry standards. It's no less corrupt than anything else in business these days.
The entire notion of a "standards essential patent" is obscene.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Anti-competitive behavior is only bad insofar as it retards advancement. You have forgotten this and treat it as a bad value all by itself, which it is not.
Patents stop "competition" from people who did not think up the great idea from stealing it, without paying for any of the work that it took to develop that idea. It is akin to government protecting a farmer's field from raiding, so he can be secure in growing a crop and selling it.
In this, it enhances advancement, which is the real goal, and a good value.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Nice description until you veer off into Applesux land. Apple has categorically stated that it will never use SEP to attack others. None of the lawsuits they initiated involved SEPs.
Your sense of reality is warped. If every fucking little patent is worth 2.25%, how are they even going to sell the XBox?! There were hundreds of patent holders for all the patents "used" in the making of the XBox.
Also, GOOG bought Motorola. If they wanted to, they could have killed the lawsuit outright. As simple as "hey, we are new owners, we're killing this stupid lawsuit".
And once again, if you had been paying attention to the case, the issue was between Motorola and Microsoft BEFORE Google got involved. It has taken quite some time for this to even get into the courts let alone headlines. (Surely you didn't think the legal system was instantaneous.)
That is a good point. If the purchased company is evil, then the purchasing company is absorbing evil into itself. The question then becomes... Does the purchaser root out evil in the purchased company and cleans it, or does it allow the evil to continue and thus become corrupted itself? And, how long do we give the purchaser to start showing movement in the direction of a cleansing before we place judgement on them?
On the first point... You are correct that 2.25% for every patent used would make the XBox impossible. This just highlights a problem with the patent system. A flaw that Microsoft also uses to hurt competition. E.g. the FAT patent. The fact that there are patent wars going on, makes the level of evil in the price hard to tell. War is hell, and unilaterally setting down your weapons isn't always a good idea. I'm not saying that Google is clean here. Just that it is murky.
On the second point... You are correct. Apologists like to make a lot of claims about how a business MUST do this, or MUST do that, when they most certainly do not. Google could have just dropped the royalty fee to whatever they wanted if they chose to. They could not however have killed the lawsuit outright. They were the defendants, so it is not their choice directly.
See wikipedia for an example of MS attempting to charge 3.85% for patent licensing re the EU interoperability case. Since interoperability was mandated by the EU, I find it reasonable to equate this case to a FRAND licensing case.
The EU beat them down to lower values, but could only do that because they held the bigger stick.
So really, not so long a time after all.
So this means Google is now officially a convicted patent troll.
$14.5 million is basically the cost of bringing a case such as this to trial, so this is a moral victory only, the equivalent of being awarded $ 1 in small claims court.
EVIL!!!! EVIL!!!! EVIL!!!
It is not as if MS, Oracle, and Apple, have been running patent scams against Google.
This is Slashdot. We don't apply our own thought process here. We are nothing but a bunch of fucking sheep who blindly regurgitate asinine arguments, because, well, it just sounded so fucking cool and irreverent when the other guy said it, and we want people to think we're cool and irreverent, too. We hate on things like patents, copyrights, M$, Apple, Google, religion, blah, fucking blah, blah, blah. We're not intelligent enough to understand why, we just know that you don't get to ride on the bandwagon if you have an opposing viewpoint - especially one that is backed up by facts and knowledge. After all, bandwagon rides are teh funzeZ!!
Oh, by the way, you must be new here. Welcome to the forum!!
Really, there's fuck all news here. The USA is worse by fact of being both more brazen and more in denial in this "home advantage" shit than Korea, China or any other country in the world.
Agreed. It's a pretty common tactic to open negotiations that way though. Patent holder says 2.25%, Licensee counteroffers 0.0001%, and eventually they arrive at a reasonable number. In this case though Microsoft didn't even make a counteroffer, they just went straight to the courts.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It would have taken a further step on their part "hey, we are the new owners, we're killing the original lawsuit against msft by motorola, and msft, will you kill your lawsuit too?".
On original point - the problem is that this was a SEP. Standard Essentials Patent. You need it for H.264 and other standards for interoperability.
I could give a rats ass if you're suing over non-standard essential patents. Even Apple got hit by one and had to either pay hundreds of millions or re-engineer things. But it was Apple's decision to pay, or re-do. *BUT* if it was a SEP, there is *NO WAY* to re-do. You have to implement as is, because you need to interoperate with others.
That is why friends don't let FRAND abuse of SEPs happen.
Please read a little before spouting nonsence. Note that the article is written in 1990, but phenomena it described are known almost to everyone today and have gotten only worse.
The normal way these things go is through "cross licensing deals." In this case, cross licensing was not offered by Microsoft. It is widely recognized that without such agreements, patent disputes would have melted civilization into a molten pool long ago.
2% isn't much. Care to guess what Microsoft wants for their alleged patents in Android?
Part of the problem with many of the software patents being enforced anti-competitively these days is the fact that patent holders are attempting to restrict the consumers of material created with the patent. So you get:
1. Video codecs, where the intellectual property resides in the encoding process, but for which patent rights are being used to restrict decoding. Once encoded, a video format is no different than any other file format. Decoding it is just consuming the media, and shouldn't require a patent license to do. Sure, if a poducer of video content wants to use the best compression tech out there, charge 'em for it. But don't charge the consumer for the 'intellectual property' involved in decoding the resulting file - unless they're using your code to do the decoding.
2. The notorious FAT32 patent, which seems to be the basis for Microsoft's royalty shakedown of Android OEM's. This 'intellectual property' is a workaround for a bad file system design. Using it in a device, which needs it in order to be able to plug into a Windows PC is not a question of Android taking a free ride on the intellectual brilliance of Microsoft. Nobody in their right mind would use FAT32 except for the fact that it's the common denominator that Windows understands. So, sure Microsoft ought to be able to charge you for it as part of Windows. But nobody should have to pay Microsoft for intellectual property needed to connect to Windows unless they are paying for a license to the actual code to do it.
It would seem that restrictions on patenting file formats would go a long way toward these kinds of potential abuses. A file format isn't the intellectual property - it's just the way to store the results of a patentable process.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Bill Gates operates in an attempt to place himself (and thus his company, Microsoft) at a higher level than Google- a remarkable ambition given that Google is literally the software/hardware R&D arm of the NSA. But Bill gates has opted to work smarter, rather than harder.
The people REALLY responsible for the NSA (rather than the peons who work there at ANY level) were blown-away by the audacity of the Xbox One Kinect spy platform- a massively sophisticated camera/microphone-array/movement-recognition-system in the living space of tens of millions of Americans. Google had never even proposed, let alone offered to create such a service for the full surveillance grid. Then Bill Gates went one better, and created the full surveillance child database system (in partnership with Rupert "Goebbels" Murdoch under the shell company named inBloom- a pedophile pun).
Part of Gates' rewards are easy court victories over his rivals, if the Microsoft side has any merit. This follows multiple years of court losses for Microsoft, even when the facts were on Microsoft's side. Bill Gates finally understood he needed to step up his 'game' with respect to those he gains powerful influence over. Before, Microsoft simply handed over bundles of cash. But those in real power are already wealthy, and desire those things money cannot buy.
From November onwards, the NSA will have real-time access to astonishing numbers of homes all across America. Although neither an Internet connection nor a connected Kinect sensor bar are now required to use the new console, it is anticipated 95% of all Xbone owners will willingly give Kinect an optimal view of the room, and leave the console in permanent connection to their router. The 5% or so of lost NSA spy victims is compensated by a greater public confidence in the Xbone.
Meanwhile, Bill Gates' inBloom full-surveillance-of-every-child database is rolling out all across the USA, and is on the edge of moving into other nations. Future child abusers will be able to pick out their victims electronically, using the unprecedented statistics provided to maximise their safety against possible guardian or law enforcement actions.
In a world where a civilised secular society like Syria can be targeted for total destruction, knowing that the dribbling sheeple (including most of you here) will give at least passive support to the atrocity, because the ONLY things you think you know about ANYTHING come from 'push' campaigns in the mainstream media, every form of perverted darkness grows on our planet. YOU do not question the existence of lone psychopaths who kidnapped and hold women as sex slaves for years, and yet you are too thick to ever understand the vastly greater criminality of those that claim the right to rule over you.
Yeah.
I want to buy a Lamborghini, but I feel the quarter million dollar price tag is outrageous. I can't get this car any where else so they have an unfair monopoly over them. I'm willing to pay 20, 000 though.
Can I sue them?
In both cases you're decoding media. Just point it out :)
You are being short-sighted then... because as a natural consequence, companies will not license their IPR for use in standards, and, if that isn't sufficient, they'll not make standards anymore.
The better solution is fixing the damn patent system. A mandated eminent-domain purchase of any patent deemed essential and then allowed for public use, for instance, would be an interesting way out, though fraught with its own problems (who determines the fair price? This is always the problem with any eminent-domain issue). I'd prefer those problems to what we have today, though.
The main reason that Google bought Motorola was to shore up its patent arsenal which really hasn't helped since other companies can sue Google using non-FRAND patents while Google can't retaliate because most of Motorola's useful patents are FRAND.
On top of that Motorola has lost millions of dollars more since Google acquired them.
It was wrong in 1990, and it's wrong now.
It makes nothing but logically fallacious arguments and scare terms.
example:
"Fact–Not one patent in one hundred will ever show any
positive cash flow"
So the fuck what? I patent something and couldn't market it, or the market didn't want therefore patents are bad?
WTF?
Grow up.
Without patents corporation will just take what they want and the inventor will have no leverage.
The answer to a system that has some flaws isn't to get rid of the system, it' to improve the system,.
People like you who couldn't invent there way out of a paper bag only want to get your dodads cheaper and don't give a shit about the people who spend money time and effort creating. Frankly. you are ignorant and mean.
Full disclosure: I am an inventor that has made money becasue I could protect myself with patents.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
" In neither law nor philosophy "
he said in a discussion about the patent law.
And there is plenty philosophy around control of distribution.
Based on your first sentence, clearly you are ignorant of the whole thing.
so, shut up.
"Capitalism has existed without patents in the past"
yes, but might took what they wanted to produce the good for profit.
". Capitalism has existed without patents in the past"
not in the US.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Except they weren't a troll. The court is wrong here. I should be able to charge whatever I want to license the patents I own.
In fact 'patent troll' is really relevant and doesn't make sense for the vast majority of cases the invoke it.
It's a scare term to get people who have no clue about patents to get on the anti-patent bandwagon.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The just meas MS needs to come up with a different way to do it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You will notice that no one is pressuring anyone to add their standards to SEPs. These companies volunteer because they know if they don't, their patents are worthless. If your patent doesn't make it into H.264, who gives a shit about it? Who would license it? No one (or very very few people)
2% isn't much? Let me quote the relevant bits again.
If every fucking little patent is worth 2.25%, how are they even going to sell the XBox?! There were hundreds of patent holders for all the patents "used" in the making of the XBox.
And why should Microsoft license their stuff cheaply? FAT is not a SEP. *YOU* choose to implement it. You were not required to implement it.
However, H.264 is a standard, and if you want to play mp4 videos, you *HAVE TO* implement it.
Please go read up on what FRAND and SEP is before you try to talk about it again.
Sounds like some home cooking...
Then don't put your patents in a FRAND pool and participate in development of a standard that is encumbered by them. The point of the FRAND agreement is that you are allowed to profit from your patent, but you are not allowed to use it to bar everyone from the market (by setting unreasonable rates) or to bar a specific company from the market (by setting discriminatory rates for that one company).
This case (and related cases involving Apple) involve disputes over what involves a violation of the "FR" part of FRAND, what the obligations of prospective licensees are, and what recourse the patent holder has against a potential licensee who acts in bad faith.
These are FRAND patents. Why is there any negotiating?!? Everyone should be getting the same terms.
You have to understand that patents were originally on manufacturing processes, not on product features. The scope of patents was expanded well beyond what the founding fathers intended.
The intent was to promote public discloser of what would otherwise be trade secrets. The idea being that with that public disclosure, you would be granted an exclusive right to your (presumably more efficient, or new) process for a limited time. This is win-win because you no longer have to run the risk of a competitor discovering your secret (through either spying or their own R&D) while at the same time public knowledge grows as a consequence. It should be noted that some companies still keep trade secrets in some cases rather than patenting, most notably Intel does this for part of their lithography processes (expect to sign some NDAs if you visit their latest FABs.) It also should be noted that there is a small chance of loss with patenting a manufacturing process, that of being denied the patent and thus giving up your otherwise trade secret to public knowledge for no gain.
But in the case of patents on product features, the public gains the knowledge of those features regardless of patents. So the public gains nothing, which isn't win-win like in the case of manufacturing processes. This is also why there is a patent attempt for every product features that has even a remote chance of being awarded a patent. The only downside is the modest filing fee.
So while the case for patents benefiting society is clear, it is not the case for all the kinds of patents that we have today. They were not meant as an increased incentive to make better products, and its quite clear that they quite literally stifle the progress of product improvements.
"His name was James Damore."
Neither capitalism nor communism has ever existed. We all live in combinations at best, or totalitarian states at worst. The US becomes more socialist over time because capitalism is inevitably unsustainable. "Communist" China is the most capitalist place on earth because human motivations always trump political objectives.
PJ wasn't shy about predicting negative outcomes that she disagreed with. See most of her prediction of Judge Koh's rulings in the Apple v. Samsung case, where she obviously takes a dim view of both the case management and the rulings but still tends to predict correctly how Judge Koh will rule.
She did have a strong editorial bias in favor of FOSS, but it didn't seem to filter through much to her legal analysis, that I could see.
What is that, about $14.50 to most people.. pocket change. That won't even cover the catering costs on the smaller company's yacht party.
If you bought a company that did something prior to your buying it, are you evil?
Yes, they bought an evil company and continued on with what it was doing rather than putting a stop to it.
In any case, Microsoft is the evil one
Of course they are, whenever it is Google V Microsoft it doesnt matter what happens, in a slashdotters eyes its always Microsoft that is the evil one while you continue towing the party line for Google.
if you followed the case at all, you would have noticed that Motorola actually asked for a reasonable amount by industry standards but Microsoft didn't even attempt to negotiate and, instead, went straight to a court challenge arguing things that aren't quite even law.
Bull-fucking-Shit! Take off you Google Glass and you will see pretty quickly that 2.25% is *not* a reasonable amount!
Yeah, and Microsoft is the worst offender here. They certainly don't deserve any sympathy in this case.
I don't think anybody is asking for sympathy here but you can't say that Microsoft should be slapped for doing it and Google shouldn't because they are doing it Microsoft, that's just eye-for-an-eye pettiness.
The entire notion of a "standards essential patent" is obscene.
Agreed, but Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nokia, etc... all make too much money from them.
I think you mean the other way around. You don't add standards to patents, you use patents over parts of standards. Either that or you mean something about adding patents to patent protection pools?
In any case it isn't true that their patents are worthless when they don't put them in.
Look at Microsoft with the FAT patents.
What the current ruling does is encourage companies with patents to NOT disclose them, or to keep them as patent applications as long as possible (and thus they can be kept secret for longer) only to pull the patent out of the proverbial hat after the technology is established.
Again, the only way to fix this is to provide an ability to remove these patents from the patent holders.
2% isn't much. Care to guess what Microsoft wants for their alleged patents in Android?
Irrelevant, and in making that comment you make it obvious you need to educate yourself on what Standards Essential Patents are and how they differ from patents that are not Standards Essential.
It's all quite irrelevant. 2% does not violate FRAND because Motorola was not a member or party of any agreement associated with the standard. Motorola was not owned by Google when it started.
Microsoft did not negotiate let alone negotiate in good faith. Microsoft simply didn't want to pay at all. I do side with Microsoft on that though. There should be no payment for software patents because there should be no software patents.
This kind of nonsense can't keep going on. It saddens and sickens me.
And what about all these companies?
As an owner of patents you are biased in favour of them, just like all the mega corps that own a fuckton of them. After Google paid a few billion for patents recently they might be reluctant to see the downside of the system, and neither will they permit any change to the patent system because that might decrease market value of their "warchest".
Aside from a few cases where consensus is in favour of patents, like pharmaceuticals, the patent system today mostly serves to attack and often elliminate competition. Why does every Android device made pay $5 tax to Microsoft? Did Microsoft invent something that Android could not possibly be produced without? Hint: when contacting manufacturers MS does not even specify which patents they infringe. How is this different from legalized blackmail?
>. I should be able to charge whatever I want to license the patents I own.
Except that these patents were promised to be FRAND and hence were included in the standard implemented in hundreds of millions of routers and videos. Turning around and extorting based on those is breach of contract, plain and simple, which the jury agreed with.
Don't you think FRAND patents should have restrictions on them or should, say Nokia, be allowed to charnge $10B dollars for licensing patents related to your phone being able to talk to millions of 3G GSM towers around the world?
Motorola.
If you bought a company that did something prior to your buying it, are you evil?
If they decided to continue the suit rather than settle / drop it, yes. Google could have settled with Microsoft after taking control, and didn't. Why? Because this is why they bought Motorola Mobility - to have a bulldog in the patent wars.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Not at all. Abridged from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing
Fair relates mainly to the underlying licensing terms. Drawing from anti-trust/competition law; fair terms means terms which are not anti-competitive and that would not be considered unlawful if imposed by a dominant firm in their relative market
Reasonable refers mainly to the licensing rates. According to some, a reasonable licensing rate is a rate charged on licenses which would not result in an unreasonable aggregate rate if all licensees were charged a similar rate.
Non-discriminatory relates to both the terms and the rates included in licensing agreements. As the name suggests this commitment requires that licensors treat each individual licensee in a similar manner. This does not mean that the rates and payment terms can’t change dependent on the volume and creditworthiness of the licensee. However it does mean that the underlying licensing condition included in a licensing agreement must be the same regardless of the licensee.
So lots of room for rate variation between licensees, but you can't put additional restrictions on just some of them. Which I would read as terms like "must have a 4 inch or smaller screen", or "must cross-license their own Patent X". The initial 2.25% offer would probably run afoul of the Reasonable clause if they refused to license for a smaller amount, but I don't believe the terms apply to the initial offers, just to the final agreement.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The patent has been weaponized.
Nope. It was always a weapon. Always.
Place nail here >+
And you should learn some manners instead of behaving like a spoilt brat
The notion of stealing an idea is fucking ridiculous. You make some delicious cookies, I buy a dozen and reverse engineer the recipe. Pray tell what exactly have I taken from you?
The thesis that patents foster innovation is for the most part disproved, in most any industry you can mention the overall costs of patents are negative or nearly neutral, expect in the pharmaceutical industry which have overwhelmingly high regulatory costs.
The cost of reverse engineering an innovation is comparable to just the original development. In addition being first to market still allows you fairly large margins, allows you to establish in the market, and puts you in the forefront for further improvements.
As for a concrete example look at the steam engine, major innovations and improvements were delayed until after the patents were expired.