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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."
"Patents Abuse Against MS"
who cares
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!
Not quite the sum Apple was hoping for, but something is better than nothing.
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...
Google. google. GOOGLE! Google GOOD! Chromebook fap fap fap GOOGLE! GOOOOGLE!!! (Made in USA) Do no evil.
Microsoft lol. derp herp derp. Evil. lol Sheeple. Microsoft. Dyeing. Microsoft.
Robert Rankin
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"
Microsoft filed this suit in 2010, Google bought Motorola Mobility (and the patents and lawsuits that come with them) in 2011.
ROFLMAO!!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... the $14 million is what Motorola owed for the money lost per XBox ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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
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.
$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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
The patent has been weaponized.
Nope. It was always a weapon. Always.
Place nail here >+