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Microsoft, Apple and Others Launch Huge Patent Strike at Android
New submitter GODISNOWHERE writes "Nortel went bankrupt in 2009. In 2011, it held an auction for its massive patent portfolio. The winners of the auction were Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others, who bought the patents for $4.5 billion as a consortium named Rockstar Bidco. At the time, many people speculated those patents would be used against Google, who bid separately but lost. It turns out they were right. Rockstar has filed eight lawsuits in federal court targeting Google and Android device manufacturers. 'The complaint (PDF) against Google involves six patents, all from the same patent "family." They're all titled "associative search engine," and list Richard Skillen and Prescott Livermore as inventors. The patents describe "an advertisement machine which provides advertisements to a user searching for desired information within a data network. The oldest patent in the case is US Patent No. 6,098,065, with a filing date of 1997, one year before Google was founded. The newest patent in the suit was filed in 2007 and granted in 2011. The complaint tries to use the fact that Google bid for the patents as an extra point against the search giant.'"
Those who can, innovate. Those who can't, litigate.
Then there are the ones like Google, who bought Motorola to sue Microsoft for four billion dollars, and get their ass handed back to them. So what do those who can't litigate do?
Why do you find it necessary to misrepresent what happened? Apple forums openly talk about problems in their products and fixes. What Apple deleted was an attempt to organize a protest which would be expensive for Apple rather than work with Apple to resolve a problem in line with the terms of warranty. That is Apple deleted posts where people were engaging in a activities which arguably consisted of a conspiracy to defraud Apple.
Generally when an installer fails the customer process is to resume installation and reinstall. That is a well established norm that users have found acceptable for many products. And there is no evidence what-so-ever that they did not find it acceptable in this instance.
What Lessig wanted to do was misrepresent the problem as a broken system that required a hardware swap, as a way to punish Apple. That's bordering on if not outright fraud.
The issue with the posts was not Apple's screw up. It was the unwillingness to do just do what people normally do when software installs fail. Reinstall and fix the problem. Instead Lessig wanted to treat this like it was a hardware problem and demand a warranty swap.
I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product.
So buying the company that developed it is "stealing"? Who knew Jobs was such a socialist.
I don't live in the EU. But I suspect that in the EU is it illegal to go into a store and with full knowledge and understanding that a problem is an easily resolvable software configuration issues claim there is a hardware defect. That's more or less the definition of fraud.
I just noticed that mentioning any patent suits that Google starts, or patent suits that they inherited from Motorola, is considered "trolling". I think that's because Google is a force for good and every Google patent suit is therefore good, while any patent suit against Google must be evil.