Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Makes an Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties
mrspoonsi sends this report from Business Insider:
"Microsoft is generating $2 billion per year in revenue from Android patent royalties, says Nomura analyst Rick Sherlund in a new note on the company. He estimates that the Android revenue has a 95% margin, so it's pretty much all profit. This money, says Sherlund, helps Microsoft hide the fact that its mobile and Xbox groups are burning serious cash."
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines:
"to one skilled in the art".
i.e. if it's blindingly obvious to someone who does similar work all day long, professionally, every day, then it shouldn't actually be patentable at all.
And this is why we can't have nice things.
However the test used in the patent systems worldwide tends to be along the lines: "to one skilled in the art".
It's the same in America. The difference is, the art isn't engineering, it's lawyering.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Technically it's only the implementation of an idea that is supposed to be patentable. With physical patents if you can accomplish the same thing by other means then it's fair game.
Somehow in software they've decided to allow patenting the *idea* of momentum when scrolling via swiping, or bounceback when you hit the end.
The equivalent to patenting physical implementations would be to allow protection of their *implementation* of an idea--and in the software world that implementation is already protected by copyright, so there's really no need for software patents.
They're trolling.
So they're indirect patent trolls via Intellectual Ventures and Rockstar?
Not as long as Microsoft filesystems are the de-facto file systems for SD cards by virtue of their desktop monopoly.
Funny.
But seriously, open your fucking eyes, people. Here we have a private enterprise that put a break on the development of a personal computer for 20 something years, and now it's taxing the development and adoption of an operating system that was written from scratch, using UNIX philosophy which Micro$oft neither invented nor indeed implemented.
Just like copyrights, patents are not worth crap to individual inventors because the chances of making a return on the investment with one, two, or even a hundred inventions are miniscule. So the inventors sign over their inventions to capitalists for either a small lump sum or a regular paycheck; and so do the artist with copyright, because it ultimately makes sense for them economically. The capitalists, on the other hand, are wielding tens of thousands of patents; just like the art producers are controlling significant proportions of the entire catalog. And when they control, say, 10% of all published ideas, they can finally make patents (and copyrights) pay. The art business is ugly, we all heard that, but the technology is uglier! With patents, in particular, the best way to maximize the return is by suing everyone who dares to innovate. The point being, everyone has to keep using the same shit invented 20 or 40 years ago, and pay, pay, and pay again to some bastard who neither invented nor encouraged invention [1], but simply invested into exclusive rights. This was true for the steam engine, and it is true for the latest, smallest, sexiest computers of tomorrow.
[1] Don't believe me? Look it up. Multiple studies were conducted, and no correlation was found between patent law strength on one hand and the rate of innovation on the other.
I have never understood this. Windows users are used to installing drivers for each new piece of hardware. Why not bundle an ext4 driver? The device could even have a small FAT partiton (without the patented parts of FAT) that contains the driver for the larger ext4 partition.
Manufacturers have allowed the situation to exist.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This gets to an odd contradiction right in the summary: the mobile division is "burning serious cash," yet also making $2B which is "pretty much all profit." It's as if the author sees no connection between investing in a business unit to generate intellectual property, and subsequently profiting from that investment.
Most of the intellectual property (basically just FAT licenses) actually came from the windows division. If you want your phone to plug into a windows machine you pay the short ugly looking character at the bridge.