Slashdot Mirror
Jury Tells Apple To Pay $532.9 Million In Patent Suit
An anonymous reader writes: Smartflash LLC has won a patent lawsuit against Apple over DRM and technology relating to the storage of downloaded songs, games, and videos on iTunes. Apple must now pay $532.9 million in damages. An Apple spokesperson did not hesitate to imply Smartflash is a patent troll: "Smartflash makes no products, has no employees, creates no jobs, has no U.S. presence, and is exploiting our patent system to seek royalties for technology Apple invented. We refused to pay off this company for the ideas our employees spent years innovating and unfortunately we have been left with no choice but to take this fight up through the court system." The trial happened in the same court that decided Apple owed VirnetX $368 million over FaceTime-related patents back in 2012.
Unless the big fish start feeling the pain of the current patent regime. If patent trolls get too greedy, they may undo themselves.
VirnetX, whom Apple lost a patent case to previously, had direct ties to the intelligence community of the U.S. Government - they sued to prevent Apple from using point to point encrypted communication with no encryption keys going to Apple (for their Facetime and iChat products - if memory serves)...afterward Apple was forced to change to a client server client model (where the encryption keys were held on Apple's servers - reachable via NSL's - the goal).
VirnetX also sued Microsoft and Cisco on these same patents. Just the NSA arranging the board so they could run it going forward. Software shouldn't have patents IMHO...simply because of the documented abuse of the U.S. government's proxy in these matters. Supposedly the NSA has other proxy patent holding companies as well.
The vast majority of Apple's patent s are due to the tech environment ripening, not actual innovation. They are just as much a patent troll as they company they are accusing of being a troll. Just because Apple makes product doesnt make them less so. IN fact the whole 'IP holder must make the product' is shitty reasoning at best.
Good-bye
In related news, iPod Touch sales are apparently nonexistent.
Outside of kids, that's probably true.
Inside of kids, it's too dark to use one.
Nah, the screen lights up just fine.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Start reforming what can be patented. No software patents, and throw out the crap that is obviously not invention but intellectual property land-grabbing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Better yet, if people are re-inventing your work why do you even think you should be granted ownership of it? Chances are that you contributed nothing to the state of the art. You didn't publish anything that's actually useful. Patents are rubbish as documentation. So if that's all you've contributed to the world, then you didn't contribute anything really.
The fact that ANYONE could "re-invent" your stuff means the patent should be tossed.
Patents are evil that way. They allow patent holders to claim ownership of the work of others. It's legalized theft.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Looks like 7334720 is just applying DRM "over the internet," using a portable computer. How can anyone be granted such wide patents?
The reason they and every other company file all of these crazy patents is because it's much, much harder to sue them if they can pull out their own patent in the trial. At that point the other company now has to prove that a patent granted by the patent office, which basically says that this patent is a unique and different implementation than any other existing patented implementations, is somehow invalid. Good luck with that.
There is no buying into the game or not. Either you play it with a good strategy or you get rolled over and learn to play smarter the next time if you don't want to lose. Agreeing or disagreeing with the rules won't change them, and since next to no politicians really care about patent reform or have any understanding of it at all, it would take a lot of money to lobby for a reasonable change, which assumes that anyone opposed won't spend just as much if not more to make your efforts useless.
Most of Apple's patents are on hardware
Most of Apple's hardware designs are ripped off from other places. Slide to unlock is centuries old and other phones did it first on a touch screen. Their tablets look almost exactly like Samsung photo frames released years earlier. Much of their other hardware looks like Braun products from the 70s and 80s, the kind of stuff Jobs would have lusted after when he was young.
Apple got this way because they were IP-raped pretty hard in their early years
We have all hard Steve Jobs talk about how Apple used to shamelessly stead good ideas. That's the way it should be. Apple, and Jobs in particular, turned nasty in later life. They could use patents defensively, but instead they use them to stifle competition with nonsense claims that defy common sense. Normal people who are raped do not then become rapists because they had a bad experience.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC