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Apple Loses Patent Suit To University of Wisconsin, Faces Huge Damages (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has frequently been in the news for various patent battles, but it's usually against one of their competitors. This time, Apple is on the losing end, and they're losing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A jury found that the university's patent on improving processor efficiency (5,781,752) was valid, and Apple's A7, A8, and A8X chips infringed upon it. Those chips are found within recent iPhone and iPad models, which generated huge amounts of money. Because of the ruling, Apple could be liable for up to $826.4 million in damages, to be determined by later phases of the trial.
The iPod had large "misfeatures" for most at the time it was released: It was firewire and Mac-only.
Mac only limited the market, but I don't think that made it suck. Firewire was a good choice at the time: all macs had firewire. USB2 was only juuuuust out and if you cast your mind back to 2001, it stank. The chipsets were yound and flakey as was the software. Firewire was much faster, and much more reliable.
Eventually USB2 realised it's potential and stopped sucking and actually caught up with firewire in terms of actual speed, but that took years.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A shame this got modded as Flamebait, since it's exactly the right answer. For some reason, many Slashdotters seem to be completely unaware (or perhaps willfully ignorant) of the distinction between utility patents (i.e. what we think of when we say "patents") and design patents, which are something else entirely. As a result, when they hear that "Apple got a patent on rounded corners", they rightfully think that's utterly ridiculous and an example of a broken patent system, when it's actually nothing of the sort, since design patents more closely resemble a time-limited trademark than they do a utility patent.
The reality of the situation, is that Apple is one of likely thousands of entities with design patents that include a claim for rounded corners. That's because those design patents aren't just making a claim for rounded corners. They're for rounded corners + a long list of additional claims that makes each of those products uniquely identifiable as the product they are. In the case of the iPhone 5 series, the design patent was for something along the lines of rounded corners + chamfered edges + aluminum trim + flat glass front + aluminum back + no adornment on the front + some other stuff I'm forgetting. I've seen a similar design patent filed by Samsung that covers some of their phones, and, as you'd expect, rounded corners were included in their list of claims as well. Again, each claim is considered alongside the other claims, rather than independently of the other claims, and for a competitor to be infringing, they need to be infringing against not just one of the claims, but against many or all of them. After all, rounded corners do not an iPhone make.
In the end, I'm just disappointed that there's a cadre of Slashdotters who appear to be willfully phrasing it as they do so as to confuse the issue, since in most subjects we discuss here, the commenters are seeking the truth of the situation. Unfortunately, when it comes to discussions that elicit fanboy-ish responses, they would rather seek out phrasings that help suit their narrative, rather than accurately convey the facts as they are.