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.

Comments

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

[serviscope_minor]

I'm generally pretty against patents.

However, I love seeing bad things happen to bad people, especially if it's ironic punishment. Yeah patents should probably be scrapped, but anyone who tries to patent rounded courners and then sues deserves to lose patent lawsuits.

Re:Live by the sword, die by the sword.

[serviscope_minor]

such as the concept of an integrated app store

You mean like Cydia: the first app store for the iPhone? Fun fact it was available via a jailbreak before apple launched an app store.

I'm not sure why they bothered with superficial patents on things like the shape of the device's packaging

Because they're not much of an innovator. This is not a troll. They've never been terribly good at inventing brand new things. What they do very well, arguably better than anyone else is taking a bunch of existing but not very popular technologies and producing an implementation which doesn't massively suck before anyone else.

I don't believbe I'm doing them a disservice with that, doing such a thing is clearly very hard else they wouldn't be the first people to do it after others have tried and failed. But it's not generally protectable with patents.

In actual fact, I think claiming Apple has made innovations where they haven't is actually doing them a disservice because it detracts from what they are uniquely good at.

Look at the history of things they're well known for:

The iPod: the canonical MP3 player. Not the first, afterall we know it had no wireless and less space than the Nomad (lame!) but by far the most popular and became synonymous with MP player. Due in large part because all the ones before had horrendous interfaces and other awful misfeatures.

Smartphones: IBM invented the concept of the toucscreen only phone in 1993. Nokia had this device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... AT&T pretty much nailed the real concept of a smartphone http://www.xorl.org/people/njh... as one might recognise it with a decent UI and apps, except it needed a remote application server, too much connectivity and generally the tech wasn't up to it in 1998. Heck, they weren't even the first to put multitouch on a phone. What they did was combine all those elements in a way which didn't suck.

And so on.

Jury competence?

[bradley13]

This is a very technical patent having to do with prediction. Not predicting branches, but predicting data. It might even be valid - I haven't kept up with processor architecture for too long. The gigantic question is: given the state of the art at the time this patent was filed, is it a logical extension obvious to a person "skilled in the art". That would be a very tough question to answer, even for an expert in the field.

Just how is a jury of non-technical people supposed to figure this out?

I'm sure they will have heard from Apple's experts: "This is obvious, a kid could figure it out", and the university's experts: "wow, what a clever invention". How will they have judged and compared these expert opinions? Their charisma? Their hairstyle?

The whole patent system is one gigantic disaster. Even for potentially valid patents, the process is just wrong.

Paging Governor Walker

[overshoot]

Here's a nice windfall for the Job Creators of Wisconsin. This may be as much as another $800 million you can cut from University funding.

Re:Love that this is modded troll

[gstoddart]

Is it trolling or flamebait to point that large companies are constantly suing one another over patents which mostly seem obvious to us, and that it's about time one of them came up short?

I don't care if you're a Microsoft fanboi, an Apple fanboi, a Google fanboi, or a Samsung fanboi ... these patents and the lawsuits which stem from them more or less amount of a bunch of multi-billion dollar corporations carving up the industry and making sure nobody else can get into the game.

Patents are probably doing more to stifle innovation that foster it, precisely because they all patent even the smallest thing to have in their war chest.

Honestly, seeing the big players getting screwed in patent lawsuits gives me hope at some point they'll all wise up and start pushing for patent reform themselves.

Because as long as it's a stacked deck which makes them huge amounts of money, they have no interest in things ever changing. If the only way for things to change is by costing these guys a bunch of money, bring it on.

Re: You are joking, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah, 800 million dollars is nothing. You fucking idiot."

They have $212 billion that they can't figure out what to do with. Otherwise it wouldn't be in the bank.

And that's *Mister* fucking idiot to you.

$823 Million ... 0.4% of Apple's cash on hand

[enjar]

Apple has somewhere around $200 billion in cash. If they have to pay $823 million they still will have around $200 billion in cash.

If you buy something for around $200, do you care if it's $200 or $200.80? Do you really miss the extra 0.80?

University patents funded by the public

[laughingskeptic]

These university patents are paid for by the tax-paying public, why does this no longer make them public domain?