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.

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

[serviscope_minor]

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.

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

[Anubis IV]

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.

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:Better coverage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I've done CPU design. I'm not a professional, but I'm definitely familiar with it. The amazing thing about a lot of CPU innovations is, once thought up, they seem incredibly obvious. But you get somebody holding your hand and you're trying to think of what they did before they flat out tell you, and it usually only dawns on you about 1 or 2 steps before they flat out tell you.

Just because something seems obvious once you've been told about it, doesn't mean it was obvious.