Patent Troll VirnetX Awarded $626M In Damages From Apple (arstechnica.com)

Tackhead writes: Having won a $200M judgement against Microsoft in 2010, lost a $258M appeal against Cisco in 2013, and having beaten Apple for $368M in 2012, only to see the verdict overturned in 2014, patent troll VirnetX is back in the news, having been awarded $626M in damages arising from the 2012 Facetime patent infringement case against Apple.

Comments

Require that patents be defended

[spork invasion]

Some of the problems with software patents could be solved with an idea from trademarks. Require that patents be defended or else they're lost. This wouldn't affect companies that legitimately do research, develop patents, and license the patents. One criticism would be that this favors big companies who have the ability to defend their patents at the expense of individuals and small businesses who don't have those resources. I don't think the criticism is valid because the playing field is already tilted very much in favor of big corporations and because law firms would market to inventors to help defend their patents in exchange for a share of the royalties. A legitimate patent is valuable enough that an inventor won't have a hard time finding legal representation to help defend it. This would squash the tactics of patent trolls and reduce the patent wars between big companies like Apple vs. Samsumg.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[greenfruitsalad]

instead of defend, it should be 'use'. unused patent just stifles innovation. you wanna keep it, use it.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[thegarbz]

That devalues the concept of an idea and intellectual property on the whole.

Not that I think that's a bad idea, just that it would result in a fundamental change to how modern civilisation works.

Hmm I should patent the concept.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[JaredOfEuropa]

That doesn't solve anything, this isn't just about submarine patents. As soon as a patent troll is awarded their patent on "Activity X that has been practised for millennia, but on the Internet", they can start "defending" it by having their lawyer sent letters to any infringing party who started using it after the application was filed.

Maybe we shouldn't have software patents at all, nor award patents on stupid, trivial stuff. Or, since it is rather hard to define exactly what is trivial and what isn't, we could adjust the duration of a patent instead. Invest a few billion in discovering a new medicine, and yeah maybe you deserve a couple of patents with a long validity. Spend a few million on a think tank to come up with good ideas, and you'd deserve some patents with a duration that depends on how good those ideas are. Be the first to come up with a clever little algo in the course of your normal work, and maybe you ought to get a patent as well even if it's for something more or less "obvious to someone skilled in the arts"... but only one valid for a few years.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[Anonymous Coward]

The concept of intellectual property is just a sick idea of the lawyer class to tap the wealth of innovation... at the cost of others.

Everyone worth her salt is standing on the shoulders of giants, and *knowing* it. I owe far more to Galileo and Newton and Leibnitz than I owe to Apple or Samsung or Microsoft.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[Tom]

Most patents on software are fundamentally wrong the way they are being issued.

A patent should be about your brilliant invention of how to do something, in detail, that nobody else could figure out. It should not be about what to do, without any details on the how.

The patent on the steam engine did not read "a machine that produces torque". Everyone could see that such a machine would be useful, the devil is in figuring out how to build it. But a lot of software (and design) patents are of the "a button that makes you do this cool thing" kind. They leave out the actual technical details, which is why they are so broad and abusable.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[greenfruitsalad]

developing and licensing is using the patent. as you said, trolls simply wait for others to encroach. that's a completely wrong approach.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[spork invasion]

As one of the other replies noted, utility patents should be about how to do something, not what to do. I don't really think articles of manufacture and compositions of matter apply to software. However, the categories of processes and machines seem to do so. If you design a unique and novel algorithm to do something useful, that seems to qualify as a process. Putting algorithms together in a truly unique and novel way would seem to qualify as a machine. As long as you're patenting how to actually accomplish something rather than patenting the outcome, it seems reasonable to me. I agree that the length of patents is an issue, but I don't think it's easy to say that one patent is more novel than another, thus deserving longer protection. However, the term of 20 years from the earliest filing is probably not appropriate in some sectors. The reason a longer patent on a drug (a composition of matter) makes sense is because of the regulatory hurdles that have to be cleared before bringing a drug to production. On the other hand, 20 years in the software industry is an eternity and is much too long. I'd say that a drug deserves a patent from 17 years from the date of issuance. A software patent, however, might only deserve three or four years from the date of issuance. It really depends on the sector, the pace of innovation, and the time it takes to bring an idea to market. I recognize that software is unique in that, aside from bandwidth or distribution media, the cost of production is essentially flat regardless of how much is produced. That's what enables the free (as in beer) model for software that really isn't viable for anything with a physical product. Of course, that's a problem for paying royalties that are typically per-product. I get why people call for eliminating software patents, but the consequence of that is to provide less incentive to conduct research. I can't think of a good way to simultaneously avoid both problems.

Re: Require that patents be defended

[O('_')O_Bush]

They aren't patenting the math, they are patenting the idea. If you wanna get really hand wavy about it, everything is just math.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[ILongForDarkness]

So what? If your expertise isn't running a manufacturing company/marketing department but you spend your time coming up with good ideas that someone else can use to do so, why should you work for free? Are you saying working with your hands/mouth is more valuable than working with your mind?

Re:Require that patents be defended

[mwvdlee]

Patents were created to benefit the public, not the inventor.
The value of patents is in the sharing of inventions for public use, the cost of patents is a period of protection given to the inventor.
Requiring inventions to be used by the patent owner or else allow use by the public seems perfectly in line with the concept of patents.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[Applehu Akbar]

"Patents were created to benefit the public, not the inventor."

Patents gave investors a monopoly of specified term on use of the idea. What they vitally gave to the public was revelation of method. Before patent was invented, innovators simply kept their ideas secret for as long as possible. The Murano glassmakers kept their advantage in the market for centuries by having their own staff of ninjas fan out across Europe, killing off anyone else who used their methods.

With the coming of industry, trade secret became unwieldy and was replaced by patent.

Re: Require that patents be defended

[gstoddart]

You're not supposed to be able to patent an idea, you're only supposed to be able to patent an invention ... far too many patents are really little more than the idea of "doing something kinda like this".

So many of them describe a concept already in use, or which is exactly the same in the physical world ... but digital.

And then seemingly it becomes a magic device whereby you can claim that "a system and methodology for doing something which is commonplace, but involves a computer and a network" is a unique invention.

In the many years I've been aware of software patents, the ones I've seen more or less boil down to software analogs of things we've already seen, and stuff many of us would have learned in a CS degree (and which was already common practice).

Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.

Re:Require that patents be defended

[Kartu]

If your expertise isn't running a manufacturing company and you are developing software (as I am) you don't need patents either.
In fact, patent shit is an obstacle for me, with legal department going on "OMG open source, PATENT ALARM" every now and then.
(they do have a point, when you buy commercial stuff, if it infridges, it's seller's problem, kind of "troll protection")

Let me put it this way: there is NO "multi million investment" into actual software that benefits from software patents.

Most of US hardware patents are not valid in EU, yet no bad impact noticed so far, on the contrary, no "troll took on company X" stories in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Require that patents be defended

[8086]

Then you just write it in fancy sounding bullshit, and pass it off as a unique invention -- and the morons at the patent office, whose only real criteria is if the checks clear, will rubber stamp it and suddenly you have a patent.

To a great degree this is actually true. The patent officers don't care about the checks that much, though. It just creates a lot of work for them when they reject a patent claim and the lawyers of the people applying for the patent, i.e. prosecuting (that's the technical term) it prove them wrong and get their rejections overturned. It also shows badly on the record of the patent officer if their rejections tend to not hold up. The lawyers usually have more resources and motivation to make the patent pass through. So, the patent clerks tend to take the path of least resistance, i.e. approving the patents after doing their due diligence. Patent officers have a pre defined set of databases(including scientific journals, previous patents, etc) that they look through for prior art, and they don't look outside of that set (for example on Google) to find out if an idea is original. There is a fair amount of screening that goes into granting a patent for sure, and they don't just stamp anything. But they will stamp anything as long as their asses are covered. And they are really tiny asses that don't need a whole lot of cover.

Now when you bring up a case in court to invalidate somebody else's patent, that's when your lawyers will do all the google searches and thorough research to show that the invention was publicly known before the patent was granted. This research would go in front of a judge who will most likely rule in favor of whoever hired the bigger guns.

The problem with ideas in software (as opposed to, say, chemistry) is that they are generated far too quickly and anonymously to be included in formal databases and journals, even though they may be publicly known. I'll give you a rough example. Around the year 1998, you could use a plugin in Winamp called Geiss that showed trippy visualizations of music. Before that plugin (correct me if I'm wrong), music visualization was mostly just fancy waveforms. Apple lifted this idea wholesale and made it part of iTunes in 2001. Sony patented this idea in 2009. Poor Mr. Geiss got diddly squat for his invention, even though millions or even billions have probably used it till date, and his idea got patented more than a decade after conception. Such is the state of affairs: big tech companies go out and patent ideas that they learn from the general public. If the idea's implementation takes off, the patent provides them security, and if it doesn't, it's a bargaining chip to gouge money from anyone that tries to use the idea.

Regarding the patenting of ideas versus inventions, in theory you can only patent inventions, but the definition of what constitutes an invention is very lax, especially for software, and you don't have to go and show a working proof of concept to a patent officer. If the patent application describes the software in enough detail so as to allow an average programmer to develop it based on just the description, it's good enough to qualify. In other words, you can pretty much patent a piece of software at the requirements and architecture stage.

East Texas patent troll capitol of america ..

[tetraverse]

'East Texas is known for its Piney Woods, Caddo Lake, maybe for sweet potatoes. It’s also the patent lawsuit capitol of the country. More patent infringement cases are brought to Eastern District courts than anywhere else. There’s pressure to root out the so-called “patent trolls”.' ref

Re:East Texas patent troll capitol of america ..

[TheDarkMaster]

We can nuke East Texas?

Re:East Texas patent troll capitol of america ..

[TheDarkMaster]

Okay, serious now. Why this particular district is so popular for patent trolls? Easy to bought corrupt judges? Or too stupid judge to realize the malicious intent of the troll? Both?

Re:East Texas patent troll capitol of america ..

[gander666]

Okay, serious now. Why this particular district is so popular for patent trolls? Easy to bought corrupt judges? Or too stupid judge to realize the malicious intent of the troll? Both?

I can answer this, having been through the wringer wrought by a patent troll.

• It has the appropriate US district court presence. This is pretty important, as patent infringement cases are brought to a US district court.
• It is an area that has a mediocre pool of jurors. Not highly educated, not too ignorant, but enough to be dangerous.
• It is really really hard to get to. You fly into College Station and drive hours east, or into Louisiana and drive hours west. Yes, this is part of the patent troll modus operandi. Make it super inconvenient for the players to get to. Look it up in google maps, and see.
• Back to the jurors, the pool is made of people who are at the bottom of the middle class or close to poverty. They view big companies as deceitful, and the bad guys. The patent trolls' lawyers play on this David vs. Goliath, and the jurors love having the power to put the hurt on.

Almost all the major patent toll companies have a small presence in the county, so as to be able to file and force the suit to go through Marshall Texas.

The 12 hours I was deposed was probably the worst 12 hours of my life, and the 30 days of rigorous prep I had to do beforehand was just awful.

Re:Karma

[GuB-42]

Do you love patent trolls or do you just want to hurt Apple so much?
Like it or not, Apple actually makes good products, maybe they are overpriced, maybe they don't fit your expectations but there is no denying they have some technical merit. And while I would like them to lose against another innovative company or for consumer rights there is no way I want them to lose against a company whose whole purpose is to exploit the patent system for personal profit without contributing anything meaningful.

Greed. The oldest profession

[geekmux]

Only in America can "Patent Troll" become a legal multi-billion dollar industry, and yet prostitution remains illegal.

How ironic, since both are in the business of fucking people.

America 101

[theprophetof sarcasm]

Isn't this really just what America is all about? It's partly capitalism 101 and stealing from others. That's what America was built on, who are we to judge the methods of how one earns their living?

Crap patents.

[sabbede]

There's nothing there! Just load balancing and some early attempt at DNSSEC. If they have a case against anyone (not that the patents are really valid), it's Microsoft for Active Directory - secure internal DNS with a portal to the internet. Except of course that those two patents specify the use of non-standard TLD's.

And somehow I doubt that facetime uses server names like facetime.apple.scom. Case should have been tossed on those grounds alone.

Re:Fuck VirnetX

[jsepeta]

Why can 't we encourage psychopaths like antiabortionists to engage in violent acts against patent trolls? Let them fear for their lives.

They'd rather pay than play

[WOOFYGOOFY]

The fact that M$ and Oracle and IBM and all the rest of the "victims" of "trolls" would rather pay the trolls than do what is intellectually ethcially and morally right- lobby Congress to ban software patents (and yes trolls, those ARE a definable thing) tells you something. They'd rather endure the billions lost to trolls than have to compete in the open marketplace, without their trivial patents. If they didn't have this barrier to entrance and the threat of crushing legal judgements, then they'd have to compete on the basis of the goodness of their product offerings.

Obviously, such a "disaster" is monetarily more frigthening to them than losing to billions to trolls.

It gives you some idea of the amount of market supression and concomitant loss of innovation the consumer is experiencing without ever knowing it.

Believe me, lot's of "agreements to be acquired" by small companies are in reality software-patent blackmail- you can sell us your comapny, or we can go to court.

It how they make sure that all innovation accrues to them, and they retain all real financial and political power in the world.