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Apple Sued Over iPhones Making Calls, Sending Email (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: A company that seemingly does nothing but license patents or, if necessary, sue other companies to get royalties, has taken aim at Apple. But here's the kicker: the lawsuit alleges that Apple's last several iPhones and iPads violate a slew of patents related to seemingly standard features, including the ability to place calls as well as sending and receiving emails. A total of six patent infringement claims were brought against Apple by Corydoras Technologies on May 20, according to Apple-tracking site Patently Apple, which obtained a copy of the lawsuit. According to Patently Apple, the counts against Apple cover every iPhone dating back to the iPhone 4 and every iPad dating back to the iPad 2. In addition to taking issue with Apple's devices placing calls, the lawsuits also allege that the tech giant violates patents Corydoras holds related to video calling, which is similar to Apple's FaceTime, as well as displaying a person's geographic location through a feature like Find My iPhone and the ability to block unwanted calls. Last year, Apple was ordered to pay $533 million to Smartflash LLC for allegedly violating three patents related to copy protection.
an iphone can make calls? no fucking way! i don't think i've ever seen my sister or her kid make a call on theirs.
They should be abolished. Patent trolls aren't the problem, if patent trolls get banned they will buy fake businesses and sell ten manually made phones for 6k$ each.
The more stupid patent lawsuits we have, the more likely we will see patent reform.
Right now, none of the big guys want patent reform, because it helps them keep down competitors, and some of them make a good chunk of money from it. If we want to see patent reform, then they're going to have to start hurting. Bring on the patent trolls, I say!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I say outright get rid of software patents: the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. Most new software ideas are created in the act of making a specific product, not mass general research labs of the kind Edison used. This means that the ideas would be created anyhow even without the royalty incentives.
And most don't bother to mine existing patents for new ideas because most are vague, obvious, or trivial junk, often filed for defensive or legal ammunition reasons.
Thus, the two main reasons for patents: incentives and publicizing ideas, are mostly moot these days. For every good software patent, I bet there are at least 10 junk patents.
Patents can join H-1B visas in the high abuse-to-legitimacy ratio: a game played by and for big biz to stay big at the expense of everybody else.
Table-ized A.I.
In 1967 one of the ways Canada celebrated its centenary was to hold an exposition called Expo 67. I can remember being there as a kid and being entranced by something that looked like it was from the future. It had a keyboard, a telephone handset and a ~10" black and white screen. You could talk to and see the person on the other side of the hall who was sitting at a similar device. According to Bell Canada it was coming "real soon now".
Remember though that in the past you had to actually show a model of your invention, and have a patent inspector pass on it. Meaning that you had done some non-trivial amount of work first, you had the idea and also the means to demonstrate the idea, and now needed time to get manufacturing up and running. Today the patent inspectors just rubber stamp everything, no one needs a working model, or even a non-working model. That's what's broken.
The limited time for exclusive access was very useful in the past. That is, if you think that supporting the little guy versus the large conglomerate is useful for society. The actual purpose of patents originally was not to lock everything out from everyone else, instead the purpose was to make the patent free and open once the time period expired. Before patents inventions were kept locked up and controlled, guilds were formed to protect the secrets, and so forth.
The patent term was long enough to get up and running and get into a competitive position before the rest of the world started making copies (but long enough to be more lucrative than hoarding the invention). Twenty years was also a very short period in the past, it just seems extremely long today because people are rushing new crap out as fast as they can and planned obsolescence is the status quo.
I guess theoretically we could crack down on them with the laws we have now. First you'd have to start by granting fewer BS patents, which means hiring more and better patent examiners. Then you'd have to go after people who falsify stuff, including skipping over obvious cases of prior art.
The reason this remains a problem is that we don't have enough interest in using the laws we already have, much less making any new ones. Until we start electing people who want to do something about this we all have to live in a world where there are BS legal impediments to creating and bringing new products to market. It doesn't matter when it's a company like Apple, which has the resources to defend itself; the chilling effect is much greater on smaller companies. Which is why it politically is allowed to continue existing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Patent trolling is the motherfucker of invention.
Anyone else notice the company is NAMED for a species of bottom-feeding catfish?
Otherwise I could just file a patent for a time machine. Now no one can create a time machine in the next twenty years without my permission.
They'll just travel back in time and either (a) create prior art and/or (b) file a patent before you - the results will likely be paradoxical.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The courts defer to the patent office. The patent office uses a rubber stamp and expects the courts to sort it out.
Sloth, stupidity. No knowledge of computers. What we need is a last gasp of this crap, with companies who are sued for ridiculous mundane stuff like this to sue the patent office for frivolous and bad patents. Though I dunno if you can sue the USPO
Can you file a patent for issuing patents? Would the uspo have thought to do that? Get that, then sue them for patent infringement on issuing patents in the most frivolous case ever.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Jurors in Texas are stupid. There, I said it. Many patent trolls are located in Texas and they all prefer to file in Texas courts, since idiot juries reliably award them millions. "Your website uses usernames and passwords to log in? Why didn't you get a license from this here local Texas firm that invented that idea? Pay up now, the law is the law!" Remember that John Oliver story on patents? Samsung actually built a public outdoor ice skating rink in Marshall, TX because they're so terrified of the juries there. Apple was ordered by a Texas jury to pay a half billion dollars to a troll who held a patent on the concept of copy protection. I hate Samsung and Apple, I hate copy protection, but Texas is worse than both of them put together.
Is it me, or do these patents just sound like "take these previously invented things and put them together". Combinations of things that already have been invented should not be patent-able. On top of that, I'd live to put a very short statute of limitations on filing claims like these. You have 6 months from the time the item was publicly released on the market. That's it. No waiting about for years so you can claim larger infringement.