'Corporate Troll' Wins $3 Million Verdict Against Apple For Ring-Silencing Patent (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A non-practicing entity called MobileMedia Ideas LLC won a patent lawsuit against Apple today, with a Delaware federal jury finding that Apple should pay $3 million for infringing MobileMedia's patent RE39,231, which relates to ring-silencing features on mobile phones. MobileMedia is an unusual example of the kind of pure patent-licensing entity often derided as a "patent troll." It is majority-owned by MPEG-LA, a patent pool that licenses common digital video technologies like H-264, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Minority stakes in MobileMedia are owned by Sony and Nokia, which both contributed the patents owned by the company. MobileMedia also has the same CEO as MPEG-LA, Larry Horn. The battle ended up being a long one, as MobileMedia first filed the case in 2010. It went to trial in 2012, and the jury found that Apple infringed three patents. After reviewing post-trial motions, the judge knocked out some, but not all, of the infringed patent claims. Then came an appeal in which a panel of Federal Circuit judges upheld (PDF) some of the lower court's judges and overturned others. A $3 million verdict is hardly going to make an impact on Apple, and it doesn't represent a huge win for MobileMedia, which was reportedly seeking $18 million in royalties from the trial. Still, getting a verdict in its favor does represent some validation of MobileMedia's business model, which was a striking example of technology corporations using the "patent troll" business model as a kind of proxy war. Nokia and Sony were able to use MobileMedia and the licensing talent at MPEG-LA to wage a patent attack on Apple without engaging directly in court. In all, after years of back-and-forth, the ring-silencing patent was the one that MobileMedia had left. While Apple didn't win the case against one of the first "corporate trolls," it was able to severely pare down the scale of the attack and show that it's willing to fight a long legal war of attrition to make its point.

Comments

This means that

[Anonymous Coward]

for this article, only troll comments are on topic.

Re:This means that

[GeekWithAKnife]

No. Only your mother is on topic.

*runs away giggling*

Re:This means that

[penguinoid]

Patent trolls? I call them "patent reform activists".

Delaware?

[XxtraLarGe]

Wait, this didn't happen in Texas?!?

Re:Delaware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Delaware has no or low taxes for most business stuff so many companies cook the books so they can use Delaware to do whatever bullshit they're trying to do to avoid paying taxes. Therefore it's not uncommon to see legal cases pop up there.

Re:Delaware?

[locotx]

Wow, I too thought it was the Texas patent-troll company !

Live by/Die by

[Anonymous Coward]

Bye-bye!

Re:Live by/Die by

[Plumpaquatsch]

Bye-bye!

Yeah, those three million dollars are going to kill Apple. No wait, they made that much while I wrote this.

Re:Live by/Die by

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if Apple invested the specific amount of money it lost so far in court or on fines, in some basic little changes to its shitty hardware; like the antenna shit on the iPhone 4, move the exhaust ports from blowing into adhesive holding the old Airs together, the relatively small cause of touch disease, and various other crap problems with their hardware over the years,
i'd suspect that Apple would be making much much more money than you are thinking of on account of less people leaving it when they figure out that Apple is no better than other companies and actually gives less shit about users than other companies.

Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pretty obvious. God, patents in this country are terrible.

Re:Obvious

[kamakazi]

If it is really obvious then where is the prior art?
Telephones are a couple years old now, and the ring silencer has been around for just about as long. In fact the old mechanical bell phones had ring volume control that just adjusted clapper/bell distance. However the patent in question is for a 1 time mute, you push the button and that call is muted but future calls are not. Even when land lines were all we had people would silence the ringer, then miss calls because they forgot to unsilence it.

Just because an idea is obvious in the sense of "Why didn't I think of that" after the patent is issued does not mean the patent fails the obviousness test.

I am fairly anti-patent, feeling that patent life needs to be strictly limited, and vague concepts should not be patentable, but this one has some merit. In fact, I am sitting here pondering how to implement a 1 call ring mute in an old mechanical analog phone, and it isn't obvious to me how to accomplish that.

In a cell phone context a call exists as an entity, in the analog world a ring is a singular event, going back to the days when a human operator cranked the handle and you had to count rings to know it was your call.

I suppose you could use a mechanical timer, that disengaged the bell clapper for a period of time. The first thought would be a clockwork snail type counter, but you never know how many rings comprise a call, so it would have to be a timer. It would at best be a guess, because it is entirely up to the caller how long to let the phone ring.

  I recall in my younger years calling a friend who didn't want to talk and just letting the phone ring for minutes at a time. However he responded by just going off hook, and the phone switch would not release the line until both ends went on hook, so I annoyed him for a few minutes, but he took our phone offline for the whole evening.

Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to take a side I don't recall taking on the patent question before, and to recall a simpler time from my youth.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

GP here. Maybe you are right. That's a pretty good argument. I do think that phone off the hook sends a very different message than phone still ringing, but no one is listening. This patent is all about the latter. It is a way to ignore a ring (by silencing) without sending the signal to the other party that you are doing it. But you make a great point: this could have been implemented on dumb phones years prior. But, you have to admit that the only reason it became a reality is that, when the phone is made up of software, it's an almost no-cost feature. It's low risk; it's easy. But, if you need additional hardware, it could be a lack of market desire that led to the lack of prior art. Just because there is no prior art does not mean it isn't obvious. That's partly the problem with patents. Maybe every other phone maker thought about this feature, but thought it wasn't worth the effort (or, in the case of old phones, the additional hardware cost).

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is really obvious then where is the prior art?

The big patent lie; that non-obviousness is the only reason why there's no prior art.

There are a host of reasons why something might not be done and you're not even trying if you can't think of a few yourself.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to call it a call reject button.
http://community.polycom.com/t5/VoIP/Soundpoint-IP501-reject-button-does-not-work-as-expected/td-p/5817
There is the first hit I found, from 2011. I know they existed in the 90's, probably the 80's and 70's too. So this is a classic example of "common feature, but on a new thing".

I could theoretically file a thousand patents for "burning fuel" in an engine between N and N+1 cubic inches, for N=1..1000.
Sure, the existing engine size patents could be defeated, but if there is no 469"? That's mine, for twenty years.

Hello, I could patent making a call on an iPhone 8 right now - there is no prior art bc it doesn't exist. So its "novel".

Re:Obvious

[tomhath]

If it is really obvious then where is the prior art?

It was first filed something like 20 years ago. Not many smart phones handled incoming calls and other notifications back then so prior art would be a surprise.

I'd call it a good UI design, but obvious to someone skilled in the art. Phone makes two sounds at the same time? Suppress the one that's less important. Duh.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

There were mute buttons well before cell phones. The only difference is that this is "on a computer". This is trivially stupidly easy and should never have been given a patent. It's just a freaking circuit disconnect to the speaker.

Re:Obvious

[macs4all]

I am fairly anti-patent, feeling that patent life needs to be strictly limited, and vague concepts should not be patentable, but this one has some merit. In fact, I am sitting here pondering how to implement a 1 call ring mute in an old mechanical analog phone, and it isn't obvious to me how to accomplish that.

Kinda depends on how far you want to go back in phone-time.

If you are talking about recent times (but let's say before microcontrollers), you could do it with a retriggerable monostable multivibrator (either as an IC, or with discrete components), with Edge-sensitive trigger. The 70 VAC ring voltage would be rectified, but not filtered (but probably voltage-divided) and would be presented to one side of a momentary, normally-open push button switch. This would be applied to the edge-sensitive "trigger" input of the monostable (we will pretend that the "rise time" of the "edge" doesn't matter, or we can use something like a backwards-connected zener diode to produce a crisper "edge"). The timeout of the monostable would be set so that it was about twice as long as a single ring "burst". The output of the monostable would be hooked up to the coil of a small DC relay, and the normally CLOSED contacts of the relay would be connected to the 70VAC ring signal and the bell, so the bell has to get its ring-voltage through those N.C. Contacts. The Normally OPEN Relay contacts are wired across the "mute" button.

When the call comes in that you wish to silence, you simply press the button. This triggers the monostable. The relay is then energized, which simultaneously disconnects the bell from the ring-signal, while simultaneously letting the rectified ring signal "pulses" continue to get to the Trigger input of the monostable, keeping the relay energized, and thus the bell remains quiet for as long as the ring "bursts" keep coming.

When the caller gives up, the monostable times-out, and the relay de-energizes. The bell then gets reconnected to the ring-signal, readying the phone for the next call.

For an even older phone, the role of the monostable could be replaced with a mechanical time-delay relay, and the rest of the circuit stays relatively the same.

There are actually a bunch of ways it could be done. Those are just two of them...

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds to me like the snooze button on an alarm clock. There is a noise.... silence it... Smoke detector.... silence it.... if there is danger it will still ring. Just because you didn't think of it does not mean it was not obvious.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to call it a call reject button.
http://community.polycom.com/t...
There is the first hit I found, from 2011. I know they existed in the 90's, probably the 80's and 70's too. So this is a classic example of "common feature, but on a new thing".

I could theoretically file a thousand patents for "burning fuel" in an engine between N and N+1 cubic inches, for N=1..1000.
Sure, the existing engine size patents could be defeated, but if there is no 469"? That's mine, for twenty years.

Hello, I could patent making a call on an iPhone 8 right now - there is no prior art bc it doesn't exist. So its "novel".

Obviousness is not as simple as you suggest. Your patents on different engine sizes would likely fail from obviousness because it would be obvious to scale an engine upward or downward in size to meet varying requirements of fuel consumption or maximum power. Nor could you patent anything about an iPhone 8 simply by its name.

Re:Obvious

[Dog-Cow]

The thing with hardware patents is that it's no the idea which is patented, it is the implementation. With software patents, it's the idea itself which is patented. With hardware patents, a working model or a description detailed enough to allow another practitioner to recreate the mechanism is required. Software patents don't even require a working binary.

There is no way to defend the ethics of software patents. The iPhone does not silence the ringer via a mechanical mechanism. The button press is a trigger, but the silencing is done by software. Unless this Troll has access to source code which demonstrates that Apple uses the exact same method that was patented (as if software patents ever do that; see above), the case should have been thrown out.

Re: Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

The patent says 2001. My first cell phone, a Motorola RAZR, had this feature in 2003 and I'd be willing to bet it wasn't Motorola's first phone with that feature.

Most people didn't know it, but pushing either volume button would silence the ring for the current call.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I will almost guarantee that this exists on the Nortel DMS switch. It has bazillions of features like that.

But you are just plain wrong anyway. Even if it did exist on the DMS switch, it would not be prior art because the patent is on the implementation, not the idea. The test for obviousness is to a normal practitioner. Is the implementation obvious to me? Well, I haven't looked at that patent, but I can think of several exceptionally obvious solutions on a modern cell phone.

And just for good measure, I'll help you out on the old style phone solution. The ring is triggered by dropping the voltage on the telephone line. It has worked like that for the better part of a century. To make the phone stop ringing, all you need to do is ensure the voltage does not drop for a certain time period. You may not have known this, but it's probably because you have never worked with old style telephones before. If you were normal practitioner then I assure you that nothing would be more obvious.

Certainly, if nobody has done this previously it's because nobody thought it was worth their while. In the old days telephone calls were important, you know. Again, without actually looking at the patent, I can't say if it is obvious or not, but I seriously can not conceive of any situation where this could be a valid patent.

Re:Obvious

[gstovall]

Yes, the enterprise desk phones I've used for the last 30 years have call ignore buttons. The newer ones (1990s) have softkeys with call ignore and call reject.

So yes, this feature has been on wired phones for decades.

Re: Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall a few years back a judge ruling that "on a computer" did not constitute enough change to warrant a patient. What did they change it to "on a smartphone" to get around that?

In the End

[lbmouse]

The only winners of a patent troll proxy war will be the lawyers.

Re:In the End

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the lawyers didn't win much off of this one. Three million dollars for six years worth of work? Split between how many people?

Re:In the End

[David_Hart]

Even the lawyers didn't win much off of this one. Three million dollars for six years worth of work? Split between how many people?

Six years of constant salary, fees, etc. and then a bonus at the end... Or do you believe in the Hollywood version where lawyers work on contingency just for the payout at the end?

Re: In the End

[Anonymous Coward]

How much actual *work*, though, and how many other cases did they service during the same period? $500,000 (assuming 6 attorneys involved, just out of my butt) isn't bad for 3 days work - even if it takes a while to get paid.

Apple part of MPEGLA

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is also a licensor in MPEGLA, so I guess it gets a cut...?

Poor innocent Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

...to make its point.

And what point was that? That it has enough cash on hand to put enough lawyers on a case to do whatever it wants?

Apple does easily enough dubious manipulation of the patent system and coercing its business rivals with questionable "innovations" as all "patent troll" companies combined.

Since you're suggesting a moral overarching framework which should call for a different evaluation than the legal decision, consider there's enough actual innovation in BSD, which by every definition but the legal one you're minimizing, Apple "stole"-- and the content there easily overrides every innovation Apple ever made, by a thousand-to-one margin. That being precisely why Apple took it and slapped the "OS/X" label on it. That co-opting is the primary reason that Apple is in business today--they tried to create their own viable OS, failed repeatedly to be competitive in their attempts, and thus stole one. That, and that specifically, is why they survived to have the enormous business wealth they now use to inhibit other companies through legal games no better than any other company you care to invoke.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[bluefoxlucid]

Apple's point is 14 years of licenses are more expensive than the past 5 years of licenses, and way more expensive than a half million dollars of lawyery when you're trying to hit them up for $18 million as it stands. What do you think infringement is? It means you're using the patent, which means the past 6 years of $18 million become the next 8 years of $24 million; that's $42 million, man.

Apple pared off $35 million in this defense. Going forward, those $3 million royalties will project to another $4 million over the next 8 years, unless Apple can negotiate lower royalties. Post-lawsuit, Apple's negotiating position has been severely trashed, with a Federal court telling them they're to pay up for this shit; and arguing about it for a while and then just refusing to pay puts them into the willful-infringement category, tripling back damages (i.e. $54 million instead of $18 million, and *then* another $24 million in the next 8 years).

There's basically no reason not to argue the lawsuit in court, unless the royalties are comparatively tiny.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[kamakazi]

You cannot steal BSD unless you remove attribution. This is exactly the holy war being fought by Stallman et.al. The BSD license specifically allows copying, modification, use, obfuscation and repressive licenses.

This is the great difference between the free licenses, and the one that makes BSD people call the GPL infectious. It is also probably the reason that Apple didn't even consider Linux for their OS.

In retrospect, I would rather have Mac OS in our environment than not, two competing closed operating systems is better than one, and Apple was never going to really have an open OS in spite of all their Darwin talk.

But disregarding philosophical wars Apple did not "steal" BSD.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

which by every definition but the legal one you're minimizing, Apple "stole"

I understand the legal aspects.

For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it, all the while using those profits for attempting to shut down free innovation coming from anyone else.

The answer there seems unquestionably "no".

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[kamakazi]

Don't get me wrong, I am not sticking up for Apple's morals in this argument.

I am coincidentally a Mac user, and as MacOS diverges from it's open BSD roots I come ever closer to ditching it, probably for Debian. Apple has consistently pushed MacOS further and further from the ideals which we attribute to Unix, programs that do one thing well, human readable config files, etc.

I think Apple took advantage of all the BSD hackers that built the foundation they stand on, but the "freedom" the BSD licenses stand for is the freedom that allows that exploitation. That particular ethos would rather allow the existence of parasites than limit any use at all of the software. There can be no "steal" when all are welcome to do as they see fit with the singular requirement to attribute.

In the GPL ethos there is indeed theft, because that freedom is one that strictly regulates the behaviour of the people who use the software, they are required to contribute if they release.

I am not going to judge in either direction, In my personal IT space I use FreeNAS and pfSense and Debian and MacOS. I don't use Windows, but not because of the eula. I don't use Windows beause it is a PITA to get it to do what I want, and every time you turn around I have to reboot the dumb thing for updates or leave it vulnerable to the attack of the week. In fact those same reasons are why I don't use Ubuntu and am considering changing my laptop from MacOS.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it

That seems to be the feature that BSD proponents like most. When you choose a BSD license, there is no restriction on what can be done with that code. That is exactly why they choose that license.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[imidan]

For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it, all the while using those profits for attempting to shut down free innovation coming from anyone else.

The answer there seems unquestionably "no".

I don't know how you came to that conclusion, but it's clearly incorrect. The developers didn't choose the BSD license on accident. I mean, the BSD license was invented for the BSD OS. The fact that commercialization of software released under the BSD license is allowed is not a flaw that they somehow overlooked, it is one of the major features of the license. The BSD license is similar to the CC-BY license, which Creative Commons also did not create by mistake.

Re: Poor innocent Apple

[hackwrench]

All I know is that most of the build tools out there need Apple's tools as part of the build setup in order to make binaries that run on Apple hardware, thus necessitating owning Apple hardware to give someone a binary that will run on their Apple computer while there are more options for cross-compilers to the Windows platform.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how you came to that conclusion, but it's clearly incorrect.

If it's clearly incorrect, cite some evidence of that fact.

I propose -nobody- who worked on BSD would have desired this scenario, and -nobody- would have contributed to it knowing it's eventual outcome and effect on free software per se.

Only a naive misconstruing of the likelihood of the primary "user" of their contributions being a rapacious megacorp, would create any compatibility with the altruistic social motivations with which the work was being done. Sorry, the only analogy I can think of regarding your stance is one of a date-rape apologist. There is philosophically no possible reason one with the objectives of free software could find Apple's co-opting of it and hypocritical further business activities acceptable. Feel free to post any actual evidence, e.g. an after-the-fact survey of those developers, to back your claim.

Re: Poor innocent Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in other words, you've got nothing.

You made the claim, you support it.

Re: Poor innocent Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the clearly most likely conclusion from applying basic logic.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[DavidRavenMoon]

If you really study macOS, and before that NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, you will see that it's not entirely BSD, and they didn't steal anything. NeXTSTEP was introduced in 1988s. And if you weren't hiding under a rock (or maybe you weren't born then?), you'd know that the first web browser and app store were created on NeXTSTEP. Plus, if you want to talk about Linux, Apple was a big supporter of Linux, and released MkLinux in 1996. I used to run it on my PowerMac 6100. It was sponsored by Apple Computer and OSF Research Institute.

They took parts of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Mach/BSD, since it runs on the Mach kernel. Windows NT and SUN Solaris also use BSD code.

The BSD License allows proprietary use and allows the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary products. So how did they steal anything? The parts they did use, they released as Darwin, which is open source, and is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects.

So where's the problem? They followed the BSD License, and give credit. You can see it when you boot macOS in verbose mode. And they released their modified code as open source. This includes things like WebKit.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[DavidRavenMoon]

It is also probably the reason that Apple didn't even consider Linux for their OS.

They went with NeXTSTEP, which was released three years before there ever was a Linux. And of course NeXT was Steve Job's baby.

They were concerning BeOS, which I always thought was an interesting operating system. A copy of it came with my PowerComputing Mac clone.

Re: Poor innocent Apple

[Dog-Cow]

You invented the axiom on which your "logic" is based. That makes your logic worthless.

Re:Poor innocent Apple

[imidan]

Projects that are licensed under BSD can switch to a more restrictive license at any time. The code already released under BSD would remain under BSD, but any new development would be under the new license. The fact that the BSD license has been revised several times and has never added any commercial constraint, and that the BSD developers have never adopted a different license for the project seem to indicate that they are comfortable with the lack of restrictions on commercial exploitation of their code. They were certainly aware that the license allowed for it.

As hard as it seems for you to believe, some people are happy to release code into the world with the knowledge that someday, someone else may profit from it. In my work, I release code that is licensed under CC-BY. If a business takes my code and incorporates it into one of their products and sells it, as long as they credit me, I have no issue with that: those are the terms of the license I chose. I'd prefer that they contribute to the code under the existing license, but I don't find it necessary to require that.

How is this patentable?

[tomhath]

In a communication terminal equipment and in a method of controlling call incoming, unnecessary noises in a period from the start of an alert sound to carrying out of the next operation can be reduced. When a predetermined operation is effected under the condition that an alert sound is ringing, the alert sound is stopped or the volume of the alert sound is reduced at least over a duration of call incoming.

Mute or reduce the volume of an alert while talking to someone on the phone?

Seriously?

Re:How is this patentable?

[cdrudge]

Actually, it's not when you're talking on the phone. It's muting or reducing the volume of the ringer for an incoming call, but performing a predetermined operation (aka pushing a button) just silences/reduces it. Performing said action does not affect the incoming call so the caller does not have the "unpleasant feeling" of being ignored, sent to voice mail, etc.

If an implementation silenced a call and immediately sent it to voice mail, then that would not be a violation of at least this patent (although there's probably a stupid patent for doing that too).

Re:How is this patentable?

[hey!]

According to the a Bell System technical bulletin dated September 4, 1978 the volume wheel on the C4A ringer can be adjusted, if the subscriber requests, to provide full cut-off. The C4A ringer is the same ringer used in Bell System subscriber phones since the 50s.

Google "ringers c type maintenance 501-250-303".

Re:How is this patentable?

[kamakazi]

I agree, that is why this patent is different. The ringer adjuster (which actually just adjusts the distance from the solenoid clapper to the bell) is for all incoming rings. The patent in question here silences the ring for a single call, and you don't have to remember to turn it back up if you want to hear the next ring.

I grew up with mechanical phones, I remember the annoyance of missed calls because the ringer was accidentally left silenced.

It is a little tedious to read the ESL the patent is written in, but I do not recall ever seeing a silence 1 call button on a phone.

I am also quite sure if there was prior art Apple woud have managed to unearth it in the years this case has dragged on.

Re:How is this patentable?

[marka63]

So you remembered being annoyed. You most probably also thought "wouldn't it be nice if it could reset it self automatically". That makes the concept obvious. So obvious that even some not skilled in the arts could think of it. Now how you achieve that may or not be obvious.

There is also the "will it being me enough extra sales" to be worth spending time you figure out how to do it.

It's much like how I shouldn't have to set the time on the gps to the local time. We have timezone databases. We have maps which describe the boundaries of a time zone and we have the current location. That gives you all you need to set the time on a gps to the local time.

Or wouldn't it be nice if the speed warning on gps's took into account school zone and hours of operation.

Or wouldn't it be nice if time of day turn restrictions could be taken into account when route planning.

The latter two really need the first to be implemented to be fully automated.

Are we going to get an update?

[Plumpaquatsch]

For all the other suits filed, e.g. against Samsung?

Apple is reinventing finance. Presenting iFinance.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when a double irish was when you DP'd a girl named Megan O'mally.

Universities

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to say that the patent system will never be reformed because the major universities are all patent trolls too; they litigate or license to troll entities like MobileMedia Ideas who then litigate true product developers.

if-then-else

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently basic functions are now patentable?

Next

[kqc7011]

And now the Appeal's start. Should be good for another 8 to 10 years.

Re:Next

[cdrudge]

Initial appeals had already started and finished. It stated as much in the summary and even linked to the Appeals Court judgement.

Re:Next

[Anonymous Coward]

From the same article...

The battle is likely not over, either. Most high-stakes tech patent cases are appealed to the Federal Circuit these days, and there's no reason to think that won't happen here.

FRRRRRRRP

[Hognoxious]

FRRRRRRRP! That's the noise my ring makes. Silence that, you asshats!

Re:FRRRRRRRP

[mjwx]

FRRRRRRRP! That's the noise my ring makes. Silence that, you asshats!

Mr Hognoxious,

I am hereby ordered to inform you that by the court of East Texas that your ring is in violation of patent number 2438938342 which is owned by our client, as such we are to, immediately and without condition, forcefully install this cork. Attempts to remove the cork will be met by severe fines or imprisonment.

Sincerley

A Hats,
Senior partner,
A, S and S Hats, attorneys at law.

Do ideas have value?

[mi]

We've been at each other's throats over these topics over the years. I'm going to try it one more time without injuring anyone with a dialogue. Well, not really a dialogue, because my opponent shall be imaginary. But I don't expect too many people to disagree with him:

Are ideas — pure ideas — valuable? That is, if you've thought of something interesting, are you a richer person, than you were right before that? Yes, they are valuable. Who is the owner of that value? Whoever thought of it! What if multiple people have thought of the same thing? Well, if it is so obvious, maybe, it really has no special value. Indeed, so let's stick to the non-obvious ideas. If multiple people think of the same non-obvious idea, I guess, it should belong to whichever one of them thought of it first. How would we know, which one them did? They will register their idea. Ok, once the ownership of the idea is established, what can be done with it? Something cool should be made based on it. By who? By the owner... But he is an inventor — not necessarily an entrepreneur. Ok, by the owner or whoever he sells/leases his idea to. At what price? At whatever they agree upon between themselves. So, an idea can be sold — like more tangible property? Yes! Can it then be resold, if the current owner no longer wants it? Yeah... Can it also be stolen then? Used by someone, who neither thought of it first nor purchased it from the inventor or an earlier buyer? Ok, yes, it pains me to admit it, but the term "theft" is not as inappropriate here as I once thought... Can the owner — be they the original inventor or someone who honestly purchased or inherited or otherwise legally obtained it — sue such a thief for damages? Yes, Ok, he can. But I'll still spit on him and call him names — such as "patent troll"! Profit!!

Re:Do ideas have value?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off, ya pretentious dweeb. Take your self righteous told-ya-so bullshit and go do something useful for society.

Re:Do ideas have value?

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying and selling ideas, having to do checks to make sure that no one has thought of an idea before, these things are completely non-value added for society. They are actually a negative in sum.

Re:Do ideas have value?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are ideas — pure ideas — valuable? That is, if you've thought of something interesting, are you a richer person, than you were right before that?

Yes, you are a richer person, in the same way that an individual who experiences the splendor of nature is enriched by that experience. That and $5 will buy you some Starbucks.

If multiple people think of the same non-obvious idea, I guess, it should belong to whichever one of them thought of it first.

But you just said if multiple people think of the same idea then it must not be that special? Are we just stringing together sentences here? I'm not sure whether Socrates would be proud of this abuse of the Socratic method.

Re:Do ideas have value?

[Anonymous Coward]

This ignores the main issue, as I see it, of many software technology patents, which is they seem to more about a general idea, vs an actual design. In a more tangible example, can I patent the idea of a brakes on a car vs patented the design of drum brakes? Can someone else patent the design of disk brakes? Does my drum brake patent let me sue the company using disk brakes for infringement?

Re:Do ideas have value?

[Anonymous Coward]

If multiple people think of the same non-obvious idea, it's not non-obvious any more is it?

Your logic jumped the shark early on and any thing following is invalid.

No matter how hard you want the world to believe it...

Re: Do ideas have value?

[hackwrench]

Not everything of value, maintains value once monetized.

Re:Do ideas have value?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shitposting is more of a 4chan thing. A love it too, but over there.

$3 million is just pocket change

[bfwebster]

Given that this case has gone on for six (6) years, a $3 million verdict probably won't even cover MobileMedia's legal fees (which, I suspect, the judge will not grant to them on top of the aware; it's unusual for the plaintiff/patent owner to get legal fees on top of damages in these cases). Patent litigation is very expensive, especially if you go to trial; I remember being staggered at what the cumulative per-hour billing rate must have been for one such trial where I testified as an expert. ..bruce..

Re:$3 million is just pocket change

[sl3xd]

It seems every patent troll thinks their patent should be worth billions of dollars. It also seems that some companies are deciding it is worth their dime to get the courts to evaluate an actual court-ordered value for the troll's patent, which is a fraction of anything the troll wants.

This time Troll has won a Pyrrhic victory.

Hopefully the trend will continue until trolls decide that a non-practicing entity suing over patents isn't a viable business model.

Re:$3 million is just pocket change

[Anonymous Coward]

but with apple its coming out of your pocket, not theirs

Apple's strategy should be to stall.

[RightSaidFred99]

When you're as big as Apple you can afford to make such lawsuits very expensive. It probably cost more than $3mil to litigate this case.

Apple, and other very wealthy companies, should in these cases just use every means to delay, stall, and in general make the trial as expensive as possible. They will pay more as well, of course, but it discourages others and will reduce such cases in the future.

If hemorrhaging $ is validating a business model..

[Anonymous Coward]

> Still, getting a verdict in its favor does represent some validation of MobileMedia's business model

$3mil victory, after 6 years in court. After lawyer's fees, they probably came out as a negative ROI. Even if they were able to eek out a slim margin above the lawyers' fees, they would then split that between a bunch of partial owners. I don't think Sony will notice the $5 they won

Because in America

[Anonymous Coward]

It stands to show that if you work hard, be innovative, keep on believing and NEVER give up ... you too can acheive your dream, and bring a creation to life ... which someone will ultimately sue you for. THAT is the new American Way.

When trolls get trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

its hard to be sympathetic.

revolution

[bzipitidoo]

Oh, I think reform will happen, one way or another. Either we get busy bringing sanity back to our laws, or watch helplessly as the ever increasing corruption pushes us into doing a reboot. Revolutions clear away all kinds of bought laws.

So far, there isn't any political entity that hasn't eventually fallen. Their elites always push too far and beggar everyone else or push their state into overreach, or they get stuck in a rut, or they hold too dearly profoundly wrong or inferior ideas. Time and time again belligerents have lost despite numerical superiority, when the other side employed superior weapons they refused to accept, or sometimes only superior tactics, or merely didn't make the incredibly stupid military move of calling for a massive assault on a well fortified and defended position while the losing side did. Sometimes the internal corruption wasn't too bad, but it was enough to bring about a collapse in the face of a big problem such as a long drought or severe plague. The Byzantine Empire was so notorious their name is now a byword for corruption and graft covered up with excessive complexity. The Ottoman Empire that conquered the Byzantines itself succumbed to corruption.

There's more than mere technical problems to overcome before we'll ever be capable of colonizing other star systems. A generational colony ship needs a society that can remain more than stable for millenia, that society has to really clamp down on violence, can't have so much as one gunfight between two individuals lest the ship and everyone on it become collateral damage.

Patent Trolling?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a novel idea, someone should patent it.

prior art 'rockstar'

[Anonymous Coward]

Rockstar, using the nortel patents, part owned by apple, a corporate troll has been suing every man and his dog for several years.

Prior art by Frodo Baggins

[Anonymous Coward]

Ring-silencing patent? You don't say.

Patented code

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's some patent infringing pseudocode:

on incoming call =>
        if ringEnabled:
                ring()

Sue me!

Apple made a point on patent trolls? Let's praise

[zedaroca]

And forget that they reduced American's product competition by enforcing the round corners patent. Let's forget that they patented the "slide to open" (like the doors). Isn't slide to open even more outrageous than ring-silencing patents? Or at least about the same?
Let's forget that they just applied for the paper bag patent

Let's forget that they are constantly buying patents to profit from them in the exact same way these "patent trolls" do. Not every patent they buy becomes a product of their own, many are buried and many are just for collecting money from others use. This was a troll vs troll situation, let's not pretend Apple was on the high moral ground.

These patents are there just to make every product cost more and destroy any competition from small companies, humanity is losing.

Don Henley reiterated it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of 'All', I'd say 'Most'

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=3061

Re:Apple made a point on patent trolls? Let's prai

[Dog-Cow]

Let's forget that Apple sues for infringements of patents it actually uses. MobileMedia Ideas wouldn't know how to silence a ringer if you handed them a bell and a sledgehammer.

Apple is not a patent troll.

Re:Apple made a point on patent trolls? Let's prai

[Anonymous Coward]

no they are just part of Rockstar a patent trolling non-practicing entity.

Re:Apple made a point on patent trolls? Let's prai

[zedaroca]

Yes, they use the round corners and slide to open. But having those patents qualifies them as patent trolls.