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'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.
for this article, only troll comments are on topic.
Wait, this didn't happen in Texas?!?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
The only winners of a patent troll proxy war will be the lawyers.
Bye-bye!
Yeah, those three million dollars are going to kill Apple. No wait, they made that much while I wrote this.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Apple is also a licensor in MPEGLA, so I guess it gets a cut...?
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?
For all the other suits filed, e.g. against Samsung?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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.
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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.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
FRRRRRRRP! That's the noise my ring makes. Silence that, you asshats!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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!!In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
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..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
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.
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".
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.
Initial appeals had already started and finished. It stated as much in the summary and even linked to the Appeals Court judgement.
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.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
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.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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.
-- if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic - Lewis Carrol
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.
You invented the axiom on which your "logic" is based. That makes your logic worthless.
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.
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.
Yes, they use the round corners and slide to open. But having those patents qualifies them as patent trolls.
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.