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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.
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.
No. Only your mother is on topic.
*runs away giggling*
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
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.
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)
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
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.
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
You invented the axiom on which your "logic" is based. That makes your logic worthless.