Most of the Apple lawsuit by Samsung and Nokia (before they settled) where for patents that have been accepted into International Standards, under which the companies have agreed to license to 3rd parties under FRAND terms. Apple has simply said they are happy to pay under FRAND terms but will be be black mailed into cross-licensing technologies Apple independently invented and hold patents on.
To use a car analogy, Samsung supplied some of the structural supports used in creating a toll bridge used by the larger motoring community. They agreed to supply these structural supports in exchange for $x each time somebody cross the communities bridge. Along comes Apple in there new sports car with a smoking hot babe with big boobs in the passenger seat and try to drive over the now public bridge for $x per trip. Samsung likes the look of the sexy babe Apple has in its car and is demanding that Apple should let Samsung have sex with the sexy babe in exchange for letting it use the bridge.
The Bridge is patents which 100's of companies all placed into International Standards such as 3G and Wifi. The hot babe in Apple cars are it's iOS innovations and patents.
If all you where obligated to do was pay a small fee on the toll bridge would you just stand by and let the toll collector have sex with your girl, because he found her sexy and wanted her?
Google hasn't used it's patent portfolio to prevent competition, simply because apart from the PageRank Algorithm which it owns the patents on it hasn't invented anything.
Google is currently the verb meaning "to search thing internet for a subject", but outside search Google is a synonym for another company name that became a verb, Xerox.
Go back and look at the history. Nokia and Motorola started the patent wars attacking Apple. The only people currently directly suing Google is Oracle and judging by the Lindholm email they have very good reason to.
Microsoft and Apple both are sitting on many $10Billion's of cash. Paying a couple dollars to them to license technology which has obviously been copied isn't going to give with company and more of an advantage in the market place than they already have.
In fact Microsoft has already offered Google to join syndicates to purchase patents so they don't end up in the hands on non practicing patent trolls. The fact that Google refuses to join in and play nice says a lot about their evil litigious intentions.
Hey Google seeing as you don't agree with software patents can I please have a free license to use your PageRank search algorithm patents. More competition is good for everybody right so how about it.....Whats that? You want to use everybody else's patents for free but you are not prepared to share your own patents?? Doesn't that make you a hypocrite?
Paying money as part of a cross license agreement is kinda standard practice in the technology industry. Google purchased Andriod and controls it's "free" distribution to hardware OEMs when they had virtually no patents apart from the origin PageRank patent (that they will not license to anybody else by the way). What's different from Google and Apple and Microsoft is they have been active in the research and development of software operating systems and hardware manufacture for ever. They already had a large number of patents and are also more than happy to pay FRAND fees for patents that are part of international standards.
As far as worrying about having to continue to pay more later thats a simple matter of contract negotiation. Google pays to license all current patents as at the date of the contract.
While you might not agree with software patents, they are in currently part of the legal system. There is an obligation on all corporations to follow the law until such time as the law gets changed.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper for Google to arrange a direct patent license with Microsoft and Apple rather than trying to build their own patent portfolio to try and go to war? It's pretty clear from the Lindholm email in the Oracle lawsuit that senior member of the Andriod team knew there was patent issues, which they ignored and decided to risk the legal problems later. So now instead of fairly paying their own way they are paying stupid money for Motorola and billions more buying patents from IBM and others. "Do no evil" what a joke, they are a dirty bunch of thieving bastards!
The recent court documents in Oracle vs Google show that Sun offered google a Java license and they decided just to use the code without a license. So Google deciding to start paying for other peoples software would be a 100% change in previous strategy of just borrow without paying.
Why bother with VMWARE. Given Googles history of stealing code from Sun why don't hey just use VirtualBox and pretend it was a clean room implementation.
Yes I agree with you there. But independent invention clearly can not be somebody purchasing your product, looking how it works, copy your products features then claim independent invention.
Those stupid Ecommerce patents for shopping carts etc. and business process patents which follow the model, (well known business process) "on the Internet" are clearly garbage.
What about something like the bounce you get when you scroll an iPhone to the bottom of a web page? If it was granted a patent, which I think from memory it did, should Android be able to just copy it because its a nice feature or should that be an example of something that somebody should have to lisence?
How exactly is it the mobile companies fault for being greedy? Companies like Research in Motion, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Apple, HTC all design and manufacture phones for people to buy via a competitive market place. Google tried to sell their own phone the Nexus One, but failed in the market place and on July 16, 2010 pulled the product from the market. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/19/nexus.one.discontinued/index.html?iref=NS1#fbid=nPeDbHV_wpr
The fact is Google could not compete even with their own phone. But they continue to develop and promote Android even while the majority of companies actually using Google's software are being sued for violating other companies IP. Google clearly know there are major legal issues with Andriod, but choose to ignore these issues and leave them to the OEM partners to sort out.
With the tens of Billions of cash Google is sitting on they could negotiate licenses with Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, Research in Motion and the other major holders of IP rights in the smartphone space. The fact they are aware of the problems and do nothing about it when clearly they can is an abuse of Corporate citizenship.
If you or I went to the local Kmart and stole products from the shelf without paying for them we would go to jail. But it's "ok" for Google to steal other companies IP, open source the code, give it away free on the condition Andriod OEM use "official" Google web apps (kick backs on advertising revenue) then claim no harm no foul. How can this be right? It's not even legal!
Everybody knows you are not supposed to feed trolls!!
But I disagree. The purpose of a troll is to write comments that will incite anger and inflamed responses. This is not my purpose. I have my own individual beliefs that Google is becoming one of the most evil companies out there, which I am wanting to promote. If you have a different opinion and actually believe Google is a genuine nice guy I feel sorry for you.
Google is not about mutual advantages between itself and the FOSS community. Google is about making money selling advertising and attacking any and all companies who might stand in the way of their prized revenue stream. They use FOSS to destabilize who technology sectors so their advertising tentacles can spread like a virus, unabated. They have no regard for personal privacy and no regard for obeying laws in large numbers of countries throughout the world. They are one very scary company, to which people need to open their eyes and wake up to. If Google is not answerable to the users personal privacy and they are not answerable to sovereign laws regarding to IP rights, just who the hell are they answerable to?
By the way it is not "competition" when Google gives Andriod away for FREE when there is clearly a significant value proposition for smart phone OEM. Google is clearly "dumping" their software on the market for FREE in order to extend their Internet Search and Advertising monopoly. There are national and international laws against this illegal practice which Google seems to have weaseled their way around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
Google know that Andriod is not FREE because of the significant IP rights of others that it violates. Ignoring existing laws and treaties to pursue your own "for profit" agenda is exactly what Microsoft used to do, Google is no better!
If Google truly wanted Patent reform and the promotion of FOSS they should not have been prepared to pay $4B for the Nortel patents. They should have just spent the $4B on a grass roots campaign to lobby the government to reform the broken patent system. But no, they where going to spend $4B continuing to take advantage of the broken patent system for their own advantage.
Google do not release as open source any software used for their core business of generating search results and displaying contextual advertising. They happily buy up small software projects like Andriod and WebM which operate in markets that other companies make their livings selling software and release software with known IP violations trying to undercut and undermine other people business models, with the sole purpose of promoting their own "for profit" advertising ambitions.
If Google truly believed in FOSS they would release their Page Rank search algo for free to create competition in the search listing market. They don't want to do this and hurt their core business. But they will happy disrupt the Smartphone market and wipe billions of dollars of value off a company like Research in Motion and their Blackberry franchise by attempting to commoditize smartphone OS's so they can sell more advertising. Google is the new Microsoft, they are pure EVIL!!
Time to smell the coffee dude. Google has a monopoly in internet search and contextual advertising and is using the FOSS community to promote Andriod and try maintain relevance in the mobile computing space. The original Andriod prototypes where Blackberry rip-offs then while Eric Schmidt was on Apple board he saw ripped off their iPhone concept and re-engineered Andriod to use a touch interface like Apple was working on. They then ignored Sun's licensing offers for Java and all other IP related issues then promptly open sourced Andriod without indemnifying users and have hung out HTC, Motorola and all the other Andriod produces out to dry.
Google have done the same thing with the WebM video codec. Release software they know violates other people IP to the FOSS community and wait until the users of the software they release get sued.
They do not have a track record for respecting other peoples IP rights. They have even sues a small independent music label so they can continue to make money selling advertising to people search for illegal music downloads! http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/05/06/us-media-google-idUSTRE6450RP20100506 . So it is clear Google doesn't give a dam about other people IP rights, all they care about it selling adverts and making money.
If you believe that people should respect the GPL and not steal open source software for closed source projects then you must believe in the principal of IP rights. The GPL only works if people respect the IP rights and choices of the original IP creators. Believing that FOSS software IP rights should be respected but everybody else's rights can be ignored is hypocrisy.
The end to Google's IP theft is, known as Andriod is coming. Whether you like it or not there are 1000's of patents covering aspects of Andriod which Google knowingly ignored when it released the software as Open Source.
Google is a blatant IP theft and idiots who have fallen for their "open" agenda are just pawns. If Google was really Open it would make available it's Search Engine, Page Rank patents and software for everybody to use. It doesn't do that because it is EVIL and seeks to commoditize the Smart Phone and Tablet OS with free and open source Andriod software so it can push it's search engine and web apps to datamine private personal data to display adverts to the masses.
Google and Andriod are only interested in your personal information to make money selling advertising to all their users. This IS NOT the promotion of a free and open source ideals. It's about making sure Microsoft and Apple do not completely take over mobile computing operating systems and marginalize Google near monopoly on Internet advertising.
A lot of these patents are Hardware patents that relate to 4G, LTE mobile networking devices. Removing software patents will not help Google. Like it or no patents provide a legal monopoly on the invention for 20 years. If they don't want to license these patents to Google, Android may never be able to go 4G.
Apple has spent close to $500 million buying P.A. Semi and Intrinsity. Both companies have a wealth of experience in custom silicon design. It is very likely that the A4 chip is a knock up of off the shelf parts. The next generation (A5 chip) will probably have some major modifications and energy saving enhancements for which PA Semi and Intrinsity are renowned.
I predict they are seriously mistaken in forgetting about ARM processors in their analysis. ARM processors have taken over pretty much all the mobile and a lot of the netbook space. From wikipedia As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processorARM Wikipedia The world is getting more and more mobile and the desktop processing capacity is becoming irrelevant.
I believe Moore's Law stating the number of transistors will double on an integrated circuit every two years and the continual increase of CPU GPU processing power is a solution looking for a problem. What we need is power efficient processors that have enough processing capacity to do what we need and nothing more. Unless you are a Gamer or doing some serious GPGPU calculations in CUDA or OpenCL what on earth is the need to have a graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GT 340 with around 380 GFLOPs of floating point processing. It's ridiculous.
Apple purchased FingerWorks and with it got all the patents and the key players in the company that had been researching the area for years in the specific implementation of capacitance based recognition of multi-touch movement. Microsoft's technology on their Surface product was light based recognition from memory, two different technologies or two different implementations of a similar idea.
The thing is that you can not patent an idea. Apple have not attempted to do this. What they have got are patents on in a specific implementation of an idea, in this case capacitance based recognition of multi-touch and gestures. They fairly purchased the patents and key researchers in this area, payed for further R&D into practical implementations of this technology and developed a ground breaking product with makes use of their technology.
Nokia agreed for license their patents relating to GSM on Fair and Reasonable Non Discriminatory terms. According to Apples response to the original complaint they where offered these patents at 3 times the standard rate charged to other cell phone manufactures or the same rate with Nokia have full access to Apples patent portfolio.
Lets not forget that Apple also created one of the first PDA's in the Newton and developed a whole bunch of technology and patents relating to PDA functionality that Nokia have been helping themselves to for years without paying Apple a cent.
Multi-Touch is not simply a software patent. The technology is directly related to hardware sensing and processing information in order to determine how many fingers are touching a capacitance sensing LCD or other display screen and what movements or interactions those fingers are making with the screen.
The fact there is 1) a capacitance sensitive screen and 2) fingers, makes the patents device / hardware implementation based patents no software patents sorry.
Apple has some of the deepest pockets around. currently $34,000,000,000 in cash (yes that's 34 billion). Apple latest financial results Turning to cash, our cash plus short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $34 billion at the end of the September quarter compared to $31.1 billion at the end of the June quarter, an increase of $2.9 billion.
MVS made by IBM is pretty much used at every large scale financial institution in the world. I'd hazard a guess that over 90% of the worlds financial transactions are processed on IBM big iron.
The fact that so many trillion dollars are processed daily through MVS systems would make it a prime target for attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the Apple lawsuit by Samsung and Nokia (before they settled) where for patents that have been accepted into International Standards, under which the companies have agreed to license to 3rd parties under FRAND terms. Apple has simply said they are happy to pay under FRAND terms but will be be black mailed into cross-licensing technologies Apple independently invented and hold patents on.
To use a car analogy, Samsung supplied some of the structural supports used in creating a toll bridge used by the larger motoring community. They agreed to supply these structural supports in exchange for $x each time somebody cross the communities bridge. Along comes Apple in there new sports car with a smoking hot babe with big boobs in the passenger seat and try to drive over the now public bridge for $x per trip. Samsung likes the look of the sexy babe Apple has in its car and is demanding that Apple should let Samsung have sex with the sexy babe in exchange for letting it use the bridge.
The Bridge is patents which 100's of companies all placed into International Standards such as 3G and Wifi. The hot babe in Apple cars are it's iOS innovations and patents.
If all you where obligated to do was pay a small fee on the toll bridge would you just stand by and let the toll collector have sex with your girl, because he found her sexy and wanted her?
Google hasn't used it's patent portfolio to prevent competition, simply because apart from the PageRank Algorithm which it owns the patents on it hasn't invented anything.
Google is currently the verb meaning "to search thing internet for a subject", but outside search Google is a synonym for another company name that became a verb, Xerox.
Go back and look at the history. Nokia and Motorola started the patent wars attacking Apple. The only people currently directly suing Google is Oracle and judging by the Lindholm email they have very good reason to.
Microsoft and Apple both are sitting on many $10Billion's of cash. Paying a couple dollars to them to license technology which has obviously been copied isn't going to give with company and more of an advantage in the market place than they already have.
In fact Microsoft has already offered Google to join syndicates to purchase patents so they don't end up in the hands on non practicing patent trolls. The fact that Google refuses to join in and play nice says a lot about their evil litigious intentions.
Hey Google seeing as you don't agree with software patents can I please have a free license to use your PageRank search algorithm patents. More competition is good for everybody right so how about it.....Whats that? You want to use everybody else's patents for free but you are not prepared to share your own patents?? Doesn't that make you a hypocrite?
Paying money as part of a cross license agreement is kinda standard practice in the technology industry. Google purchased Andriod and controls it's "free" distribution to hardware OEMs when they had virtually no patents apart from the origin PageRank patent (that they will not license to anybody else by the way). What's different from Google and Apple and Microsoft is they have been active in the research and development of software operating systems and hardware manufacture for ever. They already had a large number of patents and are also more than happy to pay FRAND fees for patents that are part of international standards.
As far as worrying about having to continue to pay more later thats a simple matter of contract negotiation. Google pays to license all current patents as at the date of the contract.
While you might not agree with software patents, they are in currently part of the legal system. There is an obligation on all corporations to follow the law until such time as the law gets changed.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper for Google to arrange a direct patent license with Microsoft and Apple rather than trying to build their own patent portfolio to try and go to war? It's pretty clear from the Lindholm email in the Oracle lawsuit that senior member of the Andriod team knew there was patent issues, which they ignored and decided to risk the legal problems later. So now instead of fairly paying their own way they are paying stupid money for Motorola and billions more buying patents from IBM and others. "Do no evil" what a joke, they are a dirty bunch of thieving bastards!
The recent court documents in Oracle vs Google show that Sun offered google a Java license and they decided just to use the code without a license. So Google deciding to start paying for other peoples software would be a 100% change in previous strategy of just borrow without paying.
Why bother with VMWARE. Given Googles history of stealing code from Sun why don't hey just use VirtualBox and pretend it was a clean room implementation.
Yes I agree with you there. But independent invention clearly can not be somebody purchasing your product, looking how it works, copy your products features then claim independent invention.
Those stupid Ecommerce patents for shopping carts etc. and business process patents which follow the model, (well known business process) "on the Internet" are clearly garbage.
What about something like the bounce you get when you scroll an iPhone to the bottom of a web page? If it was granted a patent, which I think from memory it did, should Android be able to just copy it because its a nice feature or should that be an example of something that somebody should have to lisence?
How exactly is it the mobile companies fault for being greedy? Companies like Research in Motion, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Apple, HTC all design and manufacture phones for people to buy via a competitive market place. Google tried to sell their own phone the Nexus One, but failed in the market place and on July 16, 2010 pulled the product from the market. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/19/nexus.one.discontinued/index.html?iref=NS1#fbid=nPeDbHV_wpr
The fact is Google could not compete even with their own phone. But they continue to develop and promote Android even while the majority of companies actually using Google's software are being sued for violating other companies IP. Google clearly know there are major legal issues with Andriod, but choose to ignore these issues and leave them to the OEM partners to sort out.
With the tens of Billions of cash Google is sitting on they could negotiate licenses with Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, Research in Motion and the other major holders of IP rights in the smartphone space. The fact they are aware of the problems and do nothing about it when clearly they can is an abuse of Corporate citizenship.
If you or I went to the local Kmart and stole products from the shelf without paying for them we would go to jail. But it's "ok" for Google to steal other companies IP, open source the code, give it away free on the condition Andriod OEM use "official" Google web apps (kick backs on advertising revenue) then claim no harm no foul. How can this be right? It's not even legal!
Everybody knows you are not supposed to feed trolls!!
But I disagree. The purpose of a troll is to write comments that will incite anger and inflamed responses. This is not my purpose. I have my own individual beliefs that Google is becoming one of the most evil companies out there, which I am wanting to promote. If you have a different opinion and actually believe Google is a genuine nice guy I feel sorry for you.
There is more and more mounting evidence that Google has major privacy violation issues. Take the Do Not Track feature that all major browsers apart from Chrome are supporting http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/04/chrome-do-not-track/
Google is not about mutual advantages between itself and the FOSS community. Google is about making money selling advertising and attacking any and all companies who might stand in the way of their prized revenue stream. They use FOSS to destabilize who technology sectors so their advertising tentacles can spread like a virus, unabated. They have no regard for personal privacy and no regard for obeying laws in large numbers of countries throughout the world. They are one very scary company, to which people need to open their eyes and wake up to. If Google is not answerable to the users personal privacy and they are not answerable to sovereign laws regarding to IP rights, just who the hell are they answerable to?
By the way it is not "competition" when Google gives Andriod away for FREE when there is clearly a significant value proposition for smart phone OEM. Google is clearly "dumping" their software on the market for FREE in order to extend their Internet Search and Advertising monopoly. There are national and international laws against this illegal practice which Google seems to have weaseled their way around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
Google know that Andriod is not FREE because of the significant IP rights of others that it violates. Ignoring existing laws and treaties to pursue your own "for profit" agenda is exactly what Microsoft used to do, Google is no better!
If Google truly wanted Patent reform and the promotion of FOSS they should not have been prepared to pay $4B for the Nortel patents. They should have just spent the $4B on a grass roots campaign to lobby the government to reform the broken patent system. But no, they where going to spend $4B continuing to take advantage of the broken patent system for their own advantage.
Google do not release as open source any software used for their core business of generating search results and displaying contextual advertising. They happily buy up small software projects like Andriod and WebM which operate in markets that other companies make their livings selling software and release software with known IP violations trying to undercut and undermine other people business models, with the sole purpose of promoting their own "for profit" advertising ambitions.
If Google truly believed in FOSS they would release their Page Rank search algo for free to create competition in the search listing market. They don't want to do this and hurt their core business. But they will happy disrupt the Smartphone market and wipe billions of dollars of value off a company like Research in Motion and their Blackberry franchise by attempting to commoditize smartphone OS's so they can sell more advertising. Google is the new Microsoft, they are pure EVIL!!
Time to smell the coffee dude. Google has a monopoly in internet search and contextual advertising and is using the FOSS community to promote Andriod and try maintain relevance in the mobile computing space. The original Andriod prototypes where Blackberry rip-offs then while Eric Schmidt was on Apple board he saw ripped off their iPhone concept and re-engineered Andriod to use a touch interface like Apple was working on. They then ignored Sun's licensing offers for Java and all other IP related issues then promptly open sourced Andriod without indemnifying users and have hung out HTC, Motorola and all the other Andriod produces out to dry.
Google have done the same thing with the WebM video codec. Release software they know violates other people IP to the FOSS community and wait until the users of the software they release get sued.
They do not have a track record for respecting other peoples IP rights. They have even sues a small independent music label so they can continue to make money selling advertising to people search for illegal music downloads! http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/05/06/us-media-google-idUSTRE6450RP20100506 . So it is clear Google doesn't give a dam about other people IP rights, all they care about it selling adverts and making money.
If you believe that people should respect the GPL and not steal open source software for closed source projects then you must believe in the principal of IP rights. The GPL only works if people respect the IP rights and choices of the original IP creators. Believing that FOSS software IP rights should be respected but everybody else's rights can be ignored is hypocrisy.
The end to Google's IP theft is, known as Andriod is coming. Whether you like it or not there are 1000's of patents covering aspects of Andriod which Google knowingly ignored when it released the software as Open Source.
Google is a blatant IP theft and idiots who have fallen for their "open" agenda are just pawns. If Google was really Open it would make available it's Search Engine, Page Rank patents and software for everybody to use. It doesn't do that because it is EVIL and seeks to commoditize the Smart Phone and Tablet OS with free and open source Andriod software so it can push it's search engine and web apps to datamine private personal data to display adverts to the masses.
Google and Andriod are only interested in your personal information to make money selling advertising to all their users. This IS NOT the promotion of a free and open source ideals. It's about making sure Microsoft and Apple do not completely take over mobile computing operating systems and marginalize Google near monopoly on Internet advertising.
A lot of these patents are Hardware patents that relate to 4G, LTE mobile networking devices. Removing software patents will not help Google. Like it or no patents provide a legal monopoly on the invention for 20 years. If they don't want to license these patents to Google, Android may never be able to go 4G.
Apple has spent close to $500 million buying P.A. Semi and Intrinsity. Both companies have a wealth of experience in custom silicon design. It is very likely that the A4 chip is a knock up of off the shelf parts. The next generation (A5 chip) will probably have some major modifications and energy saving enhancements for which PA Semi and Intrinsity are renowned.
It has been Steve Jobs stated claim that he wanted to create devices with custom components with technology that could not simply be copied or purchased off the shelf by Apple's competitors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity
How about here... ARM Netbook The first hit on google for "ARM Netbook" ;-)
~~~~~~~~
Google was my friend, even if they have started to be a bit evil lately
I predict they are seriously mistaken in forgetting about ARM processors in their analysis. ARM processors have taken over pretty much all the mobile and a lot of the netbook space. From wikipedia As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than one billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor ARM Wikipedia The world is getting more and more mobile and the desktop processing capacity is becoming irrelevant.
I believe Moore's Law stating the number of transistors will double on an integrated circuit every two years and the continual increase of CPU GPU processing power is a solution looking for a problem. What we need is power efficient processors that have enough processing capacity to do what we need and nothing more. Unless you are a Gamer or doing some serious GPGPU calculations in CUDA or OpenCL what on earth is the need to have a graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GT 340 with around 380 GFLOPs of floating point processing. It's ridiculous.
Apple purchased FingerWorks and with it got all the patents and the key players in the company that had been researching the area for years in the specific implementation of capacitance based recognition of multi-touch movement. Microsoft's technology on their Surface product was light based recognition from memory, two different technologies or two different implementations of a similar idea.
The thing is that you can not patent an idea. Apple have not attempted to do this. What they have got are patents on in a specific implementation of an idea, in this case capacitance based recognition of multi-touch and gestures. They fairly purchased the patents and key researchers in this area, payed for further R&D into practical implementations of this technology and developed a ground breaking product with makes use of their technology.
Nokia agreed for license their patents relating to GSM on Fair and Reasonable Non Discriminatory terms. According to Apples response to the original complaint they where offered these patents at 3 times the standard rate charged to other cell phone manufactures or the same rate with Nokia have full access to Apples patent portfolio.
Lets not forget that Apple also created one of the first PDA's in the Newton and developed a whole bunch of technology and patents relating to PDA functionality that Nokia have been helping themselves to for years without paying Apple a cent.
Multi-Touch is not simply a software patent. The technology is directly related to hardware sensing and processing information in order to determine how many fingers are touching a capacitance sensing LCD or other display screen and what movements or interactions those fingers are making with the screen.
The fact there is 1) a capacitance sensitive screen and 2) fingers, makes the patents device / hardware implementation based patents no software patents sorry.
Apple has some of the deepest pockets around. currently $34,000,000,000 in cash (yes that's 34 billion).
Apple latest financial results
Turning to cash, our cash plus short-term and long-term marketable securities totaled $34 billion at the end of the September quarter compared to $31.1 billion at the end of the June quarter, an increase of $2.9 billion.
Wow a Dragon 32. I'm so very envious!! You had real keys. My ZX81 didn't have any real keys. You lucky bastard!
In Soviet Russia the RIAA has no scruples and less profit than a nomad, Lame.
MVS made by IBM is pretty much used at every large scale financial institution in the world. I'd hazard a guess that over 90% of the worlds financial transactions are processed on IBM big iron.
The fact that so many trillion dollars are processed daily through MVS systems would make it a prime target for attack.