The issue here is that Samsung's patents are deemed essential to cell phone networking standards, so the law mandates that they be licensed under standard terms to prevent extortion (FRAND). However, slide-to-unlock and design language aren't interop. standards nor essential features of a phone (or, at least, they have not been declared to be, though I suspect they don't meet the bar) so the patent holders are free to set licensing fees as they wish. I suspect that Samsung would not hesitate to raise their licensing fees if the law allowed them to.
More biased propaganda from Groklaw. Hello, Slashdotters--welcome to HN!
It does seem kind of perverse that the essential, fundamental technologies on which the entire industry depends have to be licensed to all comers at bargain basement rates while at the same time latecomers can use fairly trivial UI and design patents to drive competitors' products out of the market.
Maybe this is the letter of the law but the reason so many of us are disappointed in Apple is that they're exploiting a broken system using tactics that for a long time have been precluded by gentlemen's agreement and common sense.
What infuriates me is the lack of outrage by all the hipsters who hold everyone else to such a high standard. The same people who are still trying to drag Bill Gates through the mud for his business tactics in the 90's are dead silent about their favorite company employing methods that are at least as outrageous.
Whether you're an Apple guru or not, everyone loses when there's no competition in the market. It seems like the ultimate irony for the "Think Different" company to be acting like this. Still, I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
It could be argued that Apple is acting within the legal system, whereas Bill Gates and Microsoft were convicted and settled numerous lawsuits.
And while I disagree with the patent suits, I'd have preferred that the competition found ways to make smartphones that _didn't_ infringe of any of those patents, and made an even better product because of it. (For instance, a phone with facial recognition doesn't need slide to unlock).
I think Apple's perspective is that they view these innovations as central to their success. If these innovations are truly trivial, perhaps Samsung would not have copied them nor be so intransigent about removing them from their products. One could argue that Samsung is not ripping off Apple because Apple simply "got there first.". The problem is you can make that argument about any innovation, but all discoveries are obvious in hindsight, even though, in actuality, these patents were the fruits of a fantastically expensive innovation investment by Apple.
The thing that bugs me about Apple's recent lawsuits is that they seem more like cynical, tactical moves and not some kind of honest stance on principle. I think they're deathly afraid of losing their majority in the tablet market and want to try to keep competing devices off shelves long enough to cement their ecosystem in place all the while standing behind the flag of "innovation".
I think these kinds of tactics could backfire on them in the long run though because they're burning up a ton of good will with people like me that love their products and code for their platforms but don't enjoy seeing them beat up a legitimate competitor with things like "slide to unlock" patents.
Agreed, and I think it shows a disrespect for history since Apple would not have been able to thrive if Xerox, IBM, Microsoft and others had taken out patents and enforced them back in the 80s.
While I don't agree with software patents and don't like Apple pursuing companies because of them, nobody is forcing other cell phone companies to violate those patents. It's not like Apple has patented the only way to make a smartphone.
On the other hand, if companies could refuse to license or could name any price for a patent they've gotten into a standard, that would make it impossible for newcomers like Apple to enter the cellphone market.
So while Samsung must license patents for difficult-to-design wireless hardware at extremely low prices to prevent extortion, Apple is free to extort from Samsung, with design language patents, all of their profits, all while taking advantage of the extremely-low FRAND terms? And this should be acceptable why?
I agree that Samsung would probably do the same thing if the law let them, which is why the law needs to not let them.
Yes. Because, if they had not agreed to the FRAND terms, they wouldn't have been able to get their technology into the standards at all.
Getting your patented technology into a widely adopted standard has huge benefits since you're forcing people that want to use the standard to license the patents, and the FRAND requirement is there to ensure a level playing field.
Nobody is forcing any cell phone vendor to violate Apples patents, and Apple has made no attempts to get their patented technology into a standard body.
On the other hand, Samsung willingly contributed patented technologies to various standard setting organizations, encouraged their use in a host of consumer electronics, and years later now charges the very producers they encouraged to use these standards with patent infringement. That doesn't sound acceptable either.
I forgot about this before, but it's also true that Samsung claims that Apple /didn't/ license Samsung's 3g patents at all, even under FRAND terms. That would be fair grounds to sue, though the rate they are demanding may be unreasonable.
Apple didn't license the patents directly from Samsung, but they did through Qualcomm. Apple claims that Samsung has exhausted their patent claims since they've already gotten paid by Qualcomm for those patents.
According to the article it was not a license agreement, but rather a contract not to sue. Apparently, Samsung claims that the agreement was terminated when Apple sued them, but I would not be surprised if we see Qualcomm doing something to make clear to Samsung that it does not appreciate this move.
OK, that puts it in a different perspective - the question at hand now is whether those patents are covered by the ETSI FRAND agreements, and if those agreements are relevant in Australia.
This is exactly why I'd like to see all these suits thrown out so that people can get back to making better products. It creates the wrong incentives for either side to win this way.
Yes, it's a legal agreement. Since a company can be sued for not following agreements that they've signed, they're bound by law to the FRAND agreements.
I think one reason that this legal brouhaha generates so much invective is because of a few fallacies about patents. At least, I think they're fallacies:
1) If a patent is easy to copy, it must have been easy to create. Samsung's 3G technology sounds hard to copy, so it must have been hard to create. Slide to unlock is easy to copy, so it must have been easy to create, right? The classic counter example is Viagra: formula is C22H30N6O4S. Easy to copy. But hard to create; clinical trials alone provably cost $100M, and billions of dollars were lost exploring other drugs which were failures. Similarly, I think slide-to-unlock is but the tip of the iceberg of Apple's expensive R&D machine; without the entire machine, it's hard to create, but easy to copy.
2) The value of the patent system is in the disclosures. People assume that because they didn't need to read a patent to recreate an invention, the patent is useless. But I would argue that the de facto value of the patent system is not the disclosures, it's the legal protections that allow the damn thing to be invented in the first place. If SmallCo is pondering whether to invest $100M to develop an innovation, and they know that DominantCo can quickly copy it for $1M, they won't proceed; they'll gave spent $100M for no benefit in the marketplace. Innovation suffers. Patents allow SmallCo to proceed with expensive investment by documenting the protected result. Similarly, if Apple couldn't protect their investments, we might all still be using BlackBerries.
Personally, I think the patent system should be modified so that the amount of protection is proportional to the monetary investment in the innovation--but that is hard to make game-proof.
I thought Groklaw was for information about legal proceedings, not speculation about companies' ability to compete in the market. MS isn't doing so hot, but it's pretty ridiculous to claim that Apple is doing this because they'd otherwise have some sort of trouble selling their devices.
The claim is that if Apple had to pay the sorts of royalties on Samsung's (and others') technology patents that Apple is asking Samsung to pay on Apple's patent on curved lines, Apple phones would be so expensive that they wouldn't sell like they currently do.
More biased propaganda from Groklaw. Hello, Slashdotters--welcome to HN!