Interesting times. There is no doubt that the legal punches thrown at Android have been anti-competitive and kills innovation instead of what there were meant to protect. For example reportedly Microsoft earns more from Android than selling Windows phone: http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-is-making-2bn-a-year-on-andro.... If the patents were that useful for innovation, Microsoft would have been ahead of Google by miles.
What kind of innovation do you see in Android? It has been almost being copy-pasted. Google copied everything, from kernel (Linux) to UI design and trying to make lot of money from it and expecting others not to sue.
EDIT: The replies of this comment say that the others (Apple etc) are too copying and copying kernel in not wrong. Well, I did not say that copying is wrong. What I mean is that copying is NOT innovation.
There is nothing wrong with "copying" kernel. This is what the open source is aimed at: Infectious growth. In fact that was the right and smart thing to do.
I think you might be unfamiliar with 'open source' and its licensing. Android is a Linux-based distribution, which means that it uses a Linux kernel.
'Copy': make a similar or identical version of; reproduce: [1]
Google forked and contribute to the kernel. They did not create their own identical version of, or reproduce, the kernel.
"Forking" does not necessarily mean "innovation". Innovation, by definition, requires something new. "Doing the same things differently" is only innovative to the extent that things are done differently. (Android certainly did do some innovative things, just saying that forking the kernel was probably not it.)
Yes, but reinventing the wheel is not innovation, it is stupidity. Why write a new kernel if there is a very good one available? Innovation often is in taking existing things and combining them in new ways (or improving already existing inventions, which is what google is doing).
I think the correct term you're looking for is 'forked'.
Which inevitably brings forth the discussion of dongling the fork, or is it forking the dongle?
BTW, widgets were original to android in regards to apple, were they not?
Although it seems so now, keep in mind Google bid for these patents themselves and lost. They were also offered to join the Rockstar consortium, which they declined. Unfair definitely, but not enough to qualify as anti-competitive under a black & white banner.
A serious question, what was the patent system created for?
> ... gives Congress the power "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8).
From what I read based on what some legal experts simplified but again, "it's the Internet" but basically, they considered patents as legal rights to monopolize on such innovations.
So, based on that, exactly how is it anti-competitive to disallow other companies to use the said patents unless they agree to pay for the rights?
It's by definition anti-competitive. Its entire purpose is to reduce competition so that the inventor can profit from it. Even if inventors were required to license their inventions to other people for a truly fair rate it would still be anti-competitive since it would increase the costs (and thus barrier to entry) of competition. The inventor still enjoys a significant advantage in the market (not having to pay the license fees).
It's fair to ask if it's bad for there to be an official form of anti-competition, but call a spade a spade.
One could easily make the argument in this context by this part: "by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The argument here is that the only ones that should benefit from this are the authors and inventors, and they and only they are granted "exclusive" rights. No one else. In fact, I'd find that fair. The implication being you can't sell or transfer those rights to someone, and those rights are only granted to the authors and inventors.
Which leads us to this question:
"exactly how is it anti-competitive to disallow other companies to use the said patents unless they agree to pay for the rights?"
It's not, as long as the one doing the license is the author or inventor. One should not be able to transfer those rights to a third party, as it's explicitly an exclusive right.
Except that Microsoft innovated, got there first and clearly has something valuable if other companies are using it's IP (self evident since companies are paying them licensing fees).
The reason for paying licensing fees doesn't have to be that Micro$oft has something valuable, it could very well be they are afraid of legal repercussions.
If they weren't infringing, the companies wouldn't be paying. It's not like we are talking about some mom and pop that is going to go out of business from legal fees. We are talking major handset manufacturers.
It's not about going out of business, it's about cost/benefit. What good does it do you to avoid paying a million dollars in license fees if it costs you two million dollars in lawyers fees to do it?
(The answer is that it keeps you from being painted as a mark by other trolls. But it still doesn't change the math -- it costs more to fight than to pay.)
I'm definitely splitting hairs here, but I think there's a distinction to be made between a non-practicing entity (patent troll) and a consortium of companies that pooled together to purchase patents. Rockstar may not make devices itself, but it consists of, and represents, companies that do.
They 'pooled together' to buy third party patents with which to try and attack a competitor's product as they can't compete against it on the virtue of their own products in the open market place.
Technically you may be correct but I really think the 'troll' moniker is apt in this case.
Why think of it that way? Perhaps they bought those patents for use in their own devices. Perhaps they've been paying Nortel to use them up until they bought them out.
Right. Apple can't compete at all with android devices. Those same android devices that were originally copies of iPhones. Remember that android was just a better blackberry before iPhone came along.
And remember where Apple got its notification centre from. And remember how iOS was lacking copy and paste for years. And remember how it only got "multitasking" a few years after Android did. We could be here forever.
Also, didn't a Google employee basically debunk that "Google had to start from scratch after iPhone was revealed" claim?
You have a warped sense of time. Multitasking is essentially fast app switching on the devices. Copy and paste was a nothing feature. I'm surprised that you left out MMS too since your going down the trite meme route. Here's some back to Android, although its blatantly been influenced by the direction Apple took, it took Google until Jellybean 4.2 to catch up with the quality of implementation of iOS. They also continue to have a problem with fragmentation that is getting worse by the year and Google fucked consumers by handing control back to carriers in a bit to gain market share. Like you said, this could go on and on. So here's an idea; instead of trotting out tired and trite memes because someone has had the temerity to call out your favourite team, don't.
If Android was, as you seem to think, not a copy of the original iPhone OS, why did it take a further 18 months to release anything after the initial iPhone unveiling?
> Multitasking is essentially fast app switching on the devices
> Copy and paste was a nothing feature
> ... although its blatantly been influenced by the direction Apple took, it took Google until Jellybean 4.2 to catch up with the quality of implementation of iOS
I don't mean to come off like an ass (but don't really give a shit if I do), but you're just positing your own opinions in the place of the previous poster's opinions, then acting like you've proved some great point. How exactly are you advancing this discussion? Your post is just as useless as the one you're replying to.
I'm as big of an Apple fanboy as there is, but you're making us look bad. Multitasking and copy and paste may just be "trite memes" to gods like you, but mere mortals like me use both of those on a daily basis.
This is equally applicable to your post:
> ... instead of trotting out tired and trite memes because someone has had the temerity to call out your favourite team, don't.
EDIT: And your question,
> If Android was, as you seem to think, not a copy of the original iPhone OS, why did it take a further 18 months to release anything after the initial iPhone unveiling?
is blatantly phrased as a leading question. You're really trying to make it seem as though the only reason to not release anything for 18 months after the iphone announcement was to copy the iphone. Give the the iphone the credit it is due; it revolutionized mobile phones.
How are you so certain that the question in google wasn't "Why rush to compete with a product that just revolutionized the industry when yours clearly pales in comparison?"
Don't forget that the iPhone was totally rubbish when it was first released. It didn't even support text messaging - which made it a joke in most of the world.
Fair enough, Apple continued to work on it, and by all accounts (I don't have one) has managed to make it a fine product. But let's not pretend that it was obvious to everyone that "Apple revolutionised mobile phones" from day one.
So let me get this right. "Multitasking" isn't fast app switching? Care to elaborate? Didn't think so. My comment was made to illustrate how utterly banal the OP's comment was. I obviously wasn't clear enough that this was my aim. Sadly, prissy little assholes get offended at stuff like this and start relying on name calling (yes, the 'gods' comment is exactly that) to make 'points'. What you are saying is that it's OK to make these ridiculous comment that are no longer relevant, and that weren't particularly relevant at the time either, and I should just accept it as fact?
As to my 'leading' question; in context it's totally relevant. I'd like to know. I totally believe your version, although the evidence suggest otherwise. As I noted, Android didn't feel nearly as finished as iOS until 4.2.
> Those same android devices that were
> originally copies of iPhones.
By the same logic, the iPhone was just a "copy" of the Windows ME phones (iPaq etc). But with finger instead of a stylus.
Apple's revolution was in their magnificent marketing; and to a secondary degree the way they simplified the complex "enterprise" phones so that anyone could use them, then exploited that to build the App Store. In the short term they were less functional, but in the long term they "offered" exponentially more features (via 3rd parties in the marketplace).
> Rockstar may not make devices itself, but it consists of, and represents, companies that do.
Then tell us why they don't file the suits in their own names.
It's clearly because they're doing something distasteful and don't want to get the stink on themselves, and because they don't want to be parties in a court case where the judge has the ability to rule against them once and for all or impose penalties.
They didn't file these specific suits "in their own names" because these patents aren't owned by them but by Rockstar, a separate entity of which they are only shareholders and which apparently has committed to the DoJ and FTC to operate autonomously [1].
But they did file a bunch of other suits "in their own names". Both Apple and Microsoft are involved in litigation with other Android manufacturers in multiple jurisdictions, so it's not like they're unwilling to get their hands dirty.
> They didn't file these specific suits "in their own names" because these patents aren't owned by them but by Rockstar, a separate entity of which they are only shareholders and which apparently has committed to the DoJ and FTC to operate autonomously
That's the how, not the why. They had a choice to do it this way.
And "operate autonomously" doesn't mean much when you first fill the subsidiary with nothing but litigators and patents that have already been licensed to everyone meaningful other than the parent's competitors. It's like setting loose a rabid animal near your competitor's business and then trying to disclaim responsibility because the animal was "operating autonomously." What did they expect to happen?
> But they did file a bunch of other suits "in their own names". Both Apple and Microsoft are involved in litigation with other Android manufacturers in multiple jurisdictions, so it's not like they're unwilling to get their hands dirty.
Lawsuits against Google's customers instead of Google. And that's part of the reason why Rockstar is dirty pool.
Suppose Apple files a suit against an Android manufacturer, then a year into the litigation they show up and say "oh hi, we just bought some new patents, so let's throw out all the work we did getting to this point in the trial and start over." That clearly stinks of harassment, is going to make the judge unhappy, and may justly restrict what the plaintiffs are allowed to do with the new claims.
By filing the litigation through Rockstar, they get a separate trial with two bites at the apple in front of two juries, the litigation costs more for the target because they have to defend two overlapping cases in different courts instead of having them consolidated, and they can do it again and again with different troll subsidiaries until their smaller competitors are destroyed.
> That's the how, not the why. They had a choice to do it this way.
I don't think it was that simple, considering that the Nortel portfolio covers a wide array of different technology areas and industries. What other feasible choice did they have? Transfer the patents to themselves? Six companies were involved, each infringing different subsets of the portfolio: who gets what patents? Even if they did divvy up the portfolio somehow, they certainly weren't going to keep them lying around, not after paying so much for them -- They had to be licensed. Splitting the portfolio would not only make it weaker, but it would mean multiple individual licensing efforts. Rockstar currently fulfills the same function that MPEG-LA does.
> And "operate autonomously" doesn't mean much when you first fill the subsidiary with nothing but litigators and patents that have already been licensed to everyone meaningful other than the parent's competitors.
If you read the document linked in the comment I cited, no, those patents were not licensed to anybody meaningful until the auction. But licensing efforts were on the way years when they were still owned by Nortel and before Rockstar was created, so pretty much everybody knew what was coming. That is why all these companies, including Google, were bidding for these patents in the billions.
> It's like setting loose a rabid animal near your competitor's business and then trying to disclaim responsibility because the animal was "operating autonomously." What did they expect to happen?
Well, they paid billions for these patents. Is it fair to them that other infringers get away scott free?
> Lawsuits against Google's customers instead of Google.
Google makes pretty much no money directly from Android. This inherently makes it difficult to extract damages from them. Not to mention that since Google bought Motorola, they do have lawsuits directly against Google as well.
> Suppose Apple files a suit against an Android manufacturer, then a year into the litigation they show up and say "oh hi, we just bought some new patents, so let's throw out all the work we did getting to this point in the trial and start over." That clearly stinks of harassment...
That's not how patent lawsuits work. Dozens or hundreds of patents are involved in a portfolio, but it's not feasible to sue over more than a handful of them, because court resources are extremely limited. If you see how past patent lawsuits have progressed, companies assert a small bunch of patents and over time winnow them down to an even smaller number that are mostly likely to prevail. It's actually rare to see new patents being asserted partway through a lawsuit because, as you said, it annoys judges -- typically a whole new lawsuit is filed instead, which is a whole lot of extra work.
This is intrinsically unfair to the patent-owners with large portfolios, because no matter how many patents are being infringed, they only get to assert a few, and even if they prevail, damages are limited to the patents asserted. This is why companies try to get injunctions -- that is the only way to get enough leverage to properly license an entire portfolio.
Multiple lawsuits seem like harassment only if you disregard the flip side of the coin, which is widespread infringement.
> By filing the litigation through Rockstar, they get a separate trial with two bites at the apple in front of two juries, the litigation costs more for the target because they have to defend two overlapping cases in different courts instead of having them consolidated, and they can do it again and again with different troll subsidiaries until their smaller competitors are destroyed.
If different patents and/or different products are involved, the cases are not overlapping, so it's not the same apple that they're getting bites at.
> This is intrinsically unfair to the patent-owners with large portfolios, because no matter how many patents are being infringed, they only get to assert a few,
I agree with that. That is one of the symptoms of the disease. It is preposterous for every competitor to be infringing thousands of patents held by every other competitor. That is a pathological outcome that doesn't commonly occur in non-software industries. But we have to address the disease, not the symptom. How do we get to a world where the large majority of patent infringement in the software industry is a result of intentional infringement rather than independent invention or a need for compatibility with existing software? The easy solution is for software to be unpatentable. If you don't like that, what's your alternative? (And if the solution involves improving software patent quality, please explain how and also what to do about all the low quality patents already issued.)
> and even if they prevail, damages are limited to the patents asserted.
The other side of this coin is that juries are extremely arbitrary when evaluating the value of a patent, and in the case of software patents will often vastly overestimate their value. There are easily thousands of features the lack of which would materially reduce market demand for a device, and each of those features may be covered by multiple (perhaps hundreds or more) patents. The value of the individual patent is therefore necessarily quite small (and it has no value without being part of a device requiring a large conglomeration of such features) -- it can't possibly be right that the value of one of five hundred patents covering a specific feature is the full hold-up value of including that feature, because that would make the accumulated cost of all the patent licenses vastly in excess of what customers pay or are willing to pay for the device as a whole.
As I think about it, this feels close to the heart of the problem with software patents: The patents each cover a small, independent but complementary incremental improvement that all come together to build common software. The value of the average such patent, i.e. what a practitioner of the invention can reasonably afford and be willing to pay if they were all licensed ex ante, is so much lower than what a defendant has to risk a jury awarding, or the hold-up value of an injunction on a shipped product, that it creates a profitable patent trolling market for entities willing to be loathed in exchange for the significant difference between the market value of a patent when licensed or purchased ex ante and the hold-up value of the same patent to vendors who are unknowingly infringing.
The trouble is the reasonable value of the average software patent is less than the transaction cost of negotiating a license for it. So they either get [cross-]licensed in bulk or (generally obliviously) infringed. But bulk licensing patents is a huge fail because it makes the quality of the individual patents irrelevant, which creates demand for large quantities of low quality patents -- which makes the problem even worse, because the more patents have to be evaluated the less resources you can afford to dedicate to evaluating each one. Meanwhile it devalues and deincentivizes high quality patents that require significant R&D to receive because they go on the same stack with the junk patents.
But how can you fix it? The fundamental problem is that the transaction costs of licensing a typical software patent eat most or all of the value of the patent. Trolling with bad patents is profitable because it foists transaction costs and uncertainty onto the defendant in excess of the value of the patent, so that paying more than the patent is worth but less than it costs to prove that in court becomes cost effective. Recalibrating damage awards and making it more difficult for plaintiffs to unreasonably foist litigation costs onto defendants may reduce the trolling problem, but if effective it would eat a lot of the value of most software patents, often the entire value, because the consequence of the value of the patent not exceeding (or only barely exceeding) the cost of negotiating a license would be born by the patent holders rather than the prospective licensees.
Which seems like a necessary outcome in any event. If the perverse incentives created by bulk licensing are to be avoided then the absolute number of software patents in play has to go down significantly, so that those remaining are the few high quality patents that justify licensing individually. I don't see any obvious way around that.
[note: responding in two comments because it said "that comment is too long"]
> I don't think it was that simple, considering that the Nortel portfolio covers a wide array of different technology areas and industries. What other feasible choice did they have? Transfer the patents to themselves?
They could have. But the most significant choice they had and chose against was to use the patents defensively rather than offensively.
> Even if they did divvy up the portfolio somehow, they certainly weren't going to keep them lying around, not after paying so much for them -- They had to be licensed.
The state of North Korea fails. China spends really quite a lot of money to secure all of their nuclear and chemical weapons. Do they then "have to" sell them to terrorists who promise only not to use them against China?
> Splitting the portfolio would not only make it weaker, but it would mean multiple individual licensing efforts.
Even if the courts don't allow them to assert every patent anyway? What good is it to have thousands of overlapping patents if you can only assert a small number in practice?
> If you read the document linked in the comment I cited, no, those patents were not licensed to anybody meaningful until the auction.
I'm not talking about before the auction.
When a set of patents goes up for sale, the incumbents in the industry have three primary options to buy patents to avoid them getting into the hands of a troll that will try to shake them all down:
1) All band together and buy the patents. This is asking for antitrust trouble, both because all the incumbents are colluding in a way that prevents upstart competitors from procuring defensive patents that would be usable against the incumbents, and because they're conspicuously forming an effective cartel to buy patents instead of bidding against one another. And on the other side of the coin, it's paying the Danegeld collectively, and the sum total paid to the troll by the collective has to be more than what any individual entity would otherwise pay else the seller could sell to that entity for use against its competitors. Which encourages more trolls to "offer" to sell you more patents and gives them more money to procure them with. This is really the patent "communism" option, and is likely to fail for the same reason: You're taking money from productive businesses to give to patent trolls, encouraging the proliferation of more patent trolls which suck more of the life out of productive businesses. That isn't sustainable. It also defeats any benefit of the patent system to actual practicing entities, because they need all their competitors to coordinate to buy the patents of failed businesses, which means you can't use your own patents against them or they'll not cooperate with you and instead buy the patents themselves for defensive purposes (or do (3) to your detriment in retaliation).
2) They can individually take turns placing a bid on patents only when the current high bid is a trolling entity, and then use them only defensively. This is the patent "cold war" option. Each incumbent has to place a bid periodically to maintain their respective arsenals as older patents expire and to make the arrangement stable, but they don't get into bidding wars with one another so nobody ever has to pay excessive amounts. If improvidently granted patents do fall into the hands of a troll who demands excessive royalties then everyone has the duty to fight the good fight to invalidate those patents to make sure that sort of parasitic enterprise is unprofitable. This also makes the patent system not useful for software because any patent assertion against an incumbent invokes mutually assured destruction, but it's probably the most effective way to mitigate the damage of large collections of patents falling into the hands of aggressive trolls.
3) They can buy the patents, immunize themselves, then let them loose to a troll to be used against competitors. Thermonuclear war. Every time patents come up for auction you now get a bidding war because nobody wants to have to fight a lawsuit against a troll funded with competitors' money, which means everybody will soon be overpaying for bad patents while continually fighting suits from patent trolls set up by competitors. Meanwhile building a defensive portfolio becomes next to useless because competitors attack collaterally through trolling entities that can't be asserted against, so instead of nominally wasteful cross-licensing you get monstrously expensive prolific patent litigation. This is the one they chose.
> Well, they paid billions for these patents. Is it fair to them that other infringers get away scott free?
Sure, you just let the competitors pick up the tab for the next round the next time a company full of patents goes bust.
> Google makes pretty much no money directly from Android. This inherently makes it difficult to extract damages from them.
So try to get an injunction. If you theoretically had a solid, valuable patent that Android infringed then Google would subsequently have the incentive to license or avoid it to prevent the injunction, and this would eliminate the duplicative litigation against every individual Android OEM, creating efficiencies for everyone.
It just proves their intent. It isn't to stop these "infringers" from doing something wrong in particular, it's to harass in general the competitors who do well in the market. Creating waste and mutual costs is a benefit to the larger entity that can better absorb the cost, and they know it.
> If different patents and/or different products are involved, the cases are not overlapping, so it's not the same apple that they're getting bites at.
It kind of is, because the thing they're getting more chances at is getting a judge or jury who will significantly over-value at least one of their large arsenal of patents. It's a game the defendants have to win every time but the plaintiffs only have to win once -- one billion dollar award will pay for years and years of unjustifiable patent trolling with low quality patents.
[note: responding in two comments because it said "that comment is too long"]
Perhaps, but I find the end result to be just as vile: a conglomeration of companies banding together to bully a weaker[1] rival. That sounds like anti-competitive behavior to me.
[1] Weaker in relation to the combined power of the conglomeration, anyway.
The laws in the US are pretty clear on this subject. In general, as soon as you start colluding between companies, pooling resources, shaking hands and ganging up against one company, antitrust comes into play. Just look at what happened to Apple and publishers, standard oil, etc.
Having said that, one of the parties involved in collusion was Microsoft. They covered their tracks well, as they have had more than a few run ins with the government here. You can see that in the, "Look, we asked them to join us, they chose not to do so" line.. Which was a laughable point by the way, as joining their group wouldn't have allowed for protecting android manufacturers. But it provides an alibi for regulators. IMO, it's not a very good alibi.
Microsoft and Apple took a huge risk in their collusion. I imagine discovery might bring up some juicy tidbits. I figure they knew the risks, but reasoned that sticking it to their biggest 'problem' was worth the risk of getting caught up with regulators. So that tells you about how scared they are.
Not that it makes it right, but does anyone think that Google wouldn't have used these patents offensively against the Rockstar companies if they had ended up with them?
Yes, I believe that. Based on their past statements and actions I don't believe they would use them offensively. Do you believe they couldn't use the Motorola patent portfolio against those companies if they wanted to?
>Do you believe they couldn't use the Motorola patent portfolio against those companies if they wanted to?
Huh, haven't they been using them against Apple and MS? MS now pays them for H.264 patents, though considerably less than what demanded, and Motorola got convicted and fined by a jury for FRAND abuse.
Rockstar was created specifically to avoid creating products which might infringe on others' patents, so it could subvert and cross licensing deals that exist. If Rockstar enjoys the benefits of being a separate legal entity, surely it should bear the disadvantages as well?
Its not a hair split, consider MPEGLA, they don't make anything, they just provide a one stop shop for patent licenses. Or Public Key Partners. The list goes on.
I agree with the Nortel Retirees that Google knew this was coming, they just decided it would cost less to defend than the $X billion dollars they would have had to bid to get the patents.
>>there's a distinction to be made between a non-practicing entity (patent troll) and a consortium of companies that pooled together to purchase patents
Its a semantic question. But my (soft) definition is a company that buys or registers patents, waits for them to be violated, then extracts licensing fees via legal threats or lawsuits. The non practicing pure trolls are just specialists.
I have been digging more on this and found the following interesting article by Forbes magazine titled "Why Google Needs To Take Rockstar's Complaint Seriously" Here is the link to this post: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rakeshsharma/2013/12/05/why-goog...
The article ends with a solid statement as:
“It may be that they (Google) should have bid more (at the auction for Nortel’s patents) based on the realization that these patents were vital to their search business,” says Rappaport from IP Checkups
Except Nortel did use many of those patents. They decided to sell it to Rockstar, full of owners who are likely licensing the patents to themselves for use in their products. Yes, technically Rockster is an individual company that doesn't make/sell any products but it's not a troll just because of that. It's a troll if the owners didn't use it in their products.
By this logic, any standard bodies would be trolls as well if they decide to sue any companies that infringe without paying the fees.
Lots of the patents now used by patent trolls were originally granted to companies that meant to use them to protect things they built. What matters here is not Nortel, but Rockstar. And Rockstar frankly seems to me to be worse than ordinary patent trolls. Ordinary patent trolls are just running protection rackets. Rockstar was created not to make money but to suppress competition.
The purpose of patents is to suppress competition for one's own products. These patents don't protect any novel aspect of Apple's or Microsoft's products. By definition, if they're valid.
(Nitpick, but the purpose of patents is a lot more open ended than that -- "promote progress of useful arts etc." -- suppressing competition is just one of the means to that end.)
But what makes you say these patents don't cover aspects of Apple's and Microsoft's and the other shareholders' products? The patents involved in the Rockstar lawsuits cover networking, touch-screens and search. The shareholders make products which obviously infringed on these patents to varying extents, and that is why they paid billions for them.
Considering they've paid all that money to secure a "freedom to operate", so to speak, is it fair to them that everyone else gets to infringe with impunity?
As a little guy with a patent (team & I created a new & superior wireless audio technology - superior to BlueTooth Audio, Apple's Airplay & others) I'm with you!
We'd love to connect with some friendly people out west to help us, but not sure how to make that happen? It's not like we haven't tried - we spent a good deal of our savings to demo out in the Valley this past year.
Since we work full time jobs and are in our late 30s it seems harder then ever to find partners/those who can help. Though we will continue to work hard and further innovate with the goal/hopes in mind of finding help and or after a long road/fight be rewarded for our work.
Posted this link [1] in another comment, but apparently Nortel was in licensing negotiations for years before Rockstar was formed, and its CEO claims the current owners had no say in filing these lawsuits.
> current owners had no say in filing these lawsuits.
They didn't give an order, but they created a company whose sole purpose is to file these types of lawsuits. Did they really think that it would never happen?
It would be like the Manhattan Project scientists washing their hands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima because Truman was the one that gave the order.
> This is not correct. You're thinking of the Novell patents. Google did make a bid on the Nortel patents, but was not offered a place within Rockstar.
Jesus. Do you even read your own source before posting? The author seems just as confused as you are, since he's the one posting the Novell comments, and saying it's actually about Nortel, when it's not.
From your own source, here's what Microsoft said:
> Google says we bought -- Novell -- patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no.
> “A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them. We didn’t fall for it.”
Joining Microsoft to buy those patents would've made those patents useless for Google in the fight against Microsoft. Google is trying to buy up patents to defend against Microsoft. They can't do that if they can't assert those patents against Microsoft.
If I may try an analogy, say someone is coming at you with a knife, and you have nothing to defend yourself than a toy gun, and that person knows it's a toy gun. How useful is that gun threatening going to be to scare the guy with the knife away. Pretty useless no? Well that's the same thing with the Novell patents.
I did read it, that's why I posted it. It seems pretty clear to me. Google could've, y'know, joined them. Simple really. Surely a better idea than weaponising them? If you really believe that Google would have used them 'defensively', then you are either naive or delusional. Google knew what they were doing and knew what the ramifications of their actions would be.
Actually, Google was not offered to join the Rockstar consortium. They were offered to participate in a joint bid on the Novell portfolio (which they declined), but not -- as far as we know -- the Nortel portfolio.
I think the confusion arose when Google complained about multiple firms ganging up to win the Nortel auction, and Microsoft shot back that they'd have invited Google into the gang too if it hadn't snubbed them during the Novell auction. All PR posturing on both sides, of course, but prone to sow confusion.
For crying out loud. Will people stop confusing Nortel with Novell!!
That was about Novell patents - different company, and it all happened about a year earlier before Nortel thing went down. Completely different situations. Stop confusing them. I see this misinformation spread everywhere when there's a story about Rockstar.
To be honest, it's come up so often and is used so many times by those defending Rockstar, that I'm starting to think it's actually on a PR sheet somewhere.
> Google was offered a seat in Rockstar, they also placed a bid, and so on. They didn't want to.
Of course they didn't want to. Why would they want to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a bunch of patents they couldn't actually use against any of their main competitors? All it would have bought them is a hole in their pockets (because who would have bought the patents from them if the entire industry had already been immunized to them?), and Apple and Microsoft would then have just bought a different set of patents to sell to trolls expecting for them to be used against Google.
Buying overly broad patents is paying the Danegeld. Once they know you pay the Danegeld you never get rid of the Dane.
I worked at Nortel. Selling the patents provided important money to the fucked over Nortel pensioners. These patents were used for real work, cost massive resources to fund, and Google could have outbid Apple.
Sadly I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only solution to the broken way patents work in this country is for things to get so bad, and these troll lawsuits to get so egregious, that Congress is forced to act and overhall the entire system.
Rockstar in my mind is symbolic of everything wrong in the tech industry these days. I love Apple products, but I love Apple just a little less for getting its hands dirty in this. Obviously there are other companies as well, but I'm not as attached to them. If this ends up speeding up patent reform, I guess it's worth the bitter pill. I'm tempted to switch to Android the next time I get a phone.
Totally off topic but you just triggered a mini rant in me. Apple products are awful. Just today I was cursing Apple over the ridiculous "lightning" connector scandal. It's incomprehensible to me how Apple users keep taking the abuse to the point that they blame themselves for Apple's shenanigans. It's some kind of stockholm syndrome.
It's not a scandal at all. Apple realized that switching connectors every 5-7 years is stupid and wasteful so they designed an excellent physical connector with a dynamically reprogrammable pinout, and a pin assignment protocol to run on it.
It's excellent design, necessary, and improves on everything else presently extant. The use of any other connector would be worse than using the lightning connector.
You can be mad at change for the status quo's sake, but you may wish to reexamine your irrational anger surrounding this specific change, which is a clear improvement in all measurable dimensions.
I have modern android, wp8, win8, os x and ios machines here; looking only at hardware, sorry but what is better than Apple? I'm in the market here for a better laptop that the haswell air; the windows ones, twice as expensive, seriously feel like bad ripoffs. Talking hardware;not OS. Phones I tried to like but if you sit a long time with a 5s, I dont know how they do it but it feels always miles ahead. And I am no fanboy but I am getting there; the competition is just simply crap. But you tell me what to get ; I will get it and live with it in Q1; I want to like something different here.
About the cable; you mean its no standard? I agree with that the EU will force them now so thats fine.
> I have modern android, wp8, win8, os x and ios machines here;
Me too, which ones do you have?
Without the identifying the models, this discussion has no basis really. There are way too many android and win manufacturers there to decide which manufacturer, store or bad decision making ripped you off.
An Haswell(i7) Air, costs about $1550, the only notebooks that compare are the ultrabooks, the exact spec at acer (s7 series) costs about $1500-1600, the other manufacturers cost $1600-1800. Not quite "twice as expensive".
They may be ripoffs of the mac air design(aesthetic), not bad ripoffs tho.
How is that a negative? It really isn't and also, it still uses the standard USB connector at one end.
It's the de-facto standard for all recent iOS devices and upcoming devices for the next 5 years, and a lot of people love the reversible connector. The only ones not liking it are the ones that invested a lot in the 30-pin iOS accessories.
Just as the 30-pin connector has been the de-facto standard the first several years for iOS devices and it wasn't a standard either.
It is standard. It's just a locked standard that other people can't use without permission.
Are there flaws with the connector?
Mag-Safe is a nice idea, but poorly executed. Everyone knows that cables have a significant failure point at the place where wires are soldered to pins, so it's disappointing when a company with excellence in design and attention to detail makes a connector that fails so often at that same place.
I'd say something that uses a USB connector but violates the standard is an example of non-standard. A Lightning plug that doesn't work according to spec might also be non-standard.
Lightning is probably standardized by some reasonable definition of "standardized." It's proprietary, it's not an open standard, but it's a standard.
All this is splitting hairs. The criticism against lightning doesn't depend on the distinction non-standard v. not-an-open-standard.
That's probably a reference to Steve Jobs declaring "thermonuclear war" on Android - the sensationalism is from Apple, not the article's writers/editors.
Really? You're asserting that there's no sensationalism on the part of writers / editors whatsoever by choosing that headline and that image?
Seriously?
I don't agree with what Jobs said, and he's obviously saying that out of personal hurt. But saying that this article isn't sensationalism, especially when the headline says it's Apple backed and not mention anything about a group of companies banding together ... you and I have very different interpretation on sensationalism.
There's a difference between hyperbole and sensationalism.
And this is a blog, for fuck's sake. They can use whatever tone they want. The people wasting time complaining about "sensationalism" should go back to Reddit, where you get more fake Internet points for it.
Meanwhile, in response to abuse of the patent system by so-called “trolls,” the House of Representatives has passed a bill called the Innovation Act (details: http://www.gop.gov/bill/113/1/hr3309) to fix the worst abuses. The bill is expected to pass the Senate and be signed into law next year. Significantly improving patent quality is no easy task and would likely require fundamental changes to patent law, to the PTO, and to procedures for examining patent applications. New rules to reduce “smash-and-grab” patent trolling is VERY IMPORTANT and hope our Govt. acts on this bill asap.
You're absolutely correct but I just wanted to bring that topic just for the general awareness on the "patent troll" subject. Also, I found the following information on "conglomeration of companies" :
In 2011, a group of technology companies that included Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and BlackBerry banded together to outbid Google on a bundle of patents from Nortel Networks. This cadre was victorious, paying $4.5 billion for around 4,000 patents, which Google couldn’t match. Now the group, which calls itself the Rockstar Consortium, is reportedly looking to offload some of those patents.
Saying "Apple-backed" (or "Apple and Microsoft owned" as past articles have) insinuate that those companies are pulling the strings, which is not necessarily true. Straight from the horse's mouth [1]:
Given the amount they paid and given the on-going issues at least some of them have with both Google and the Android platform, many reports have talked about the consortium going on the attack or have assumed that it is the shareholders that have driven things. This is categorically not the case, Veschi says. “It was entirely my call based on the facts in front of me,” he states. “The shareholders got an email telling them what had happened after the suits were issued.”
You might not believe him, but it's not necessarily that unbelievable. For instance, Intellectual Ventures is, in a way, "Google-backed", since Google invested in one of their "funds" (or whatever they call it). Yet IV turned around and sued Motorola two years after Google acquired it.
It's clear that both Microsoft and Apple are pulling the strings. They didn't collectively spend $4.5 billion to just have Rockstar do whatever they want. (Not that creating a patent troll under any scenario is morally defensible for Microsoft or Apple).
The shell games provide them plausible deniability only to naive.
They sued Android. Android is a big threat to both Microsoft and Apple.
In case you didn't read the article I linked, the CEO of Rockstar created these licensing programs while they were still Nortel-owned and has been in negotiations for years before Rockstar was formed. This was a long time coming and all the potential infringers knew it, which was why the auction was in the billions of dollars.
They sued Android. Android is a big threat to both Microsoft and Apple.
Rockstar sued some Android phone makers because it infringes their patents and they don't have a license. Note that they didn't sue Sony, who makes Android phones, because Sony, being part of the consortium, has paid for those patents.
The sale of the Nortel patents closed on
29th July 2011, which also happens to be
Veschi’s birthday. But it took another few
months – until Spring 2012 – for the
acquisition to receive clearance from the
US Department of Justice (DoJ). Although
this approval may have taken some time to
obtain, the only commitment that Rockstar
itself gave to the DoJ (and the Federal Trade
Commission) was that it would operate
autonomously. This, explains Veschi, was
so that the shareholders “as operating
companies cannot pick and choose who we
will target”
Slightly offtopic, but Article One recently launched a crowd-funding project[1] aimed at helping start ups affected by actual patent trolls.
According to the project page,
"Our goal is to launch and maintain a completely free, data-rich, up-to-date, member-supported database that small companies can use to help defend against patent trolls."
They are starting with a patent owned by Treehouse Avatar Technologies regarding gaming avatars. Treehouse has been targeting indie game developers using US 8180858[2].
Eventually, they plan to build a prior art database targeting the most abused patents and provide small start-ups with free access.
How many robots could we have exploring the solar system if companies weren't throwing money into stupid patents?
Like the Banana Equivalent Dose to explain regular radiation we need some easy to grasp comparison to explain just how much money is being wasted in this stupid system.
Universities have patents for the purpose of selling them, no? If a company is making something and wants to use it, then they buy the patent. No different from today in that case. The only difference is that trolls can't buy the same patents in order to sue others, like IV, Rockstar, and others are doing.
Patent reform is highly needed or patents risk to become nothing more than minefields that already established players will use to stall - and ultimately defeat - newcomers and innovation in general, rather than dissemination of information and furthering of the sciences. Software projects (especially Open Source) projects that get popular don't stand a chance against these trolls.
Don't think this is just something we need to read about.
Action is required.
At the moment Google/Android are being attacked by Rockstar Bidco, the Patent Troll King. It owns >6000 (ex-Nortel) patents, which (Microsoft, Apple, Sony, RIM and Ericsson bought jointly) they all stuffed into the Rockstar Bidco company that has no other function than suing possible 'infringers'. Given the vagueness and fondness of the USPTO to 'create intellectual property', this could be the perfect patent storm and Rockstar's boss said it himself: 'Pretty much anybody out there is infringing'. Meaning that whatever gets into the crosshairs of Rockstar, is on the hook for possibly millions of dollars.
Who can defeat a titanic patent Frankenstein as big as Rockstar Bidco? It cannot be sued because it produces nothing (aka an Non Practicing Entity). But it has enormous wealthy backers, so it can sue everyone for everything and just sit it out. In fact, its owners all hold patents on the mobile industry, so the 'urgency' and 'usefulness' of Rockstar could be questioned, outside of being a 'bigger stick to hit Android with'. Google or the Android manufacturers have no option but to face the lawsuits.
Google will have a hard time fighting them off, but I don't see the Android manufacturers survive in one piece. And that's exactly the idea: eradicate Android, make all software development that isn't owned (or graced) by the Rockstar owners a sticky patent mess, leading to a small set of 'friends of Rockstar' who can afford to develop software in peace. That's not only bad for Android or Google, that's a bad sign for software development in general.
Because what if Rockstar Bidco all of the sudden 'feels' that the SteamBox could threaten the Xbox/Playstation duopoly? What if Rockstar Bidco thinks that Ubuntu Phone OS is something that is in infringing on their phone software patents? Who will stand up for them? Of course Rockstar Bidco claims that they are independent, but that was only believed by fools when they formed and only idiots believe it now after the other shoe has dropped (Apple, RIM and Microsoft all attacking Google/Android).
And to the supporters of Rockstar, just to be clear: Google was only invited for a jointly bid on the Novell patents, never on the Nortel patents. As per the legal counsel of Google:
Microsoft’s objective has been to keep from Google and Android device-makers any patents that might be used to defend against their attacks. A joint acquisition of the Novell patents that gave all parties a license would have eliminated any protection these patents could offer to Android against attacks from Microsoft and its bidding partners. Making sure that we would be unable to assert these patents to defend Android — and having us pay for the privilege — must have seemed like an ingenious strategy to them.
In short: Microsoft told them it was going to shoot their dog but offered them to hold the gun when they did it.
The fact that so many frivolous software patents exist is bad enough, the fact that 5 of the biggest tech companies conspired to create the ultimate patent troll is outright disgusting.
Hate Android/Google all you like, but such constructions aren't healthy for a competitive market, they'll just swallow more and more patents, and attack more and more companies, until nobody bothers because of relentless lawsuits as soon as something somewhat popular is produced.
No developer will sleep easy at night when this becomes the default, as an NPE is like a ghost, not subject to the same attacks as a regular business, which makes it so much harder to defeat.
If software can only be developed by the graces or whims of companies like Rockstar Bidco, the software industry will bleed to death in an instant.
