Apple vs Samsung, court orders Samsung to show Apple 5 new phones

[muon]

I don't misunderstand at all.

You misuenderstand what the law says and what the law does.
And instead seem to think it is some idealistic system, that it certainly isn't.

So is the Nokia design patents to stifle competition? I thought only apple did that.

Hey if Nokia uses these patents to force injunctions, I'll be the first to criticise.

Blindly sticking to the law says you can't criticise blatant tax avoidance or other abuses of systems. I would question the scope of people's ability think if they can't see beyond that. The reasoning is more important than the law, as the reasoning created the law.

 

[Glaucus]

Hey if Nokia uses these patents to force injunctions, I'll be the first to criticise.

Blindly sticking to the law says you can't criticise blatant tax avoidance or other abuses of systems. I would question the scope of people's ability think if they can't see beyond that. The reasoning is more important than the law, as the reasoning created the law.

Jwbe you read anything I've said. I have criticized the law won many occasions.

What I haven't done is blindly follow the apple are evil, they are the only one who have such patents, use such patents and have a patent on a touch screen device with rounded corners.

I disagree with the laws, strongly. But that is the fault of governed.
What I don't agree with is apple is special and is doing something new, or hold patents based on a simple title made by the media.

Read foss patents for more detailed explanations of patent disputes, rather than just news like apple owns pinch to zoom. Well no they don't, newer version of android and other Os use pinch to zoom and do not need to license apples patents, so how do apple own pinch to zoom, simply they don't and media has oversimplified it.

 

[muon]

I read foss patents all the time. It's on my rss reader. I've actually read all the relevant patents in detail. I'm not a software expert and so don't understand them all completely but do get the nuances.

Apple weren't smart enough (they made a small slip, edit: i don't think its intentional as some are suggesting) to patent their pinch to zoom feature properly and so Google found a workaround.

If Apple had a more concrete patent, what would your opinion have been? What if Google patents the workaround?

 

[Glaucus]

No, they didn't make a mistake, you simply can't patent pinch to zoom, what you can do is patent certain processes that need to occur. That is what apple have done and it is easy to get around the patent.

Going by the judgment, which are always open to appeal.
Samsung simply copied apples patent and so infringed.
Just like they did with the designs, rather than making the phone different, they copied the look of the iPhone. It is not a patent for a phone with rounded corners. It is pretty much for an exact copy of the iPhone, leaving thousands of designs available, of which most other manufactures simply haven't infringed on.

There's a very good article on the pinch to zoom patent a few pages back and it isn't a mistake by apple at all.

 

[muon]

They wouldn't be patenting pinch to zoom. They'd simply have to patent the process of effectively using pinch to zoom the way Google are. Give me a second and I'm certain they do a similar thing in another part of their multitouch patent portfolio.

 

[Glaucus]

Can we say clutching at straws. They can't stop other people doing pinch to zoom, they can't patent ever version posssible.

This is also why similar patents may not be prior art.

 

[englishpremier]

Unfortunately Apple have set a precedent by winning their court case.

If you are Nokia, Samsung, HTC et al, you now have no choice but to start patenting crap. Google started doing it recently as well.

Nokia won theirs. Cost Apple $400m

 

[Glaucus]

Nokia won theirs. Cost Apple $400m

As have others, it's just apple have won more, due to the non FRAND portion of their patent portfolio. That is the biggest difference, between these law suites.

 

[englishpremier]

Motorola were very pleased with the complete dismissal of the case between them and Apple. Their FRAND abuse actually worked in getting nearly all of Apple's UI patent disputes against them dismissed.

You fail to understand why patents exist at all and why FRAND exists. It isn't derived from necessity but from issues over competition.

When someone invents something (at a high cost) which naturally becomes a standard, a patent would give them a complete monopoly seriously distorting the market. So FRAND was created, effectively regulating this monopoly which would exist.

Apple's patents exist entirely to stifle competition. Not to protect an investment but to force other companies from competing in their space. Just as Judge Posner said.

IP laws are a result of economic theory. Nothing else.

When we have something clearly distorting competition and not forcing innovation but the patenting of pre-existing technology in order to shut out competitors, then something is very wrong. This is led by companies like Apple.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminatory_licensing

FRAND doesn't seem to mean much though. Which countries enshrine it in their law?

 

[Glaucus]

FRAND doesn't seem to mean much though. Which countries enshrine it in their law?

Most of them, well not enshrine it. But set precedence.

Check my post a page or so back.

FRAND means a lot a hell of a lot in law. People need to stop saying FRAND means nothing, it means a huge amount and courts hold FRAND up in the court of law.

What do you mean "Samsung can't do that"? FRAND isn't a legal instrument and none of the terms within it have a legal definition. Also the person paying for the license doesn't get to dictate what "reasonable" is. The usual deal with these is cross licensing of patents, something Apple pretty much refuse to do hence the drawn out case with Nokia which they ended up having to pay for.

It's got legal precedence and all the claims so far with FRAND patents have not gone well at all.
Yes they usually end up paying but less than the extortionate amounts some want to charge and then back dated. Still works out cheaper than what some companies want.

There are people out there, including some you can find quoted in the media, who say that there's a scarcity of caselaw regarding FRAND. While there certainly isn't an abundance of FRAND decisions since earlier cases typically got settled before anything important happened, one of the positive effects of the ongoing wave of smartphone patent disputes is that more FRAND issues than ever do get decided, and so far there's a clear trend across multiple federal districts that FRAND is anything but the empty word that certain notorious abusers would like it to be. District Judge Robart in Washington State, Circuit Judge Posner in Illinois (sitting by designation on a district court), District Judge Crabb in Wisconsin with the order I'm disczussing here and, on a preliminary basis, District Judge Koh in California have all given meaning to FRAND. Moreover, influential U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have spoken out in favor of reasonable interpretations of FRAND. (The context here is U.S. law, but let's not forget about the European Commission.)

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/08/us-court-grants-apple-partial-summary.html

Basically people like to say FRAND means nothing, that simply isn't the case.

And let's not think eu is any easier on FRAND patents. Samsung is allready in trouble from the EU and lost several EU cases with FRAND patents.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ation-into-samsungs-3g-frand-patent-lawsuits/

The European Commission announced on Tuesday that it has begun a formal investigation into Samsung's strategy of using FRAND-encumbered patents related to 3G wireless networking standards in lawsuits. The announcement comes after the Commission began a preliminary inquiry into the matter last November and several courts in the EU have struck down Samsung's attempts to use the patents against Apple.

And investigate Motorola over FRAND as well
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/european-commission-frand-patents-83078

In April, the European Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into Motorola Mobility, after Microsoft claimed the mobile firm was abusing its market position by not offering patents under FRAND terms

http://blog.ksnh.eu/en/2012/02/23/e...and-frand-sharpened-by-smartphone-war-part-1/

Mr Almunia clarified in his speech that he intends to enforce the so called*FRAND principle*(“fair, reasonable, and non-discriminating license”) by the executive power of EU anti-trust law in order to urge owners of standard-essential patents to out-license them under fair, essential and non-discriminatory conditions, so as to also enable further market actors to market standard-conform products. In other words, the respective standards should be available to all market participants in order to prevent the standard degenerating to patent-protected cartels.

This idea, however, is not new as it follows the lines of the 2010 EU Regulations on horizontal agreements (IP/10/1702 and*MEMO/10/676), which also underlined the EU Commission’s approach that FRAND conditions are essential prerequisites for a free access to standardised technologies.

So want to rethink FRAND means nothing and has no legal backing? People keep saying it throughout this thread, but never back it up.

 

[AndyCr15]

You say that others started the litigation story yet it is only Apple that are getting a bad press.

Someone had told me Apple were the ones lobbying for patent law to be changed to how it is (with regards to software and such) but this is just what I'm told, I have nothing to back it up. Anyone know about it?

 

[Glaucus]

Someone had told me Apple were the ones lobbying for patent law to be changed to how it is (with regards to software and such) but this is just what I'm told, I have nothing to back it up. Anyone know about it?

Far from it, they are lobbying for the opposite. They want to make it easy to remove bad patents. And spent 720k on lobbying alone in 2007.

Apple Inc. is looking to make some changes to the U.S. patent system and spent US$720,000 during the first half of 2007 lobbying the U.S. federal government to make that happen. Like many high tech companies, Apple is pushing for reforms that would make it easier to remove bad patents, according to Forbes.

Companies like Apple are motivated to push through changes to the patent system because reevaluation of some patents after they have been granted could help reduce legal costs. Currently, many companies are saddled with large legal fees because of lengthy court battles over patent issues.

The cash that tech companies spend in lobbying now is likely far less than the cost to defend or attack patents in court.

Federal law requires companies to disclose how much money they spend during the first six months of the year in lobbying efforts. Apple filed its report with the Senate public records office on August 14.

Although Microsoft and IBM were lobbying for software patents in Nz
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...e-new-zealand-to-allow-software-patents.shtml

You may remember a few years ago there was some controversy down in New Zealand over software patents. There was a plan to explicitly outlaw software patents, but then someone accidentally leaked the fact that big tech companies (mainly US ones, like Microsoft and IBM) had lobbied hard against outlawing software patents, leading to a change in plans. After that leak resulted in more public outcry it was claimed that the proposal would go back to outlawing most, but not all software patents. Well, it seems that the supporters of the big US software firms were just biding their time. As various reports are noting, more than two years after all of this, proposed amendments have finally been made to the bill, and they appear to create a massive loophole for software patents, which certainly seems to reflect the desires of Microsoft and IBM's lobbying efforts in the country. One hopes that further public outcry will finally make Kiwi politicians realize that they don't have to do what American companies demand...

 

[Richie]

They own something like 14% of the patents, so if you extrapolate the money they are asking so apple pays the others who hold the patents as well, it is no way fair and non-discriminatory.
Yes apple will have to pay and back dated, but it will be a sum not even in the same ball park as Samsung is asking.

People keep saying this but can anyone actually tell me what Apple are proposing and what Samsung want? I mean ACTUAL FIGURES.

Please no one go down the line of what it costs for the physical chip to be made as that's a silly argument and does not take into account R&D for the tech which can be in the millions.

 

[Glaucus]

Not the cost to make, the cost for apple to purchase the chip.
There's an article somewhere that's allready been posted that explains it. I'll try and dig it up.

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/09/where-on-earth-could-samsung-get-iphone.html
Ok it's about a possible 4g lawsuit, but it also says they've had a zero success rate against apple with FRAND patents.

Obviously, the larger a portfolio is, the more likely it is to contain truly essential patents, as opposed to merely declared-essential patents. But Samsung's unsuccessful 3G enforcement campaign against the iPhone*4S failed primarily because of licensing issues. The other respect in which a large portfolio of patents specific to a given standard can help is that a larger portfolio typically (unless there are serious validity or essentiality issues) entitles a patent holder to a higher royalty rate. The reasonable royalty rate is a factor to some courts who look at whether the implementer of the standard was made a FRAND offer. But even with 12% of all 4G/LTE patents, Samsung can't claim a 2.4% royalty on Apple's products. If you extrapolate this percentage to the entirety of 4G/LTE patents, Apple would have to pay 20% of its sales -- tens of billions of dollars a year -- to the collective owners of 4G/LTE patents. That's still far out of the FRAND ballpark.

It's not just the percentage Samsung asks for but, especially, the royalty base. I explained that issue on previous occasions, such as this post on one of Apple's pre-trial filings with Judge Koh's court. The proper royalty base would be a fully-licensed baseband chipset, or at the most a cheap feature phone, just like a jalopy and a sports car pay the same highway toll, as Apple noted in a letter to U.S. lawmakers. Also, Samsung won't get 2.4% of the price of an airplane if it comes with on-board 4G/LTE functionality.

Patent exhaustion is also going to be a big issue. From what I heard, the iPhone*5 will come with a Qualcomm baseband chip. Qualcomm and Samsung have a patent license agreement in place. Samsung tried to terminate it with respect to Apple as a third-party beneficiary (Motorola, advised by the same lawyers, tried the same thing). But in some jurisdictions, Samsung's push for injunctions against Apple devices incorporating Qualcomm baseband chips failed just because that termination theory was rejected, especially in light of Samsung's promise to grant irrevocable FRAND licenses to its SEPs. I don't know the Samsung-Qualcomm agreement but most likely it won't make a distinction between 3G and 4G patents as far as termination is concerned -- and participants in 4G/LTE standard-setting also had to promise to grant irrevocable FRAND licenses.

http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/08/berkeley-professor-teece-notorious-for.html

Meanwhile, Samsung has started to make its own offensive case, claiming that Apple infringes on a handful of its patents, a couple of which are allegedly standard-essential. Apple just scored a very significant FRAND-related victory over Motorola in Wisconsin, and it has plenty of FRAND-related defenses and counterclaims going in the California case. Rather than offer Apple a royalty rate that deserves to be called FRAND, Samsung is still demanding the same 2.4% of Apple's sales that it's already been demanding for about a year. The figure first came up at a court hearing in The Hague, Netherlands, last September, and shortly thereafter in a couple of Italian court rulings.

Considering that Samsung owns only a limited percentage of all 3G (UMTS) patents, that 3G is only one of the standards that are needed to make a basic feature phone work and that this standard has nothing to do with the huge price difference between an iPhone-like smartphone and a feature phone, Samsung can't reasonably demand 2.4% of the entire market value of Apple's products implementing the standard. There are only two reasons for which Samsung makes this demand: it assumed all along that Apple wouldn't accept it, but thought that if Apple surprisingly did accept it, this would give Samsung a lot of leverage in any future settlement negotiations. Neither motivation has anything to do with the FRAND market value of those patents. Apple rightfully insists that Samsung comply with its FRAND pledge.

One of Samsung's challenges is now to defend its 2.4% demand in front of the judge and the jury. At a minimum, Samsung hopes to instill at least some doubt in them about Apple's (accurate) position that 2.4% is far from a FRAND rate.

 

[bam0]

But, as you refuse to acknowledge, neither you, Florian nor Apple get to define what "Fair" and "Reasonable" are. And, despite your ramblings, there is no legal definition for them either, hence the court cases. Stop pushing your opinion as fact.

 

[Glaucus]

But, as you refuse to acknowledge, neither you, Florian nor Apple get to define what "Fair" and "Reasonable" are. And, despite your ramblings, there is no legal definition for them either, hence the court cases. Stop pushing your opinion as fact.

What don't I acknowledge.
If an agreement can't be made, then it is up to a court what is fair.
My opinion? No opionion of judges, the legal system and expert witnesses that have defined FrANd and set precedence in courts world wide.

Samsung has had a Zero success rate so far
With FRAND counter suits.

Basically your talking rubbish yet again.
I've posted the cases, read them, look at the set precendce it produces and the expert witness called to explain FRAND.

 

[bam0]

What don't I acknowledge.

Your lack of ability understand basic English? I mean, that sentence contained the terms I was referencing.

If an agreement can't be made, then it is up to a court what is fair.
My opinion? No opionion of judges, the legal system and expert witnesses that have defined FrANd and set precedence in courts world wide.

They haven't defined it, certain courts have set certain limits, not all of these are binding on other courts.

Samsung has had a Zero success rate so far
With FRAND counter suits.

Really? Given how much you clearly know about this is must be my imagination that Samsung won a case in June in the Hague that Apple were infringing a Samsung 3G patent?

Basically your talking rubbish yet again.
I've posted the cases, read them, look at the set precendce it produces and the expert witness called to explain FRAND.

You haven't read all the case docs you're talking about, you've read Florian Muller's site, a guy who is a paid shill, this doesn't make you an expert.

 

[Owenb]

Also, Samsung won't get 2.4% of the price of an airplane if it comes with on-board 4G/LTE functionality.

A smartphone isn't very smart without 3G/4G, while an airplane is still an airplane without 3G/4G.

I don't think people have really understood how big this could be. If this all this goes Apples way then the software industry will be controlled by a few companies for all time, at least in the western world. Nobody will be able to do anything significant without stepping on Apple and Microsoft toes(i.e get successful) and if you step on them they will crush you. Every animation, every gesture, every rounded/square/pointy corner on an icon patented. It will become a legal nightmare where people will have to spend more time designing around patents that designing the core system that they are trying to build.
Software is an art form and it builds on what went before it. Beethoven and Mozart drew inspiration from Bach but in the software world they would have spent most of their years in court instead of composing.

 

[Richie]

As Kirby Ferguson said, what if Xerox had done what Apple (and others) are doing. I highlight Apple as this is what the video mentions. I have skipped it to the relevant part. Watch it till about 07:16 (abut 30 secs worth):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zd-dqUuvLk4#t=414s


This should not be allowed and, contrary to what people like mrochester says, it WILL stifle innovation as no new fledgling company will enter the market.

 

[Glaucus]

Your lack of ability understand basic English? I mean, that sentence contained the terms I was referencing.

They haven't defined it, certain courts have set certain limits, not all of these are binding on other courts.


Really? Given how much you clearly know about this is must be my imagination that Samsung won a case in June in the Hague that Apple were infringing a Samsung 3G patent?


You haven't read all the case docs you're talking about, you've read Florian Muller's site, a guy who is a paid shill, this doesn't make you an expert.

Did I say I was an expert or read all cases. Um no.

What ever you say FRAND is legally bound in many countries as showen by court cases.

Samsung win did they really?
Just because apple have to pay royalties does not mean Samsung won at all. It's the rate that is important.