Motorola Sues Apple 176
rexjoec writes "Just a week after Motorola Inc. (MOT) itself became the target of legal action by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), it sued Apple Inc. (AAPL) for the alleged infringement of 18 of its patents. Motorola subsidiary, Motorola Mobility Inc. also filed patent suits against Apple in federal court in Illinois and Florida."
Just great!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is great! If this madness continues, companies will spend 90% of their revenue filing or defending dozens of lawsuits, get nothing done anymore, and will clamor at the doors of congress to save them from the patent madness they once thought to be such a great idea.
Or maybe we're all doomed.
Business as usual... (Score:1, Insightful)
Under this patent system anyhow.
Which makes it no less ridiculous.
Re:Just great!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Laughable (Score:5, Insightful)
These patents are absurd. We've debated the frivolousness of many patents here for a while, but a patent for "Receiver having concealed external antenna" is just laughable. It makes me wonder if there is a patent for have an non-concealed antenna.
Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple still has an army of fans in the media who will proclaim every new product as 'innovative' and 'amazing' regardless of the actually quality which will help less the blow of Android dominance. However there is now an air of acceptance from Apple fans that the iPhone is on its way to a Mac like marketshare and quite a bit of revisionist history of "Apple never wanted to dominate the cellphone market" rationalizing going on.
Re:Armageddon! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it seems destruction is not assured, so it is not MAD, unfortunately it appears to be MAX - Mutually Assued Crosslicensing :(
Re:Business as usual... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Just great!! (Score:3, Insightful)
You think by then that the people with all of the money (ie the lawyers) are going to let these poor companies change the laws that made them all the money in the first place?
Long After IBM Dumped Apple As A Customer (Score:2, Insightful)
Motorola was out of the picture by the time IBM had secured all three console's for its PPC/Cell chips and they dumped Apple as a customer.
This case certainly has nothing to do with that ancient history.
Re:Just great!! (Score:4, Insightful)
You assume there will be intelligent or semi-intelligent people in position to construct a new structure from the ruins of the current system. Ha! The current crop of the body politic is on the fringe of being in touch with understanding the common sense view of the majority. Their primary concerns are about power as it relates to a political office, not the concerns of either the People, Constitution, or the corporate interest.
If the United States loses a centrist, reasonable approach to politics then little will fix the problem. Republicans cheer at the failure of our economy for they feel it will bring them into power and they will "fix the problem". Democrats (for disclosure, I am registered Democrats) will then perform that same acts so they then credit republicans with failure and as the two parties tear apart the country, the middle and lower classes will melt into something between indentured servitude or at the least, little chance at a comfortable life as less then 5% of the population enjoys "The Game".
To stop the madness of A suing B who sues C who sues A and B who sues ... would require the ability of government to respect the "right to fair trial" while revamping laws relating to patents and IP...
Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Careful posting in Apple stories. There is an army of Mac/Apple zealots who will lash out with their mod points at anything remotely perceived as 'anti-Apple' and 'smite the unbeliever'...
Crazy to think Slashdot has turned into a hive of Apple fanboyism. No one would have believed you 10 years ago if you would have told them what was to come.
Re:Laughable (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
For fifty years mobile phones had external antennas that drove people nuts.
Someone figured out how to make the phone actually work with an internal antenna.
They patented it.
That's the whole point of patents.
Re:Laughable (Score:5, Insightful)
Except prior art of on internal antenna is at least 40 years. Its not an innovation. Its an EXISTING AND KNOWN feature but crammed in legalese and put in conditions like "cell based receivers" so that the patent passes without adding any innovation to the world. Its your typical "narrow enough to pass but broad enough to do damage" patent that these companies specialize in for the sake of litigious action against competitors.
The USPO's take on this is that the courts will work it out. Thanks guys for letting any patent go through and letting me, the end user of these phones, pay extra for all the laywering.
NO IT IS NOT (Score:4, Insightful)
The "whole point of patents" was to enable someone to come up with an idea and have a brief exclusivity period so that they could get the idea to market.
The whole premise of patents was that it ACTUALLY TOOK time to get ideas to market, and that an average person COULD GET THEM TO MARKET. Thus they would encourage INNOVATION by allowing small players a way to compete with already entrenched players, via innovation.
Patents were not created so that giant mega-corporations could use them to gain further market share, they were SUPPOSED to be there for the little guy.
The "whole point of patents" is totally meaningless in today's business world. Patents do not serve to encourage innovation, the limit it, because everyone and every company who has an idea has to spend enormous amounts of money just to see if their idea is already patented, and the only ones who can really afford it are the players who are already entrenched. It is not just software and IP patents that have this problem either. With facilities like mini-fabs and Alibaba.com, anyone who has an idea for a product can have it prototyped and have mini runs done of it overseas for very minimal cost. For many inventions It actually will cost more for you to get your patent investigated and filed, than it will for you to make your first 10,000 units and start selling them. How is this supposed to encourage rapid innovation again?
Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sustainable? (Score:4, Insightful)
Motorola and Nokia have a distinct advantage over Apple too - as they (and their partners) invented the vast majority of the technology that makes cell phones work at all, and Apple never paid.