Apple Has Spent More Than $100 Million Suing Android Manufacturers 184
Diggester writes with an excerpt from an article at Gizmocrazed about the absurd amount of money Apple has spent suing HTC et al: "The never-ending war on Android has cost Apple more than $100 million, according to latest estimates. While a huge chunk of that money was spent (read wasted) in claims against HTC. So far, 84 claims have been filed against different Android manufacturers (HTC, Samsung, etc.) for patent infringements, out of which only 10 were proved to have been infringed and only one ruling has gone in Apple's favor."
Re:So much for returns. (Score:4, Informative)
They did - Samsung will open a new factory in Texas for producing the A? CPUs. Too bad that they will be shipped to China for final assembly as there are no suitable factories in US :)
Re:1 ruling in favor vs. $100M (Score:3, Informative)
Question is - how much money did they won from that one ruling in favor ?
Zero. HTC just removed the feature and the court where Apple brought the suit can't issue money damages.
.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/21/BU5H1MFCVG.DTL
Re:Fear of Apple (Score:5, Informative)
It seems everyone's forgotten how different things were before the iPhone. All this "obvious" shit wasn't obvious at all back then, and it was only a few years ago.
Well, you got LG Prada (came out before iPhone, had virtual touch buttons), Samsung F700 (slightly after iPhone), and then you of course got IBM Simon... Launched in 1993, had touch screen controls, a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, and games. And it had less physical buttons than the iPhone.
So... I'd say that all that obvious shit was pretty obvious back then, but the hardware was lacking a bit. Being the first in a race doesn't mean you invented running :)
Re:Money not necessarily 'wasted' (Score:5, Informative)
Not Trolling. Not FUD.
Yes, it was idiotic, but it did happen.
http://www.dailytech.com/Report+Apple+Caught+Photoshopping+Galaxy+Tab+101+to+Look+Like+iPad+for+Lawsuit/article22459.htm [dailytech.com]
http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/apple/apple-could-have-given-faulty-evidence-in-euro-samsung-case/ [technobuffalo.com]
http://pauloflaherty.com/2011/08/16/was-apple-caught-fudging-the-facts/ [pauloflaherty.com]
http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/15/did-apple-alter-photos-of-the-samsung-galaxy-tab-10-1-in-its-inj/ [engadget.com]
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/apples-evidence-in-european-galaxy-tab-injunction-was-seriously-misleading-as-in-false/ [techcrunch.com]
do you need more?
Re:1 ruling in favor vs. $100M (Score:4, Informative)
The tantrum was about someone doing to him exactly what he did to Xerox.
Apple licensed the technology, and paid in Apple stock. So not comparable
Re:Does not compute (Score:4, Informative)
I think the reason is these are not full court cases,but injunction hearings. Only one jurisdiction, Germany, is enforcing any sort of an injunction and they are still allowing third parties to market and sell Samsung products, just not Samsung.
Re:Does not compute (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw I believe is where I read a brief summary. The judge in at least one of those cases said that while there was infringement there was no possible way that damages were caused because of the nature of the patent. I like smart Judges personally.
In several other cases (again see if you can find them on Groklaw) the MFR was given time to work around the patent. Again no damages were awarded.
Which is which case? No idea off the top of my head. I read way to much to know sources this long after reading them.
Re:Does not compute (Score:5, Informative)
9 cases of infringement that involved software that was changed in the next update so that while Apple MAY have won court costs they didn't win any profit from the defendant. Winning infringement cases usually means the end of a product in the physical world but since this is design attacks on software they can simply rectify the issue in the next software push and thus negate the whole issue.
Re:So much for returns. (Score:4, Informative)
The iPhone still has a hefty market share - which is important for Apple because they make the bulk of their iPhone related money on the iTunes store commissions.
I don't think it invalidates any of your other points, but it looks like iTunes (apps, music, and video) brought in about 1/10 the money as did sales of iPhones in the last quarter, about 1/3 of the amount brought in from iPad sales, about 1/3 of the amount brought in from CPU sales and about the same amount as brought in by iPod sales. My rough estimates from the following graph give about 2.5 billion for iTunes, 2.5 for iPod, 7.5 for CPU, 7.5 for iPad, 25 billion for iPhone.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/24/apple-reports-best-quarter-ever-in-q1-2012-13-06-billion-profit-on-46-33-billion-in-revenue/ [macrumors.com]
They seem to have had a total of 46 billion of total revenue, and 13 billion in net profit. Even if all of the 2.5 billion of iTunes was 100% profit (ie no costs associated with it), that is still only about 1/5th of their total net income. The iPhone would need to have profit rates of less than 10% to get its net profit to be about equal to this. That doesn't sound like "they make the bulk of their iPhone related money on the iTunes store commissions".
Apple is making some pretty big bucks in their content sales businesses, but they still seem to be making the lion's share of their money in the hardware sales business.
Re:1 ruling in favor vs. $100M (Score:4, Informative)
We are talking about a company that nearly went out of business because they didn't properly patent their UI (And Apple did a lot of improvements over the Xerox design)
Speaking as someone who worked on both Xerox and Apple computers during the mid 1980s, this is rubbish. There were no significant innovations which Apple and its offspring brought to their user interface - at least until NeXT Step [wikipedia.org] - which had not at least been experimentally tried at Xerox PARC before Steve Jobs' famous visit. Even if they had, nothing in this ought to be patentable anyway - it's all reasonably obvious to any practitioner in the field as soon as the technology (bit-mapped screens and a pointing device) becomes available. When I last bothered to track it, there were fourteen US patents for which I personally had created prior art; I'm sure there are many more now.