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.
Re:Just great!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Business as usual... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we're seeing something different here. Company A gets sued by Company B, because B wants a revenue stream from a stupid patent (especially since it's rather obvious that B is struggling in the mobile market pretty badly). Company A, also struggling, doesn't want to have to pay for the eventual licensing out of its own funds, so it sues Company C to get a revenue stream that it will in turn use to pay B with (and maybe get a bit of extra besides). Eventually everyone is suing everyone else to, well, pay everyone else.
It all looks good on paper, though, and it'll confuse the hell out of shareholders enough to make them look profitable.
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or more concisely in the long run: "Passing the buck" with a helping heaping of "what goes around comes around."
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It all looks good on paper, though, and it'll confuse the hell out of shareholders enough to make them look profitable.
Well at least somebody wins... (the lawyers)
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Indeed. I worked as a Paralegal in the Bay Area for awhile back in the day doing IP work. Our lawyers would try and talk some sense into the clients, but they were so often consumed by self-rightous fury that they couldn't be reached. So we went forward knowing it was a poor case from the get go, because that's what we were paid to do. How many coders have been paid to contribute code to a project they knew fromt eh start was doomed to fail? You can only po
Re:Business as usual... (Score:4, Funny)
Well at least somebody wins... (the lawyers)
Banks and lawyers. Two totally unnecessary services getting the most money from everything for nothing?! Great! :D
Let's not forget the roles of the paralegals, court reporters, bailiffs, court clerks, gavel carpenters and those pretentious robe designers! They're benefitting as much as anyone in this litigious patent machinery.
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Neither is an unnecessary service, strictly speaking. Lawyers are overvalued because of our overly litigious society by a long shot, however. The moment we start talking about things where someone needs a loan that beyond individual ability to offer, banks become necessary. Unless we're talking about a system in which the seller loans the buyer a physical good in exchange for a prescribed payment plan, in which case the seller is providing effectively the same service but with greater risk.
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Obviously I know what both does, however one could argue about their methods.
But you didn't argue about their methods, you said they were unnecessary. And while I don't know if you were one of those complaining about banking practices, though I wouldn't be surprised if you did after all you say they're unneeded, because new banking regulations passed and is now law I have to pay for banking. I used to have "free checking" but since this summer I now pay a banking fee. It's not much, only $10 a month, but
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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?
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The point was that they wouldn't have enough money when "we hit the bottom" as the GGP was talking about. It's a hypothetical situation. Hopefully they will realise before then though.
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...
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If the United States loses a centrist, (Score:2)
reasonable approach to politics then little will fix the problem.
As if a centrist approach is practiced now. NOT!!!
Falcon
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This is just a recapitulation of the early days of radio broadcasting. The big players fought each other tooth and nail, and eventually formed a patent cabal to stifle innovation and keep smaller competitors out of the marketplace. Lawsuits based on the shakiest imaginable IP flew like arrows at Thermopylae, and at least one pioneering figure in wireless tech was driven to suicide [std.com].
That was the better part of a century ago. The patent system was abused by incumbents to protect their turf, people bitched a
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Yup. I'm going out to buy more popcorn.
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companies will spend 90% of their revenue filing or defending dozens of lawsuits, get nothing done anymore
Except that giant corporations love time- and money-wasting processes, as long as everyone has to play. It limits competition by forcing startups to have years and millions of dollars handy just for idiot patent suits before they can even think about revenue.
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Actually, as someone who has been involved in large-scale litigation, while legal fees for these sorts of things seem huge, when measured against the operating costs of the corporation as a whole they're not especially large. I mean a sin
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I mean a single 30-second national TV ad costs a few hundred thousand dollars. For that you could get a month or two of steady work out of a top law firm.
And if you're on the receiving end of a lawsuit and you lose you can be liable for hundreds of millions of dollars. For small and medium businesses, as well as the self-employed, that can be the deathblow of the business.
Falcon
Armageddon! (Score:3)
It's like the Mutually-Assured-Destruction scenario in the mobile/wireless world!
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 :(
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How is that unfortunate? Would you rather have no mobile phone vendors, or lots of mobile phone vendors all able to produce phones with lots of useful features and good UIs?
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It's unfortunate because after they figure out a deal, cross-licensing will happen between the big industry players. They'll arrange a deal with each other and form a patent pool that will prevent anybody else from entering the market, and ensuring anything groundbreaking has a hard time appearing. And in a few years the same thing will happen again. And so on.
I'm waiting for enough unreasonable companies to come along that the entire industry implodes on itself due to litigation that leaves everybody screw
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Yes you're right – the mobile industry did that very effectively against Apple, they stood no chance of moving into the market and turning it on its head.
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Whatever. As long as I see some nukes flying and Bruce Willis trying to be an actor, I'd pay money to set at the courthouse.
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Begun, the patent wars have?
There was already a well-established patent Cold War, is this the end of it?
Re:Armageddon! (Score:5, Funny)
Or something like that.
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slain lawyers. The lawyers are like the house in poker they always win, regardless of who wins the hand.
Sustainable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this really sustainable for the industry? It seems like every mobile company has patents that every other mobile company is either stepping on or tiptoeing around. I have to think that by this time next year all the major companies involved will have set up a meeting somewhere and agreed to cross license with each other. All these patent suits are just wrangling for a better position in the agreement that they all know is coming eventually. Of course, such an agreement would make it next to impossible for any new companies to enter the market, which I'm sure none of the current manufacturers would be sad about.
Re:Sustainable? (Score:5, Informative)
It seems like every mobile company has patents that every other mobile company is either stepping on or tiptoeing around
Nope, most companies have cross-licensing agreements. Apple is in trouble because they didn't bother to set these up when they entered the market. Nokia fired first and now everyone else in the same position has decided that they can get some money from Apple, or force them out of the market.
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.
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Not really, Apple didn't have anything of value so Nokia et al. asked for cash, this is not unusual as many manufacturers such as HTC, LG, Huewei and so forth pay cash because they dont have a sufficient patent portfolio. Only the top tier R&D companies like Sony Eriksson, Motorola and Nokia have a no fee cross licensing agreement.
The way it works is, Manu
Apple Computer (Score:2)
Remember Apple wasn't doing well till they got the iPod out. The iPhone made that cake really fatting :P
No, Apple was coming back from financial ruin years before the iPod [wikipedia.org] came out which was in 2001. Apple's renaissance [wikipedia.org] started in 1998 with the release of the iMac line. Since then Apple has come out with one hit after another, even with devices others had first.
For full disclosure, I typing this on my MacBook Pro and I may replace it with another. However I don't have an iPod or an iPhone. For now my So
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It'll eventually shake itself out, the industry will consolidate to just a couple big players, the barrier to entry will be too high for anyone new to enter the market, and us consumers will have fewer, crappier options. Booyah.
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The Free Market in ACTION!
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Patents are part of the free market? And here I thought those was government granted monopolies.
Troll elsewhere, fool.
The Free Market in ACTION! (Score:2)
What GP says is not a free market. In a true free market there would not be patents. Of course truth doesn't matter to some, such as those who oppose free markets.
Falcon
No matter who loses, the lawyers win (Score:5, Informative)
A diagram in the Guardian from last week [guim.co.uk] nicely illustrates the insanity that is the mobile phone litigation business. With the vortex of lawsuits surrounding both hardware and software, it's amazing that anybody is able to innovate at all.
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It's way, way more tangled than the Guardian picture would lead you to believe
(Disclaimer - I help develop and support software that controls hardware made by pretty much all those companies, but my opinions are my own and do not represent them or my customers/etc)
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1000 Internets to anyone that recreates that diagram in the style of a WOPR simulation.
Patent wars (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty hard to keep the graph [nytimes.com] up-to-date.
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No it's not, since it will eventually degenerate into an fully connected graph. Just find one on Wikipedia or Wolfram, and link to that picture instead.
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That one is innacurate (and way too simplified), use this one [flickr.com] instead.
Oodles of phone lawsuits (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding the unfolding mess, here's what info I've gathered:
And if someone wants to get an article started on this new lawsuit, go ahead:
Motorola_v._Apple_(2010,_USA) [swpat.org]
Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
Getting sued by other major cellphone makers for patent infrigment.
Dumped into third place in sales by Google and Android.
Defective hardware - botched antenna design, wonky proximity sensor, and glass casing problems.
iOS woefully behind Android in features and ease of use.
And Apple has stopped giving out their iPad sales numbers updates.
At least they are doing better than Microsoft's colossal failure with the dead Kin and Windows Phone 7 OSes.
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.
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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.
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Indeed, what a long strange trip it has been since, "No wireless, less space than Nomad, lame."
Re:Cellphone Market Turning Ugly For Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
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AC uses a car analogy about slashdot posters... and manages to be insightful.
Bravo, sir.
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Best. Car. Analogy. Ever.
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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'...
I see that you've already been smitten with a +5 Insightful.
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Our species is barely less retarded than the other shit throwing primates. I'd have believed it, no problem.
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Apple still has an army of fans in the media
And Slashdot still has an army of anti-Apple zealots who will try to use anything against Apple.
Falcon
iOS is woefully behind on ease of use? (Score:2)
Versus Android?
How so?
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Not having to actually USE the phone to access those things (because they're the default, customized to my needs home screen) is the ultimate ease-of-use.
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and all of them stays in alphabetical order in the menu, which makes finding an app much more easier
swipe to the left on the home iOS screen, type in the first letter of the application you want into the search box... and Spotlight will bring up a list of applications starting with that letter.
They all do the same stuff, albeit in slightly different ways.
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Yea it is so ugly I just bought a new iphone 4 yesterday. IOS behind? I laugh at your silly remark.
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Kin sure, but I hardly see WP7 as a "colossal failure" in any way. The software is only just out, the hardware isn't available yet, and unless you work for MS the odds that you've held even a prototype in your hand are damn low.
Its launch day announcement has a huge number of phones signed up already - 5 launch devices in the US alone, and twice that around the world. When the CDMA version comes out there will be a bunch of new devices as Sprint and Verizon get in the game. The state of the app store is cu
having trouble keeping up? (Score:2)
A nice data visualization [amazonaws.com] will help
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.
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Maybe it's for a 'Receiver having concealed antenna that suffers poor reception when held the wrong way'?? That would be a little more specific (and a touch less obvious) ;-)
Good thing that Apple avoided that with the iPhone 4 then.
In [tgdaily.com] denial [sfgate.com] are [fastcompany.com] we [gizmodo.com]?
Falcon
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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.
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For years, people have been storing digital photographs outside of a camera... Kodak found a way to put them inside!
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?
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Well if they patented their actual working internal antenna design, then I can understand that. But if they're claiming to own the very concept of an internal antenna, then that's just silly.
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Someone figured out how to make the phone actually work with an internal antenna.
Except portable radios have had internal antennas since the 1970s and least and they worked. Except Economists say copyright and patent laws are killing innovation; hurting economy [wustl.edu]. Study: Free Markets Superior to Patent Monopolies [mises.org].
Falcon
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As has been posted in another patent story, it's the claims that matters, not the title.
Old resentment (Score:2, Interesting)
Freescale != Motorola (Score:3, Informative)
The transition from Motorola to Intel processors decided in 2005 by Apple
...happened after Motorola had already spun off its semiconductor division as Freescale in 2004.
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.
With Insolvency Possible...Sue (Score:2)
If Moto spent as much time truly innovating products that were on the leading edge of consumer demand, as they once did, they would not be looking like losers now.
Patents are only good IF YOU USE THEM IN YOUR PRODUCTS.
Patent trolls don't have ongoing brand value.
I loved the early Moto "flip phones" in the late 80s that were damn near indestructible, if bulky for a pocket.
Then when they started to miniaturize their phones, my experiences led me to believe that they lost the good designers, because of all the
In an off the record meeting ... (Score:5, Funny)
Motorola: That would be great, but what would we have to do?
MS: Nothing much, just mess with Apple a bit. We could do it ourselves but it would attract the kind of attention we don't want right now.
First thing that when through my mind when I read the headline.
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I dont know why people think MS is against Apple Inc (and vice versa) they haven't attacked each other since Apple Computers died in the 90's. In fact MS moved to save Apple in the late 90's. Both MS and Apple know that Linux is the real
What a stupid industry (Score:2)
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My favorite was one of Apple's, which described a typical GUI with hierarchical menus, "on a limited resource computing device". Evidentally "forgetting" that the "limited resource computing device" in question was a lot less limited in resources than an Apple //gs or an early Mac.
Waiting (Score:2)
Does anyone still care about this? (Score:5, Funny)
Suing is how you say "hello" in the cell phone business.
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Suing is how you say "hello" in the cell phone business.
Can you sue me now? Good!
Can you sue me now? Good!
Can you sue me now? Good!
The missing link (Score:2)
is of course when Apple sues Microsoft. Then we'll have an awesome threesome!
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It's already way beyond a threesome man:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/floorsixtyfour/5061246255/ [flickr.com]
Moto (Score:2)
Screw them. (Score:2)
Screw all these giant megacorporations making human life more miserable day by day. Poisoning the air, water, and earth, enslaving our children, completely controlling our media and pwning our political processes. The only real solution to any of this nonsense is to eliminate the corporation outright. This patent nonsense is just ONE aspect of the vile contempt the corporate model has for life and quality of life.
But don't listen to me. Ben Franklin was much smarter than I am and had extremely harsh and
Thomas Jefferson (Score:2)
Ben Franklin was much smarter than I am and had extremely harsh and accurate things to say about patents in general. As did Thomas Jefferson about the banks that now own them all.
Thomas Jefferson [monticello.org] started out against patents too, however his friend James Madison convinced him patents could be good.
Falcon
Gridlock (Score:2)
When do we finally get to that point so we can stagnate and watch China surpass us?
Perhaps then we will get a clue.. ( but i wont bet on it )
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Apple lost +USD$200 million last week (Score:2)
"Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."
thanks to most of the lawyers (Score:2)
while foreign companies are busy producing products and generating jobs and revenue, US companies are busy suing each other.
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The whole federal government is a porky pig. I'm not sure why you'd expect the USPTO to be different.
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Why would there be winmo7 lawsuits? This is about hardware tech, not software. Winmo7 is based on Win 7 - there isn't much there they wouldn't have patent rights to.
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Winmo7 is based on Win 7
Windows Phone 7 is in no way, shape or form based on Windows 7 (the desktop OS).
And where would patents come from? Well, didn't Apple have a bunch for e.g. multitouch (which wasn't there in WM6, but is there in WP7)? There's always something.
It doesn't necessarily mean lawsuits, of course. Quite often it just means cross-licensing deals.