Motorola Scores Patent Wins Over Microsoft, Apple 158
tlhIngan writes "This week is Motorola's lucky week; they've won twice in two separate patent suits. First, an ITC judge has ruled that Microsoft's Xbox 360 has violated 4 of 5 patents related to h.264. This is just a preliminary ruling (PDF) and both Microsoft and Motorola will face an ITC panel later this year. In the other case, the ITC judge has ruled Apple violates a 3G patent, one that a German court ruled that Apple didn't violate earlier this year. "
Frand... (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see if this will play into the EU investigation.
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Re:Frand... (Score:4, Interesting)
I can see why you'd like me to be less informed. The issue is that Motorola offered a license, which was declined. And these companies are now using the patented technologies without a license having been offered one. They have no license. You are not allowed to use patented technology without a license. They are breaking the law. The "F" in "FRAND" does not stand for "Free".
Fairness and FRAND - Reciprocity part of Fairness? (Score:2)
Frand Patent
You know, I've been wondering, if it would be possible to make an argument based on the "Fair" portion of FRAND; that the relationship goes both ways, with Fairness involving a two-way element of reciprocity between parties.
As such, it could be argued that cooperation should be an integral part of receiving FRAND licensing, and Apple was not playing nicely with others.
Software Patent Reform Anyone? (Score:3)
And by reform, I mean, abolition?
Come on guys. It never works. The only people getting rich off it are the lawyers. The rest of the world is laughing at us over it.
Let's put those dollars towards creating jobs and innovating.
Hello, Obama? Anyone home? There's a campaign donation in it for you from a few big tech luminaries, I'm pretty sure.
Re:Software Patent Reform Anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hello, Obama? Anyone home? There's a campaign donation in it for you from a few big tech luminaries, I'm pretty sure.
Sadly, that's not correct... most "big tech luminaries" happily use patents as cudgels to prevent little guys from entering their staked-out territories, or to push out anyone who gets in their way.
I'm not seeing any big tech corporation wanting to remove what is arguably becoming their biggest (and still legal) weapon to fend off or tame the competition.
After all, look at how much money Microsoft has managed to score from 'selling' Android to the manufacturers so far...
Re:Software Patent Reform Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think at this point a great many are over it (Google, IBM, and the entire FOSS industry) and if enough of the patent countersuits succeed against Apple and Microsoft (the most prominent non-troll offenders), there will be a time where even they are willing to stop throwing good money after bad.
I suspect many execs who would not publicly admit it are getting sick of the patent lawyers already.
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Yes, the big tech luminaries were very successful at preventing smaller companies from taking over their territory.
Let's list some examples:
AT&T prevented the Cisco from replacing switched circuit POTS.
IBM prevented Intel/Dell from running them out of the hardware business.
Moto and RIM prevented Apple from running them out of the mobile telephone business.
NOT.
Don't forget that today's tech giant is yesterday's pip-squeek upstart.
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The rest of the world is laughing at us over it.
European lawyers are slavering over it. And Chinese lawyers. And Indian lawyers. And Bolivian lawyers. And even Lower Slobovian lawyers.
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They are? Really? Because it seems the biggest economies are the same one who enforce software patents. USA, Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. So who's laughing at us, exactly? France?
Patents in general have clearly gone off the deep end in the US, and need to be reigned back in, but IP laws in general are quite beneficial when handled properly.
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You have a wonderfully deadpan approach to sarcasm. Well played. :)
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"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. " --Bill Gates [archive.org]
IP: the new tech product (Score:2)
Isn't it interesting how the tech industry is increasingly about patents?
Does Moto even make phones anymore? But who cares? As long as they have good patents, they can make money.
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Isn't it interesting how the tech industry is increasingly about patents?
Not really. Technology requires an investment to develop. Once that development is done, it's easy to replicate just by observing the final product. For some reason people around here really don't understand that. I suspect sensationalist headline poisoning.
Oh, you are serious? (Score:5, Interesting)
OK. Here's how software patents work.
There are hundreds of thousands of them. None of them required any investment to develop. They simply memorialize things that everyone always did - commenting inside of curly braces, using tables for compression, having the "AM" flip to "PM" when you scroll the hours past noon, having plugins in web browsers and "one click purchase buttons" and so forth.
No one can ever know what their work infringes on. Not even Microsoft or Google, who have carte blance budgets for such things. They simply write code and wait to get sued.
Even if the software patent fairy came down and waved her little magic wand, and you could know exactly which hundreds or thousands of patents you infringed, it would be worthless by tomorrow. Thousands of new patents are filed every day.
The only effect that software patents can have is to make every piece of code a ticking patent time bomb.
The scam was supported by a few, like Microsoft, because they saw it as a way to prevent competition and hurt free markets. They need only send part of their multi-million dollar legal team to the patent mines and amass a "war chest" that would enable them to sue others, and countersue when they were, themselves, inevitably brought to court. This would have the effect of making it impossible for anyone to write software without having a multi-million (these days multi-billion) investment in patent lawyers.
The only reason the U.S. has a functioning software industry is that the practice of using these patents is so repugnant and ridiculous that most businesses and all individuals ignore them.
Unfortunately, in their haste, cupidity and basic ignorance of cause an effect, backers like Microsoft neglected to realize that they would create a new kind of company, called a patent troll. These companies would buy patents that Microsoft was violating, and sue them. But Microsoft's patent war chest would be unusable as a defense, because patent trolls are very careful to do absolutely no useful work of any kind. Their entire business is suing the people who do actually do useful work. MS has already had 9-10 figures in judgments come in against them from trolls and they have had a few close calls with actually having to pay out.
If you are wondering who created software patent law, the answer is, not congress. Some lawyers tried it, and it flew, and it's happened all on its own - a little power grab by the patent bar and the USPTO.
This is partly why so few industrialized countries other than the U.S. have a software patent regime the way we do, because it is so prima facie ridiculous. They have been rejected in Europe and Asia. We are an international laughing stock for having such an obviously corrupt practice.
Meanwhile there is very little basis for software patent law to exist even on this basis in the U.S.. The Supreme Court has already famously struck down patents on i.e. math equations, which are vanishingly similar. They came quite close to explicitly striking down software patents already in En Re Bilski. The whole game will be up before long - no one has any choice. The more the practice grows, the faster it chokes itself off.
Good day, sir. Respond if you like, I won't read it.
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They simply memorialize things that everyone always did - commenting inside of curly braces, using tables for compression, having the "AM" flip to "PM" when you scroll the hours past noon, having plugins in web browsers and "one click purchase buttons" and so forth.
[Citation needed]
Specifically, find a patent that claims one of those things, and then find a reference that pre-dates it showing someone doing that. Mind you, the reference has to show someone doing what the claims say, not just doing something similar to the title of the patent. There are tens of thousands of patents titled "wheel" or "engine"... They're not all claiming "wheels" or "engines".
No one can ever know what their work infringes on. Not even Microsoft or Google, who have carte blance budgets for such things. They simply write code and wait to get sued.
Yes, but the nice part is that you're not going to be responsible for damages until you do get notified that you
Wow, So Many Lies (Score:2)
I am fascinated by your post - which I contains so much information that is outright wrong as to appear to be a deliberate attempt to advocate by deception.
[Citation needed]
Can you cite a software patent that has merit? I have read close on 50 at this point and seen hundreds of summaries and have yet to see it.
For further reference, a post by a different user. [slashdot.org]
Yes, but the nice part is that you're not going to be responsible for damages until you do get notified that you infringe.
This is part of how software patents kill the economy and destroy jobs, because the "damages" are a legal negotiation of unlimited dimension and cost, that can be hel
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I am fascinated by your post - which I contains so much information that is outright wrong as to appear to be a deliberate attempt to advocate by deception.
Thanks, I think. Of course, you've not shown any of it to be "outright wrong", so I'm not sure what your specific gripes are.
[Citation needed]
Can you cite a software patent that has merit? I have read close on 50 at this point and seen hundreds of summaries and have yet to see it.
Happily, but before I do so, I'd like to call attention to your goalpost moving. You stated "[Software patents] simply memorialize things that everyone always did - commenting inside of curly braces, using tables for compression, having the "AM" flip to "PM" when you scroll the hours past noon, having plugins in web browsers and "one click purchase buttons" and so forth," and I merely
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Slashdot, I present to you a case study: the intelligent person arguing in bad-faith.
We've seen them before. But let's study the technique in this case.
Of course, you've not shown any of it to be "outright wrong"
Technique: "the bold summary." The skimmers in the audience may be fooled.
Of course, he could have claimed it gladly, had he explained how any software developer can determine what they infringe upon.
Or if he had said, "Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. have a patent compliance process for all their code, and here is where you can read about it..." But he knows
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Can you cite a software patent that has merit?
RSA? Someone working in GCHQ invented the same algorithm a few decades earlier, but didn't disclose it. In the intervening period, no one came up with it even though there was an obvious need for this kind of cryptography. I'd say it's pretty close to the canonical example of an algorithm deserving a patent: not obvious, not trivial, documented well enough that anyone could implement it, and with a clear use.
On the other hand, things like Marching Cubes are pretty obvious - it's basically the naive w
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>"Vanishingly," as in "the similarity you speak of is irrelevant."
Actually - quite the inverse - it's not a similiarity but an EXACT REPLICA. No wait, that's still not the right word, it's not even a replica - it's the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING.
If you think there is ANY difference between mathematical formulas and software programs then you don't know computational theory at all. There isn't. A software program IS a mathematical formula, it is merely a formula specifically intended for a Turing machine -
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>"Vanishingly," as in "the similarity you speak of is irrelevant."
Actually - quite the inverse - it's not a similiarity but an EXACT REPLICA. No wait, that's still not the right word, it's not even a replica - it's the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING.
If you think there is ANY difference blah blah blah...
If you bothered reading the post, you'd see that I acknowledged that there's no difference and pointed out why that fact is irrelevant to the patentability of software and why it's based on a misunderstanding of the Supreme Court's decisions.
Amazing how quickly you can latch on to one sentence, miss the rest of the paragraph, and prove that you're an ass:
You sir, are just plain ignorant.
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If you bothered to read the link I said you would find that it specifically addresses the rest of your post including showing that the supreme court was in error. It points out current research into functional proofs for software programs which will in the near future allow for a whole new type of debugger that determines whether a program is free of logical bugs by testing it as a mathematical function and determining if it is a valid proof.
The early stages of this research already exists - thought it's n
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If you bothered to read the link I said you would find that it specifically addresses the rest of your post including showing that the supreme court was in error.
Yes, yes, I know. I've read the paper many times. You don't seem to understand, going before the Supreme Court and saying "you're all idiots, see this paper" is not going to succeed.
Additionally, it misses the point. The Supreme Court didn't say "math is unpatentable because it's math," but rather because it was abstract. Software is math, but is only unpatentable if it's similarly abstract... but it doesn't have to be.
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The supreme court was just plain wrong. The US law specifically excludes maths from patentability, not just "abstract" maths.
These papers ought to be filed as friend-of-the-court briefs in these cases, so that judges can actually know what they are really dealing with.
But now I'll really bake your noodle. I wrote this blog post about a year ago - but I'll copy and paste it for you with a link to the original at the end - I set out to prove that software is always abstract, and succeeded... it was ridiculou
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The supreme court was just plain wrong. The US law specifically excludes maths from patentability, not just "abstract" maths.
Actually, it doesn't. The three concepts - "laws of nature, mathematical algorithms, and abstract ideas" are explicitly grouped, so they must be considered in terms of common characteristics.
Additionally, while your post is interesting - and thank you - I still don't see that it supports your conclusion that all software is abstract, merely that it supports the conclusion that all software - or rather, encoded versions of software - are numbers. Abstraction, however, is a much broader (and vaguer) concep
Re:Oh, you are serious? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parasites.
by John Carmack
I'm proud that there is "a relative dearth of patent applications for the video game industry, especially considering how technology-dependent the video game industry is, and given its size in terms of annual sales."
Before issuing a condemnation, I try hard to think about it from their point of view -- the laws of the land set the rules of the game, and lawyers are deeply confused at why some of us aren't using all the tools that the game gives us.
Patents are usually discussed in the context of someone "stealing" an idea from the long suffering lone inventor that devoted his life to creating this one brilliant idea, blah blah blah.
But in the majority of cases in software, patents effect independent invention. Get a dozen sharp programmers together, give them all a hard problem to work on, and a bunch of them will come up with solutions that would probably be patentable, and be similar enough that the first programmer to file the patent could sue the others for patent infringement.
Why should society reward that? What benefit does it bring? It doesn't help bring more, better, or cheaper products to market. Those all come from competition, not arbitrary monopolies. The programmer that filed the patent didn't work any harder because a patent might be available, solving the problem was his job and he had to do it anyway. Getting a patent is uncorrelated to any positive attributes, and just serves to allow either money or wasted effort to be extorted from generally unsuspecting and innocent people or companies.
Yes, it is a legal tool that may help you against your competitors, but I'll have no part of it. Its basically mugging someone.
I could waste hours going on about this. I really need to just write a position paper some day that I can cut and paste when this topic comes up.
John Carmack
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=151312&cid=12701745 [slashdot.org]
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There are two major problems with this argument. First is that it does not cover the diversity gained from forcing developers to try another approach. We have seen interesting ideas come along as a result of having to re-think a design.
Thing is though, there are so many software patents that developers usually will not know the approach they have taken was already patented. Developers don't spend their lives searching patent databases for solutions to their problems - if they did they'd be spending more time searching patent databases than writing code. So instead they just invent. They will re-think designs anyway as part of their normal software development process.
Give a dozen talented developers a complex problem, and it would not
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Hi Concern! Glad you returned, I was worried I wrote all that for nothing.
We've all read actual software patents before.
The comments around here have never indicated that. I have on numerous occasions checked up on the claims of prior art made on this site. In nearly all of these cases, the wording of the patent itself made it clear that the example of prior art did not apply at all. Not only were there numerous posts, but many of them were modded up, too. Amusingly, nobody was ever there to point out exactly what in the patent made it clear tha
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I'm sorry I offended you, Concern, but I am giving you good advice.
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We've all read actual software patents before. Wooohooo. The links are always posted here. It's widely known how ridiculous they are. Most of us are, you know, actual software developers.
No one can possibly be as stupid as your post implies while managing to operate a computer at all.
Ergo, you cannot possibly believe the obvious and fairly trivial deceptions you have just written.
Conclusion: Go smoke a cock, you lying astroturf PR contractor.
First, pull that smoke out of your own rear end. Grow up, get advanced degrees in Engineering, Computer Science, Pure and Applied Mathematics and study advanced research. Then work on those obvious algorithms and patents you profess to have understood and become the Consumer Reports equivalent of Ralph Nader to save the world from software patents. Otherwise, take your own advice.
If you cant kick it (Score:3, Insightful)
The world is ill-served by "imaginary Property"..
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OT: Broken patent system (Score:1)
h.264 (Score:3, Insightful)
...violated 4 of 5 patents related to h.264
So this is the next standard for video on the web they're talking about?
Re:h.264 (Score:4, Interesting)
A big sigh of relief from Mozilla I think. This is exactly why they wanted to keep out of h.264. It wouldn't be the patent payout for either licensing or fines, but the cost of lawyers that would cripple Mozilla.
I don't know why Mozilla didn't just "move" the development from the USA to a European country where software patents do not exist. Rich people do it with money to avoid tax, surely Mozilla could do it to avoid patents.
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They didn't move development to Europe because the USA would still find them infringing.
Just because you're not in the USA doesn't mean that the USA won't sue you.
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Google, as the new owners of Motorola are obviously trying to destroy the H.264 standard because nobody wanted to use their WebM format.
If they manage to do so by patent trolling, maybe it deserves to be destroyed, better sooner than later.
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Now that you mention it, it would be excellent to see troll patent standard H.264 destroyed by patents. In a perfect world.
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You are against freedom of choice for consumers
The patent system is against freedom of choice for consumers. It is the patent system that gives government the power to block products and remove consumer choice.
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Dear dude,
It seems that we both want the same thing: a video format that can be used anywhere, without being forced to use particular software, and without software makers worrying about being sued for patent violations for implementing video codecs.
As this case shows, h.264 is not such a video format, it depends on patented technology. Of course you can embrace such a technology, and tell people to do painful things to themselves every time your favorite software maker gets sued for infringing h.264 patents. But I would argue that it's much better to choose a video format that is not liable to patent trolling (like WebM).
Dear nontechnical person,
WebM is controlled by "one" company named google. Open source exists at the behest of the "copyright" owners. Open source is not substitute for a documented established "STANDARD" managed by a third party patent pool. This patent should have been included in the pool. What google is doing through motorola probably violates several anti-trust laws as well as the principles of FRAND as they are trying use a patent on a "STANDARD" licensed under the MPEGLA patent pool. Do understand th
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How does an average consumer user encode in WebM out of iMovie?
Install the QuickTime WebM codec and select 'export'.
How does the average consumer alter the hardware decoder in modern smartphones and tablets to decode WebM format instead of H.264?
I can't think of any modern SoCs that come with H.264 decoders in hardware. They come with some specialised DSPs for image and video processing, but most of the steps that they accelerate in H.264 are also present in VP8, and in numerous other codecs.
fuck you for being in favour of removing my freedom of choice to use H.264.
Did you check the manual for your device? If you do, then you will notice some very small print telling you that the H.264 output that you record may only be used for noncommercial purposes, and if you want
what does "fair and reasonable terms" mean? (Score:1)
Ans. whatever the patent holder thinks the market will bear. In other words, it's an almost meaningless agreement.
The people who craft industry standards like H.264 need to do better than this.
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"Fair" in this context means we abuse all our victims equally.
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FRAND is really about non-discrimination. I can't force vastly different terms on a company just because I don't want to compete against them , for example. Usually, FRAND has some sort of patent cross-licensing involved with a small payment attached. The benefit to the original patent holder is that they gain security against being sued by their competitors. It is supposed to ensure that companies compete on products and not with lawyers over competing patents. I think the status quo has changed so ra
Re:what does "fair and reasonable terms" mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually, FRAND has some sort of patent cross-licensing involved with a small payment attached. The benefit to the original patent holder is that they gain security against being sued by their competitors.
Oh, how that smells like cartel.
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How is that a cartel? If a farmer goes to market to sell milk, and he runs into another farmer with eggs, he can swap some milk for some eggs. He then runs into another farmer with some potatoes, and he swaps some milk for some potatoes. Along comes a city guy, and the farmer asks what he has to swap, and the city guy says 'nothing'. The farmer says 'ok, I'll take cash'. Is that a cartel?
A cartel fixes prices and production. It has nothing to do with cross-licensing patents.
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Motorola Mobility (Score:3)
Note: This is Motorola Mobility, which ultimately means Google.
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Which means a cross-licensing agreement will be put in place ending the Microsoft tax on Androids. I guess that's a win.
Motorola Mobility is not Google (Score:4, Informative)
Except that it doesn't. Google will inherit anything Motorola Mobility gets out of this if China approves the acquisition, but until then Google doesn't have management control over Motorola Mobility.
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I imagine a few of those who sneered at the Motorola/Google deal are eating their words about now.
Who you going thermonuclear on now, Zombie Steve Jobs?
Happy to see Microsoft on the Short-End (Score:4, Interesting)
Given Microsoft's bullying of Android - an area where they don't even compete - I'm quite happy to see them coming out on the short-end of this stick. When I buy Android it's in part because I don't want to give my money to Microsoft or Apple. Now let's see a good strong Apple defeat such that Motorola (and other Android vendors) resolve these issues through cross-licensing instead of money.
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You do give your money to Microsoft when you buy Android. Microsoft gets a slice of every Android unit sold, due to patent chokeholds.
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Global Thermonuclear Patent War (Score:2)
It's approaching quickly.
--
BMO
Google Wins! (Score:4, Interesting)
So Microsoft and Apple both wanted to screw up web video by only supporting the heavily patented H.264 standard instead of Google's open Web-M standard. So Google went and bought Motorola Mobility and is now throwing their own patent strategy back at them. If they claim H.264 isn't patentable than they lose that way otherwise Google can charge huge royalties and make them pay for being so greedy.
Brilliant chess moves as usual by the Google team.
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The insane amount of money spent to buy Motorola might almost be worth it.
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Insane, yet it's only 12 Instagrams.
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If you weight it on a technology basis it's more like 10*9 Instagrams.
Re:Google Wins! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how much the moral and ethical standards of Microsoft and Apple have converged, and it is not because Microsoft improved.
Re:Google Wins! (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft shaking down Android manufacturers with its most probably bogus software patents says that you are incorrect about Microsoft improving at all.
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Google isn't completely gone yet. From time to time, they can still be shamed into doing the right.
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In my country we have a saying that's more or less like "a thief who robs a thief has 100 years of forgiveness". There's nothing hypocritical about judging differently someone who is bullying a bully.
Also, when exactly did Google claim it was an open company and /or that all their products were open? Fanboys might, but if I claim that e.g. Apple products are perfect, does that tell something about Apple or myself?
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It wasn't Google who picked a fight.
Excuse me? This is about H.264, not phones. H.264 is used in HD video cameras, the blu-ray format and as an output format to from video editors. Various devices have H.264 hardware decoders such as smartphones, set top boxes and tablets. Those decoders cannot support WebM and would have to be done in software on the CPU.
Google picked a fight with me and other consumers around the globe with this action. I hope google goes bankrupt because I don't appreciate being ass raped by a large advertiser that have no
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Various devices have H.264 hardware decoders such as smartphones, set top boxes and tablets. Those decoders cannot support WebM and would have to be done in software on the CPU.
WebM was designed to be accelerated by hardware which can accelerate H.264. If the decoder is a closed box that you hand a stream to then it won't work, but if you have access to the source to the driver then you can make the hardware accelerate WebM to some degree, bringing WebM support within the range of some fairly primitive hardware.
I hope google goes bankrupt because I don't appreciate being ass raped by a large advertiser that have no respect for consumer privacy and rights.
Then you should focus on Apple and Microsoft before you start worrying about Google, they're worse offenders who have been offending longer.
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I don't think you understand what a hardware decoder is or what the difference is between "software" and "hardware". The whole point of a hardware decoder is to have a highly optimized chip that only does one thing which is to decode H.264.
I don't think you understand that most of the modern chips don't use a truly dedicated hardware decoder. They have a GPU which can accelerate certain operations (or a DSP which can be used to accelerate certain operations, but let's just stick with the term GPU since that's becoming more ubiquitous) and the decoder uses the GPU to accelerate those operations. A H.264 stream is not handed off to the GPU hardware, it's handed to the driver which takes it apart and then hands pieces of it to the GPU hardware a
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Misleading Title? (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't the title be "Google Scores Patent Wins..."? When Google buys Motorola mobile division they take ownership, no? And yeah, what has been/will undoubtedly be repeated, retool this joke we call 'Patent Law'.
Accurate Title (Score:2)
No, because Google doesn't own Motorola Mobility yet (and may never own it) since the Chinese government still hasn't approved the purchase.
Yes, if Google is allowed to buy Motorola Mobility, it will take ownership, but that hasn't happened yet, and might not ever happen.
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Gotta love the consistency (Score:3)
Re:Gotta love the consistency (Score:5, Insightful)
How can anyone hope to abide by copyright rules when even the courts can't sort out the mess!
Because as it turns out, German and American courts abide by different laws.
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+10 if I had the points.
Too many people assume that US law applies everywhere. Just because terms like "patent" and "copyright" are common amongst many nations of the world does not mean they follow the US interpretation.
Just look at Canadian's enshrined right to make backups vs. the US DMCA for an example.
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You're right, they should've pushed for Earth's Court instead so they could rely on international law rather than the laws of the United States in the United States and those of Germany in Germany.
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This is about patents, not copyright. It's well known (at least, inside software development circles) that software patents rules are very different among countries, unlike copyright, which has more or less been unified by the Berne Convention.
Just because lawyers try to convince us that all "IP" is equal doesnt mean it's true.
Worldwide Patent War of 2012 (Score:2, Interesting)
And so began the great Worldwide Patent War of 2012.
Motorola launched and scored a hit with their patent.
Apple and Microsoft panic and fire off their arsenal of patents. Facebook, Samsung, Google, IBM, etc. all get pulled into it.
Yahoo! takes the opportunity to launch a sneak attack at Facebook. The patent scores a critical hit with the assistance of a clueless judge setting a new precedent.
Patent trolls rejoice at this and proceed to crawl out of the woodwork to start flinging their own patents around...
So now Moto won't suck? (Score:2)
Because for the last 20 years Moto has sucked as a company and generally failed at everything. Trying to save the company through lawsuits is a sure sign of that.
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Re:So now Moto won't suck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Today Iridium is a healthy business with nearly half a million subscribers. Motorola may have got that one wrong, but not very far wrong. You know who really deserves to crater as a company for bad management? Microsoft. Kept going only by illegal monopoly control of PC manufacturers and evil software lock-in of the kind that got IBM sued nearly into oblivion in the eighties.
what is this fascination with patent lawsuits? (Score:2)
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Re:COOL! (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Microsoft and Apple should not have started the war by suing Android manufacturers.
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maybe microsoft and apple should team up against "googorola"
thn again, they'd never agree on "applesoft" or "microple"
actually, who cares, they'll all eventually be bought out by samsung anyway
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Kodak sued Apple in January 2010. Then Apple and HTC sued each other (Apple first) around April 2010. Things started escalating. Motorola sued Apple Oct. 8, 2010 and then Apple countersued a few weeks later. Check out this link for an infographic of the suits (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,239
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Apple has played their part in escalating the war but as Apple and Motorola are concerned, Motorola started that particular battle.
A little disingenuous are we? Apple sued HTC on March 2nd, 2010, starting the phone wars. And let's not forget that Steve Jobs stated he was going to go "theronuclear" to destroy Android.
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How can any random company be evil. It's only when a company becomes popular and regular people start using their stuff that they become evil and uncool.
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Motorola refusing to license FRAND patents under FRAND terms does no one any good. Hopefully Google won't fall into the same vein. The terms require that a patent be offered, and it should NOT require a company to offer up it's own IP in order to obtain use of a FRAND patent.
Yes, and Microsoft trying to extort both extreme license fees and an actual veto over future Android design features with absolutely crap patents does no one any good either.
Oh, excuse me, just how many shares of Microsoft do you own again?
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The terms Apple wanted were better than the FRAND terms offered.
Apple wanted the same terms as the members of the GSM Alliance get - these are patent holders of GSM (and other mobile technology) patents who have pooled their patents and cross-license them. Obviously, if you are offering something then you get something back. If you're not putting patents into the pool then your licensing costs are going to be higher as you're not contributing.
See http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-14/nokia-apple-payment [bloomberg.com]
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Waitasec, didn't Google just pay expensive engineers for the free and open VP8 standard?
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Google makes it's money selling ads. A free and open web is beneficial to them because they can use that free and open web to sell their product.
The other companies make their money selling hardware and software. To them, free and open means nothing but a race to the bottom, something which no-one wants.
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Javascript was originally developed by Netscape, a company which no longer exists.
It is funny that you think companies worked together to benefit the industry, and use PowerPC as an example of that. PowerPC was not done for some altruistic reason like 'benefit the industry', it was done to hurt Intel. It failed at that.
It is even funnier that you think IBM of old had great leaders (I am guessing you are including the PowerPC decision in that greatness). The Apple-Motorola-IBM deal was done by John Ake
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Javascript was originally developed by Netscape, a company which no longer exists.
The fact that they no longer exist is probably the only thing that is keeping Oracle from suing them as well.
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Let's hope we don't see those Javascript patent suits. Microsoft just bought the Netscape patents from AOL.
Who am I kidding. They're probably herding up a horde of lawyers to sue The Internet right now.
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Motorola patents are only a tiny fraction of those that make up the MPEG patent pool. Google can't make H.264 open and free. WebM on the other hand, Google owns all of that - and they already have made it open and free. They opened it under a permissive license as soon as humanly possible after they bought it.
It's the folks in the MPEG Patent licensing group that were making it impossible to do video on open and free platforms. I will not mourn their passing.