iPhone Infringes On Sony, Nokia Patents, Says Federal Jury 166
snydeq writes "A federal jury in Delaware has found Apple's iPhone infringes on three patents held by MobileMedia, a patent-holding company formed by Sony, Nokia and MPEG LA, InfoWorld reports. The jury found that the iPhone directly infringed U.S. patent 6,070,068, which was issued to Sony and covers a method for controlling the connecting state of a call, U.S. patent 6,253,075, which covers call rejection, and U.S. patent 6,427,078, which covers a data processing device. MobileMedia has garnered the unflattering descriptor "patent troll" from some observers. The company, which was formed in 2010, holds some 300 patents in all."
Incoming Call Rejection Patent (Score:4, Interesting)
IncomingNumber := GetIncomingCallNumber(); := SearchRejectedNumbersList(IncomingNumber);
RejectCall
If (RejectCall)
RejectIncomingCall();
else
AnswerIncomingCall();
There I just wrote the code to reject incoming calls if the number is in the rejected numbers list. How is this patentable?
Re:There's your problem ... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not going to go through each of the claims on the patent, but I'm not seeing anything in here that sounds like an invention
Likewise, I'm not going to open the book, but I'm not seeing anything in Moby Dick that makes it decent literature.
The claims are the single most important part of the patent. Everything else is just to make the claims clear enough that somebody else can duplicate the invention. Not reading them is tantamount to judging a book by its cover.
Actually reading claim 1, we see a patent for a handheld computer containing a camera, that uses a radio to transmit the pictures. In claim 2, this is specified to be the cellular phone network. Now what's interesting is that the first cell-phone cameras came to market in the summer of 1997. Surely this is prior art, yes? And the whole patent is invalid?
No. The patent was filed in February of 1997, placing it nicely in the territory for a genuine invention. There were some devices in as early as 1995 [wikipedia.org] that might possibly be prior art, but I'm certainly not qualified enough to determine whether they fit the patent claims or not.
Its not a patent troll if (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Live by the sword . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
A company that makes no products has no need to cross-license patents.
The *point* of this company is cross licensing. Nokia, Sony etc could establish a complicated network of cross licensing deals, or they can put it into one pool and then take out the rewards relative to their contribution to the coalition.
Apple can just pay the license fee, or contribute enough intellectual property to the pool such that it gets back a share equal to a share of the patent group.
This is how the MPEG group works. MPEG is a collection of dozens of patents from tons of people. If you have something that can make MPEG better you can simply sell your patent to the group and make a nice little royalty. Or you can get your royalty and buy MPEG licenses gaining you access to the rest of the patents.
This is how the patent system should work for complicated systems. You build a cell phone patent pool. Then if you want to create new OS you pay the license fee without having to negotiate with 50 different patent holders.