'Corporate Troll' Wins $3 Million Verdict Against Apple For Ring-Silencing Patent (arstechnica.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A non-practicing entity called MobileMedia Ideas LLC won a patent lawsuit against Apple today, with a Delaware federal jury finding that Apple should pay $3 million for infringing MobileMedia's patent RE39,231, which relates to ring-silencing features on mobile phones. MobileMedia is an unusual example of the kind of pure patent-licensing entity often derided as a "patent troll." It is majority-owned by MPEG-LA, a patent pool that licenses common digital video technologies like H-264, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. Minority stakes in MobileMedia are owned by Sony and Nokia, which both contributed the patents owned by the company. MobileMedia also has the same CEO as MPEG-LA, Larry Horn. The battle ended up being a long one, as MobileMedia first filed the case in 2010. It went to trial in 2012, and the jury found that Apple infringed three patents. After reviewing post-trial motions, the judge knocked out some, but not all, of the infringed patent claims. Then came an appeal in which a panel of Federal Circuit judges upheld (PDF) some of the lower court's judges and overturned others. A $3 million verdict is hardly going to make an impact on Apple, and it doesn't represent a huge win for MobileMedia, which was reportedly seeking $18 million in royalties from the trial. Still, getting a verdict in its favor does represent some validation of MobileMedia's business model, which was a striking example of technology corporations using the "patent troll" business model as a kind of proxy war. Nokia and Sony were able to use MobileMedia and the licensing talent at MPEG-LA to wage a patent attack on Apple without engaging directly in court. In all, after years of back-and-forth, the ring-silencing patent was the one that MobileMedia had left. While Apple didn't win the case against one of the first "corporate trolls," it was able to severely pare down the scale of the attack and show that it's willing to fight a long legal war of attrition to make its point.
This means that (Score:1)
for this article, only troll comments are on topic.
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No. Only your mother is on topic.
*runs away giggling*
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Patent trolls? I call them "patent reform activists".
Delaware? (Score:3)
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Delaware has no or low taxes for most business stuff so many companies cook the books so they can use Delaware to do whatever bullshit they're trying to do to avoid paying taxes. Therefore it's not uncommon to see legal cases pop up there.
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Bye-bye!
Yeah, those three million dollars are going to kill Apple. No wait, they made that much while I wrote this.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
If it is really obvious then where is the prior art?
Telephones are a couple years old now, and the ring silencer has been around for just about as long. In fact the old mechanical bell phones had ring volume control that just adjusted clapper/bell distance. However the patent in question is for a 1 time mute, you push the button and that call is muted but future calls are not. Even when land lines were all we had people would silence the ringer, then miss calls because they forgot to unsilence it.
Just because an idea is obvious in the sense of "Why didn't I think of that" after the patent is issued does not mean the patent fails the obviousness test.
I am fairly anti-patent, feeling that patent life needs to be strictly limited, and vague concepts should not be patentable, but this one has some merit. In fact, I am sitting here pondering how to implement a 1 call ring mute in an old mechanical analog phone, and it isn't obvious to me how to accomplish that.
In a cell phone context a call exists as an entity, in the analog world a ring is a singular event, going back to the days when a human operator cranked the handle and you had to count rings to know it was your call.
I suppose you could use a mechanical timer, that disengaged the bell clapper for a period of time. The first thought would be a clockwork snail type counter, but you never know how many rings comprise a call, so it would have to be a timer. It would at best be a guess, because it is entirely up to the caller how long to let the phone ring.
I recall in my younger years calling a friend who didn't want to talk and just letting the phone ring for minutes at a time. However he responded by just going off hook, and the phone switch would not release the line until both ends went on hook, so I annoyed him for a few minutes, but he took our phone offline for the whole evening.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to take a side I don't recall taking on the patent question before, and to recall a simpler time from my youth.
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Yes, the enterprise desk phones I've used for the last 30 years have call ignore buttons. The newer ones (1990s) have softkeys with call ignore and call reject.
So yes, this feature has been on wired phones for decades.
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If it is really obvious then where is the prior art?
It was first filed something like 20 years ago. Not many smart phones handled incoming calls and other notifications back then so prior art would be a surprise.
I'd call it a good UI design, but obvious to someone skilled in the art. Phone makes two sounds at the same time? Suppress the one that's less important. Duh.
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I am fairly anti-patent, feeling that patent life needs to be strictly limited, and vague concepts should not be patentable, but this one has some merit. In fact, I am sitting here pondering how to implement a 1 call ring mute in an old mechanical analog phone, and it isn't obvious to me how to accomplish that.
Kinda depends on how far you want to go back in phone-time.
If you are talking about recent times (but let's say before microcontrollers), you could do it with a retriggerable monostable multivibrator (either as an IC, or with discrete components), with Edge-sensitive trigger. The 70 VAC ring voltage would be rectified, but not filtered (but probably voltage-divided) and would be presented to one side of a momentary, normally-open push button switch. This would be applied to the edge-sensitive "trigger" in
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The thing with hardware patents is that it's no the idea which is patented, it is the implementation. With software patents, it's the idea itself which is patented. With hardware patents, a working model or a description detailed enough to allow another practitioner to recreate the mechanism is required. Software patents don't even require a working binary.
There is no way to defend the ethics of software patents. The iPhone does not silence the ringer via a mechanical mechanism. The button press is a t
In the End (Score:4, Informative)
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Even the lawyers didn't win much off of this one. Three million dollars for six years worth of work? Split between how many people?
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Even the lawyers didn't win much off of this one. Three million dollars for six years worth of work? Split between how many people?
Six years of constant salary, fees, etc. and then a bonus at the end... Or do you believe in the Hollywood version where lawyers work on contingency just for the payout at the end?
Apple part of MPEGLA (Score:1)
Apple is also a licensor in MPEGLA, so I guess it gets a cut...?
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Apple's point is 14 years of licenses are more expensive than the past 5 years of licenses, and way more expensive than a half million dollars of lawyery when you're trying to hit them up for $18 million as it stands. What do you think infringement is? It means you're using the patent, which means the past 6 years of $18 million become the next 8 years of $24 million; that's $42 million, man.
Apple pared off $35 million in this defense. Going forward, those $3 million royalties will project to another $
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You cannot steal BSD unless you remove attribution. This is exactly the holy war being fought by Stallman et.al. The BSD license specifically allows copying, modification, use, obfuscation and repressive licenses.
This is the great difference between the free licenses, and the one that makes BSD people call the GPL infectious. It is also probably the reason that Apple didn't even consider Linux for their OS.
In retrospect, I would rather have Mac OS in our environment than not, two competing closed operati
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I understand the legal aspects.
For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it, all the while using those profits for attempting to shut down free innovation coming from anyone else.
The answer
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Don't get me wrong, I am not sticking up for Apple's morals in this argument.
I am coincidentally a Mac user, and as MacOS diverges from it's open BSD roots I come ever closer to ditching it, probably for Debian. Apple has consistently pushed MacOS further and further from the ideals which we attribute to Unix, programs that do one thing well, human readable config files, etc.
I think Apple took advantage of all the BSD hackers that built the foundation they stand on, but the "freedom" the BSD licenses stand
Re: Poor innocent Apple (Score:1)
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For the "philosophical" level, the answer seems obvious. One merely need ask themselves the question if thousands of developers altruistically gave their time to creating BSD, so that a mega-corporation could suck it up in-toto and make billions of dollars of unearned profit from it, all the while using those profits for attempting to shut down free innovation coming from anyone else.
The answer there seems unquestionably "no".
I don't know how you came to that conclusion, but it's clearly incorrect. The developers didn't choose the BSD license on accident. I mean, the BSD license was invented for the BSD OS. The fact that commercialization of software released under the BSD license is allowed is not a flaw that they somehow overlooked, it is one of the major features of the license. The BSD license is similar to the CC-BY license, which Creative Commons also did not create by mistake.
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You invented the axiom on which your "logic" is based. That makes your logic worthless.
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Projects that are licensed under BSD can switch to a more restrictive license at any time. The code already released under BSD would remain under BSD, but any new development would be under the new license. The fact that the BSD license has been revised several times and has never added any commercial constraint, and that the BSD developers have never adopted a different license for the project seem to indicate that they are comfortable with the lack of restrictions on commercial exploitation of their cod
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It is also probably the reason that Apple didn't even consider Linux for their OS.
They went with NeXTSTEP, which was released three years before there ever was a Linux. And of course NeXT was Steve Job's baby.
They were concerning BeOS, which I always thought was an interesting operating system. A copy of it came with my PowerComputing Mac clone.
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How is this patentable? (Score:2)
In a communication terminal equipment and in a method of controlling call incoming, unnecessary noises in a period from the start of an alert sound to carrying out of the next operation can be reduced. When a predetermined operation is effected under the condition that an alert sound is ringing, the alert sound is stopped or the volume of the alert sound is reduced at least over a duration of call incoming.
Mute or reduce the volume of an alert while talking to someone on the phone?
Seriously?
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Actually, it's not when you're talking on the phone. It's muting or reducing the volume of the ringer for an incoming call, but performing a predetermined operation (aka pushing a button) just silences/reduces it. Performing said action does not affect the incoming call so the caller does not have the "unpleasant feeling" of being ignored, sent to voice mail, etc.
If an implementation silenced a call and immediately sent it to voice mail, then that would not be a violation of at least this patent (although t
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According to the a Bell System technical bulletin dated September 4, 1978 the volume wheel on the C4A ringer can be adjusted, if the subscriber requests, to provide full cut-off. The C4A ringer is the same ringer used in Bell System subscriber phones since the 50s.
Google "ringers c type maintenance 501-250-303".
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I agree, that is why this patent is different. The ringer adjuster (which actually just adjusts the distance from the solenoid clapper to the bell) is for all incoming rings. The patent in question here silences the ring for a single call, and you don't have to remember to turn it back up if you want to hear the next ring.
I grew up with mechanical phones, I remember the annoyance of missed calls because the ringer was accidentally left silenced.
It is a little tedious to read the ESL the patent is written
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So you remembered being annoyed. You most probably also thought "wouldn't it be nice if it could reset it self automatically". That makes the concept obvious. So obvious that even some not skilled in the arts could think of it. Now how you achieve that may or not be obvious.
There is also the "will it being me enough extra sales" to be worth spending time you figure out how to do it.
It's much like how I shouldn't have to set the time on the gps to the local time. We have timezone databases. We have maps
Are we going to get an update? (Score:2)
revolution (Score:2)
Oh, I think reform will happen, one way or another. Either we get busy bringing sanity back to our laws, or watch helplessly as the ever increasing corruption pushes us into doing a reboot. Revolutions clear away all kinds of bought laws.
So far, there isn't any political entity that hasn't eventually fallen. Their elites always push too far and beggar everyone else or push their state into overreach, or they get stuck in a rut, or they hold too dearly profoundly wrong or inferior ideas. Time and time
Next (Score:1)
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Initial appeals had already started and finished. It stated as much in the summary and even linked to the Appeals Court judgement.
FRRRRRRRP (Score:3)
FRRRRRRRP! That's the noise my ring makes. Silence that, you asshats!
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FRRRRRRRP! That's the noise my ring makes. Silence that, you asshats!
Mr Hognoxious,
I am hereby ordered to inform you that by the court of East Texas that your ring is in violation of patent number 2438938342 which is owned by our client, as such we are to, immediately and without condition, forcefully install this cork. Attempts to remove the cork will be met by severe fines or imprisonment.
Sincerley
A Hats,
Senior partner,
A, S and S Hats, attorneys at law.
Do ideas have value? (Score:3)
We've been at each other's throats over these topics over the years. I'm going to try it one more time without injuring anyone with a dialogue. Well, not really a dialogue, because my opponent shall be imaginary. But I don't expect too many people to disagree with him:
Re: Do ideas have value? (Score:1)
$3 million is just pocket change (Score:3)
Given that this case has gone on for six (6) years, a $3 million verdict probably won't even cover MobileMedia's legal fees (which, I suspect, the judge will not grant to them on top of the aware; it's unusual for the plaintiff/patent owner to get legal fees on top of damages in these cases). Patent litigation is very expensive, especially if you go to trial; I remember being staggered at what the cumulative per-hour billing rate must have been for one such trial where I testified as an expert. ..bruce..
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It seems every patent troll thinks their patent should be worth billions of dollars. It also seems that some companies are deciding it is worth their dime to get the courts to evaluate an actual court-ordered value for the troll's patent, which is a fraction of anything the troll wants.
This time Troll has won a Pyrrhic victory [wikipedia.org].
Hopefully the trend will continue until trolls decide that a non-practicing entity suing over patents isn't a viable business model.
Apple's strategy should be to stall. (Score:1)
When you're as big as Apple you can afford to make such lawsuits very expensive. It probably cost more than $3mil to litigate this case.
Apple, and other very wealthy companies, should in these cases just use every means to delay, stall, and in general make the trial as expensive as possible. They will pay more as well, of course, but it discourages others and will reduce such cases in the future.
Because in America (Score:1)
It stands to show that if you work hard, be innovative, keep on believing and NEVER give up ... you too can acheive your dream, and bring a creation to life ... which someone will ultimately sue you for. THAT is the new American Way.
Apple made a point on patent trolls? Let's praise (Score:3)
And forget that they reduced American's product competition by enforcing the round corners patent. Let's forget that they patented the "slide to open" (like the doors). Isn't slide to open even more outrageous than ring-silencing patents? Or at least about the same?
Let's forget that they just applied for the paper bag patent [theguardian.com]
Let's forget that they are constantly buying patents to profit from them in the exact same way these "patent trolls" do. Not every patent they buy becomes a product of their own, many are buried and many are just for collecting money from others use. This was a troll vs troll situation, let's not pretend Apple was on the high moral ground.
These patents are there just to make every product cost more and destroy any competition from small companies, humanity is losing.
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Let's forget that Apple sues for infringements of patents it actually uses. MobileMedia Ideas wouldn't know how to silence a ringer if you handed them a bell and a sledgehammer.
Apple is not a patent troll.
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Yes, they use the round corners and slide to open. But having those patents qualifies them as patent trolls.