Apple Fails To Overturn VirnetX Patent Verdict, Could Owe Over $1.1 Billion (reuters.com) 55
A federal judge denied Apple's bid to set aside or reduce a $502.8 million patent infringement verdict favoring VirnetX, and awarded interest and royalties that could boost Apple's total payout in two lawsuits above $1.1 billion. From a report: In a decision issued on Friday, U.S. District Judge Robert Schroeder in Tyler, Texas rejected Apple's request for a new trial and several other claims. These included that VirnetX's award should not exceed $113.7 million, and that jurors should have been told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had deemed VirnetX's claims "unpatentable." Jurors in October found that Apple infringed two VirnetX patents related to secure networks, known as virtual private networks, to which owners of various iPhones and iPads may connect.
1.1 billion (Score:4, Funny)
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That Apple Logo (Score:5, Funny)
needs a second bite out of it.
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And what is up with that black apple logo? Not exactly what I associate with healthy eating. Makes me think of poison. Or pirates flying the apple and crossbones flag.
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And what is up with that black apple logo? Not exactly what I associate with healthy eating. Makes me think of poison. Or pirates flying the apple and crossbones flag.
Remember when Apple had the absolute highest quality home computing hardware available? It lasted only through the Macintosh II line. After that Apple began to cheap out, and they have only become more and more in love with cost reduction as they have discovered that people buy their hardware primarily for fashion reasons.
The Macintosh IIci in particular was one of the best-designed computers I have ever touched. It had a screwless case aside from motherboard retention, and even that was handled mostly by t
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Apple today [etsystatic.com]
A billion here and a billion there, (Score:2)
and soon you're talking real money.
Live by the patent... (Score:5, Funny)
...Die by the patent.
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Unfortunately that is part of the problem with patents. Large companies have such an enourmous pile of them that if they infringe a normal company's patent, they just point out all the patents they own that the normal company is infringing.
I guess VirnetX were more careful than most.
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If VirtnetX is, as described, a patent troll, their only business is buying up patents and suing companies. Unfortunately, nobody seems to hold the patent on patent trolling.
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Ah, I didn't know they were a patent troll.
A pox on both their disgusting houses then.
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Design firms produce industrial know-how (Score:2)
One concept to distinguish design firms, such as Arm Ltd., from nonpracticing entities (NPEs, also called patent trolls) is industrial know-how [wikipedia.org]. This refers to less-abstract services related to a subject matter, such as licensing related trade secrets and/or copyrights. Arm, for example, develops and licenses not only its patents but also its know-how, such as synthesizable core designs and developer tools. Design firms regularly deal in know-how; NPEs are called NPEs because they don't.
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Except we both just violated their patent too since Slashdot redirects http to https.
"Any communications sent over an unencrypted channel between two hosts, is redirected over an encrypted channel dynamically built between two hosts"
Although it's key to remember this patent was only upheld in texas, which means it's only a few billionths of a percent below 100% to be invalid anywhere else in the world.
Texas courts after all have upheld patents on breathing...
It's a bit more than a sentence long (Score:3)
You can't just take most of a single sentence from one claim in the patent and pretend that's the whole thing. You're just being silly.
The topic of the patent is a particular method to use a proxy on the internet along with a local client to make a secure connection to a designated destination.
The patentability of some claims is questionable. VirnetX has won that argument, barely.
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Broken justice system (Score:5, Insightful)
U.S. District Judge Robert Schroeder in Tyler, Texas rejected Apple's request for a new trial and several other claims. These included that VirnetX's award should not exceed $113.7 million, and that jurors should have been told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had deemed VirnetX's claims "unpatentable."
So, you're asking a jury to decide to convict someone/company on some perceived crime, while withholding critical information from that jury to make that a balanced decision??
No wonder there's so many cases of wrongfully convicted people.
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The one part of US law that scares me the most is the concept of a jury of my "peers".
Indeed - force a bunch of unpaid/underpaid people to do something they've never been trained/qualified to do for a potentially unknown length of time, and giving them the assumption you're probably guilty to begin with by virtue of being the defendant in the case.
What fucking idiot thought that system up?
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What fucking idiot thought that system up?
What alternative do you recommend?
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What fucking idiot thought that system up?
What alternative do you recommend?
Fucking pay jurors their regular salary the entire time they're being forced to do jury duty, for one.
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there regular salary + a bit extra (in the cases juries have to pe isolated, ie cases like OJ) otherwise they still might be tempted to get this done asap since they can't live normaly during the case and earn no extra
That's actually an excellent point - the current system gives jurors the (perverse) incentive to rush it through; so much for "justice" then!
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there regular salary + a bit extra (in the cases juries have to pe isolated, ie cases like OJ) otherwise they still might be tempted to get this done asap since they can't live normaly during the case and earn no extra
That's actually an excellent point - the current system gives jurors the (perverse) incentive to rush it through; so much for "justice" then!
"
Legally requiring their job be protected while serving on the jury would help as well, perhaps along with compensation for additional costs (if any can be proven) for the employer. A lot of employers will try to penalize an employee who does not manage to get out of jury duty. Loss of job can be a real possibility, especially if the trial is expected to take much time.
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A lot of employers will try to penalize an employee who does not manage to get out of jury duty. Loss of job can be a real possibility, especially if the trial is expected to take much time.
AFAIK that's technically illegal for employers to do, but then actual protections might depend on jurisdiction
But you bring up a good point that some businesses might also be negatively impacted - say an important/high-producing employee gets stuck in jury for months, they might lose sales or productivity because of it, through no fault of the employer or employee - I remember Steve Jobs having to show up for being a potential juror - he got out because he already had prior travels plans; him being CEO wasn
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A lot of employers will try to penalize an employee who does not manage to get out of jury duty. Loss of job can be a real possibility, especially if the trial is expected to take much time.
Actually another point on this (the potential for jobloss with no/peanuts compensation while being a juror) - what if the juror has a family, mortage & car payments? Are they just expected to declare bankruptcy while they jury-dutying? I wonder if there's actual cases of this having happened out there (rhetorically)...
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I was almost on a jury a few years ago, and was suprized the the education level of many of the other potential jurors. I think that there were several on the actual jury that held master's degrees.
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I'm sorry that your reading comprehension is so poor that you were unable to understand that there were several people with masters degrees on the jury. This wasn't speculation on my part: the questions for the potential jurors included level of education.
I didn't say that this was typical. I don't know how
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You could have said that initially. Instead, you chose to go down the route of being an asshole.
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My point is, that may have happened once, but thats not reality. Basic maths and a brief understanding of percentages would make this obvious. Just because tv says someone won lotto doesnt mean everybody in reality does.
Winning the lottery is an acceptable example of random chance. Equating that to jury selection assumes an equivlent level of randomness that does not exist in reality. For legal systems where jury selection includes giving the lawyers some say on who is empanelled, a jury whose members are not a random representation of the general population is more comon than not.
So, the likelyhood of juries with an abnormally large number of jurors with higher education is much greater than random chance, because one or
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For legal systems where jury selection includes giving the lawyers some say on who is empanelled, a jury whose members are not a random representation of the general population is more comon than not.
This.
The fact the lawyers (on both sides) get to decide who gets to be on the jury (based on how they feel each juror would lean) makes the 'peer' part of it a total joke (if it were to really be a set of 'peers', shouldn't only the judge, or just the defendant, be the one making the final selection?)
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The Normans, to ensure that their Anglo-Saxon serfs would feel that their customs were not being trampled and they wouldn't revolt against "foreign" justice.
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A great judge once told me his juries always returned the correct verdict except for the one time when someone who had gone to law school was on the jury. Apparently he had misled all the others.
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I did jury duty recently. Bunch of 40 year old high school students. I'll never trust our justice system again.
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It's an old (and now abolished) concept from English law, under which a sitting member of the House of Lords could demand to be tried in the House of Lords, instead of by a jury of commoners.
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When that concept was introduced, it was only meant to ensure that noblemen would have a jury of noblemen, so the king, for example, in an inheritance dispute, couldn't just rule that the king inherits it all. Also so that commoners couldn't judge against their lords, though that was never in the cards, anyway. I guess it also meant that commoners would have a jury of commoners, so the noblemen couldn't make a verdict t
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So, you're...
So, you're addressing... who, exactly??
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The "little Texas courthouse" is The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, a federal court in the Fifth Circuit. They have electricity and indoor plumbing too!
Well I certainly hope so too neither electricity nor indoor plumbing is anything other than expected in this day and age in a developed country, so unless that detail was meant as humorous, I must admit to failing to see the point.
Except a rectangle with rounded corners (Score:4)
Big Corp and Apple Bashing (Score:1)
Why was the fact that "the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had deemed VirnetX's claims unpatentable not considered?"
: : : insert your favorite conspiracy theory here : :
Perhaps Judge Schroeder's cat had a bad awakening (I know it's not the same name, but made me think about a sad moment when my cat got confused one morning. .
Really, a TX judge knows better than the USPTO?
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Biography [fjc.gov]
"our inventors" (Score:3)
After a ruling back in 2010 VirnetX said "We are extremely pleased with the jury verdict.... The jury agreed once again that Apple has been using the technology developed by our inventors."
As I understand it, they had bought these patents from SAIC (which was stupid enough to sell seemingly worthless, but sneakily worded, patents).
Texas regains title as capital of patent ... (Score:2)
An interesting article from Houston Chronicle:
"Texas regains title as capital of patent litigation"
https://www.houstonchronicle.c... [houstonchronicle.com]
I am not sure this is an aspiring goal. The locals would of course have an affinity to what essentially became a local business. However it might be time to have non-local jury selection for national patent cases.
VirnetX the patent troll (Score:1)
"An East Texas jury has ruled that Apple must pay patent-holding company VirnetX $625.6 million for infringing four patents. It's a massive verdict for VirnetX, a company that has no products and makes its money solely through patent litigation."
Why is this still a case? (Score:2)
There is something fundamentally broken with the system when the statement "jurors should have been told the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had deemed VirnetX's claims "unpatentable."" doesn't lead to "case dismissed, no damages" whether or not the jurors have been told.