All of this is small stuff relative to the consequences if the courts rule in Oracle's favor about patenting APIs.
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All of this is small stuff relative to the consequences if the courts rule in Oracle's favor about patenting APIs.
whether the technology is in widespread use or not is completely irrelevant to any potential case..
Companies such as Nokia and Motorola spent hundreds of millions in cellphone, cellular, and smartphone technologies at a time where there was little financial payback..they cross used each others technology and competed against each other, keeping the patent shotguns in their back pocket.. and relied on good old fashioned market forces to make money... consider their patent portfolios as a nuclear shield of mutually assured destruction (or at least expensive, pointless and needless aggravation in the law courst where nobody wins).
times changed, and from the mid 90's you could call up a company and get a complete bill to print design for a cellphone, and so it was possible for new entrants (read Apple) to enter the market with only marginal R&D expenditures and zero baseline in the underlying technologies.., ie consider a poker game where the pot has increased to tens of thousands of dollars based upon the bets of others, and you arrive with $5 and play. Apple was successful but then Apple engaged in predatory patent practices, having believed they invented the light switch, sliced bread, and the cellphone... none of this will sit well with the actual originators of the standards.
If you invent a technology and it is adopted by a standard, you are required to license on fair and reasonable basis...that is a construct enforced for any IP to be in consideration for a standard.
However, if you invented and patented a technology, and such technology is not adopted as a standard, but gets used by others, then that is theft.. The construct of "fair and reasonable" does not apply and you may set any level of licensing, or simply refuse to license and demand non-infringement.
So, in such a case, if your claim is upheld, then all bets are off... you can get injunctions and force redesigns and in some cases total withdrawal of a product, or line of products from the market... the scope or amount of use of stolen intellectual property in the marketplace is NOT a consideration in any judgement..
This is no surprise to me. Cell manufactures sue each other all the time over patents. In the end both parties generally work out something, RIM isn't losing any money until that day comes if and when a judge tells them otherwise to pay up! :)
I think there is a strategy to where companies sue the other ones. I can't remember if it was Samsung or Motorola but one of them, or someone else, sued Apple in Germany. They did it there because that's where a lot of the products or shipped to and then distributed. If they won the case they would have impacted Apple more so then if they sued them in another country.
(I'm going off memory from months ago)
They could also be doing it in other countries based on the likely hood of winning the case.
that was my bad. i meant Hundreds of Millions of DOLLARS...
like the cost of all the lawyers and so on could go to R&D... just didnt type the word DOLLARS in there
Nokia is just upset they lost the to samsung
Sent from my BlackBerry 9800 using CrackBerry forums application
You never hear of RIM suing anyone, ok Kik but others must be filtering some goodies, no?
Interesting, Samsung is not being sued. Prior to litigation most firms try to settle things, well Nokia is attacking the weakest link in Android--HTC.
I thought Google's purchase of Motorola was supposed to firewall all Android phone makers from litigation. I guess Elop never received the memo.
Patent Wars ........ :rolleyes: :(
No Apple.... Just a good example of "Patent Trolling".... The future of fast money.....
Patent trolls. Don't feed 'em.
You guys need to relax. Nokia is not patent trolling. It's not like they do this just to make money.
These cases seem to be legitimate patent infringement. As long as it's not a dumb patent or something.
http://technologizer.files.wordpress...ssuingwho2.png
And this is from last year (i.e. outdated) :eek: