IPCom Trying To Ban HTC's 3G Phone Sales In Germany 35
An anonymous reader writes "Patent firm IPCom announced today that it wants a ban on sales of HTC's 3G smartphones in Germany, after HTC dropped its appeal to a patent ruling IPCom won. HTC says the appeal was dropped because another patent court partially invalidated the patent in question, but IPCom is pressing forward to try to dampen HTC's holiday sales. 'IPCom, based in Pullach, Germany, is seeking royalties from a family of mobile-technology patents it acquired in 2007 from Robert Bosch GmbH, the world's largest automotive supplier. IPCom bought the patents after Bosch failed to license them to Nokia in 2003.'"
Simple Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
As I said in the past, here is a simple solution: Make the patent ownership non-transferable.
The original purpose of patents was to provide limited protection for inventors for their time and effort, NOT as a weapon of dubious litigation among megacorps which routinely "acquire" patents and have nothing to with the original inventions.
Re:ENOUGH OF THIS! (Score:4, Interesting)
If a patent holder needs to satisfy some rule about "having a product on the market", they will just contract someone to build a really crappy prototype, and put it on the market at a stupidly high price.
Re:We need iPhones and Blackberries to be banned (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately the large companies appear able to play the system, and don't seem to care about patent losses as long as they are able to threaten others with their own patent portfolio. How many large awards have we seen against Microsoft? Sun won $20 million, SPX $62 million, Eolas $521 million, VirnetX $106 million, i4i $290 million, Alcatel-Lucent $1.5 billion (overturned by judge!), reduced to $70 million, Uniloc $388 million. That isn't pocket change, and yet Microsoft is still a big supporter of patents.
But the threat of a product ban is a big one. I wonder what would happen if some holder of a fundamental patent won a case against Microsoft Windows and refused to license the patent *at any cost*. It's a shame they could work around the i4i patent.