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.'"
Things are surely getting out of hand (Score:3)
I must say this: These patent lawsuits among mobile OEMs are surely getting out of hand. Troubling.
Re:Things are surely getting out of hand (Score:4, Informative)
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If it didn't happen after Amazon's ridiculous 1-click patent, it's not going to happen. Also, I'm not convinced the patent situation is a result of "intense funding of politicians by industry sources". Industry doesn't benefit from these kinds of patent trolls. More likely it's "intense funding" by bar associations.
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Many politicians were lawyers before being elected so they don't need bribes, they're working for themselves.
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Should I read it as IP in terms of IP address or Should I read it as Intellectual Property Com ??
Imaginary Property .com
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ENOUGH OF THIS! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ENOUGH OF THIS! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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But at least that means they've built something practical, i.e. something that likely violates a dozen patents owned by other people.
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something that likely violates a dozen patents owned by other people.
huh, that's interesting. it would be funny to see a patent troll sued to death for such a thing.
Re:ENOUGH OF THIS! (Score:5, Insightful)
We need iPhones and Blackberries to be banned (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It was already invalidated, wasn't it? (Score:3)
If the patent in question was already invalidated, then WTF are these bozos suing for? They don't have a valid patent to sue with!
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Bad Career Move (Score:5, Insightful)
25 years ago - I was mucking around on my Commodore 64 thinking how cool it was to be able to code my own synthesiser, and get sprites to float around on screen. So much so, that I completed a Degree in IT in the mid 90s and have been writing software ever since.
TODAY - I can honestly say that I FUCKING HATE the vile and vicious legal cesspool that the technology industry has become.
You only have to go through a daily serve of stories on Slashdot (news for "news for nerds", remember) to see how utterly fucked up the world of IT is.
The same scenario is repeated ad nauseum on every IT blog / news site around the world.
Billion dollar legal fights, corporations exerting undue and unrestrained influence over governments; content and media giants orchestrating campaigns across all facets of media and public forums, playing on insecurities and manufacturing dissent; governments around the world increasingly tightening the reins on its citizens through advances in technology - its a total cluster fuck.
And the sad, sad, reality of the situation is that ITS ALWAYS BEEN THIS WAY.
Technology empowers those who are prepared to use it as a weapon against others.
I should have been a cabinet maker...
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Did you ever get around to coding your own synthesizer on de C64?
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> I should have been a cabinet maker...
I'm a care worker now. I used to write C++.
John Carmack on patents (Score:5, Insightful)
>The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand,
>and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the
>same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.
>
> Quoted in "John Carmack: Knee Deep in the Voodoo" Voodo Extreme(2000-09-20) http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack [wikiquote.org]
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:Simple Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
This is trivial to get around. You incorporate, file the patent as owned by the incorporated entity, then sell the incorporated entity to the person who wants to buy the patent. The patent is still owned by the original owner, but the original owner is now owned by the megacorp.
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Patent wars (Score:1)
There is something to be said for getting rid of all patents. There is, however, also something to be said for keeping them.
Patents should serve their primary purpose, which is protect and acknowledge original art, and should serve it well. But they should never, ever be allowed to be used to ban products from the market. Why? Because the customer is king, not the other way around.
So far, it has only been about banning the sales of specific products, but there comes a time when the litigation escalates to s
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The whole purpose of patents is to ban products from the market.
In years from now (Score:1)