Apple vs Samsung let the fun begin.

WildCat said:
Or maybe that the reporter is amazed as everyone else that you could patent using touch inputs on a touch screen to do stuff.
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Whether or not the reporter is incredulous about the patent is no excuse to misrepresent the proceedings and fail to do even the most cursory research into the case status.

But this sort of shoddy reporting pervades both legal and science reporting - and skeptics should know better than to repeat such articles as though they were presumptively accurate.
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
There's no way this can be good for the end user:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/09/apple_google_microsoft_buy_kodak_patents/


Report: Apple, Google, Microsoft join forces to buy Kodak patents
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Kodak went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January and got a cash infusion based largely on the value that could be realized on the auction of its patent portfolio. Kodak has a huge amount of digital imaging patents and estimates the stack's value at over $2bn at current market rates.

According to Bloomberg, two consortia had been planning to bid on the patents. Apple, as it did in the Nortel patent buy, sided with Microsoft and ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures with an opening bid of around $500m.

Meanwhile Google teamed up with a group of Asian smartphone vendors and patent firm RTX to offer a similarly sized rival bid and it might have been hoping to get the support of Kodak, since there's little love lost for Cupertino in the company at the moment.

Now, according to two sources, Apple and Google's groups have hammered out their differences and the two consortia have joined together to share costs and put in a combined bid of around $800m.
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And the secret friendship between Apple, Samsung, and Google has become official today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/business/kodak-to-sell-patents-for-525-million.html?_r=0


On Wednesday, the sale was finally announced, but instead of bringing as much as $2.6 billion as Kodak once predicted, the selling price was far short of that amount, at about $525 million. The buyer was a consortium that includes many of the world’s biggest technology firms, among them Apple, Google, Facebook and Samsung Electronics.
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If those 4 can get along, why can't we!

(Before the experts jump in, this is sarcasm, I realize they are neither secret friends, or getting along...)
 
WildCat said:
So now those 4 can ensure that any new market entrants can be sued out of business. Legal collusion.
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Well, obviously they have some reason for doing it, since they supposedly hate each other...

I would not be surprised if you are close.
 
WildCat said:
So now those 4 can ensure that any new market entrants can be sued out of business. Legal collusion.
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Possible. Also possibly the opposite - the joint ownership essentially signaling that this particular group of patents won't be asserted against anybody. It's happened before.
 
AvalonXQ said:
As usual, this is woefully inaccurate reporting. What we have, again, is a first office action rejecting the claims - not a final rejection, and certainly not USPTO "invalidating" the patent. Apple still has the opportunity to respond and there's no reason to believe that the rejection won't be withdrawn after they do. See my earler response.

By the way, the reexamination proceeding appears to be number 90/012,332 in case anyone's interested in looking at it. Note that the linked article doesn't actually provide you with that information or any way to get from it to the actual rejection - probably because, as usual, the reporter didn't bother to gather any actual facts before writing.
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Better:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/19/...d-by-us-patent-office-but-its-not-invalid-yet

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected several Apple patents in recent months, and today it added one more to the list — but that doesn't mean the patent is no longer valid. Earlier today the USPTO rejected US 7,844,915, a patent that covers the ability of a programming interface to determine whether one finger initiates scrolling, or a different number of fingers perform another action. It's the same patent that was repeatedly referred to as the pinch-to-zoom patent, even though its real definition is much, much narrower than that. The invalidation of the patent would cause considerable consternation for Apple when it comes to its $1.049 billion infringement win over Samsung — so much so that Samsung brought the decision to the attention of Judge Lucy Koh in a court filing today — but that critical step of invalidating the patent hasn't actually happened yet.
It's the same situation that we saw with Apple's bounce-back patent. The whole discussion is part of an ex parte reexamination; that means Apple is the only other party talking to the USPTO about the patent, and it will still have an opportunity to fight for keeping the patent valid or to amend its language so that it will stay relevant in the Samsung case. It's also important to note that while 21 individual claims within the patent were rejected, only one — Claim 8 — was used in the trial, providing Apple a very specific target when working with the Patent Office.
 
TheL8Elvis said:
Better:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/19/...d-by-us-patent-office-but-its-not-invalid-yet

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has rejected several Apple patents in recent months, and today it added one more to the list — but that doesn't mean the patent is no longer valid. Earlier today the USPTO rejected US 7,844,915, a patent that covers the ability of a programming interface to determine whether one finger initiates scrolling, or a different number of fingers perform another action. It's the same patent that was repeatedly referred to as the pinch-to-zoom patent, even though its real definition is much, much narrower than that. The invalidation of the patent would cause considerable consternation for Apple when it comes to its $1.049 billion infringement win over Samsung — so much so that Samsung brought the decision to the attention of Judge Lucy Koh in a court filing today — but that critical step of invalidating the patent hasn't actually happened yet.
It's the same situation that we saw with Apple's bounce-back patent. The whole discussion is part of an ex parte reexamination; that means Apple is the only other party talking to the USPTO about the patent, and it will still have an opportunity to fight for keeping the patent valid or to amend its language so that it will stay relevant in the Samsung case. It's also important to note that while 21 individual claims within the patent were rejected, only one — Claim 8 — was used in the trial, providing Apple a very specific target when working with the Patent Office.
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So Apple gets to re-word a patent and if that version is approved it applies retroactively to Samsung?

The patent office and patent law is far more screwed up that I ever thought. Dismantle and overhaul the whole stinking mess.
 
WildCat said:
So Apple gets to re-word a patent and if that version is approved it applies retroactively to Samsung?
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Reexam claims can only be narrower than the original claims, so there's no unfairness to the idea of the reexam claims "applying retroactively." By definition, if Samsung infringes any amended claims, then they infringed the original claims already. All amendments can do in reexam is narrow the scope of the patent on the basis of the newly identified prior art.
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
And the secret friendship between Apple, Samsung, and Google has become official today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/20/business/kodak-to-sell-patents-for-525-million.html?_r=0





If those 4 can get along, why can't we!

(Before the experts jump in, this is sarcasm, I realize they are neither secret friends, or getting along...)
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Semi-OT, but it's worse than anyone could imagine ... those companies aren't actually buying the patents, they fronted the money so the patents can be acquired and managed by Intellectual Ventures, the biggest patent trolling company on the planet. As investors they will be exempt from future patent litigation using the newly purchased Kodak patents.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/worlds-biggest-patent-troll-saves-kodak-from-bankruptcy/
 
Alareth said:
Semi-OT, but it's worse than anyone could imagine ... those companies aren't actually buying the patents, they fronted the money so the patents can be acquired and managed by Intellectual Ventures, the biggest patent trolling company on the planet. As investors they will be exempt from future patent litigation using the newly purchased Kodak patents.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/worlds-biggest-patent-troll-saves-kodak-from-bankruptcy/
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Which is pretty much exactly what Wildcat said (that they will be used against everyone except those 4) and the opposite of what AvalonXQ said could also be a possibility (that they would not be used against anyone).
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
Which is pretty much exactly what Wildcat said (that they will be used against everyone except those 4) and the opposite of what AvalonXQ said could also be a possibility (that they would not be used against anyone).
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It's 12 companies (not 4), and they don't control the patents. All this does is ensure they won't get sued out of business. It's doesn't mean they get to sue anybody. Which is what Wildcat claimed:
So now those 4 can ensure that any new market entrants can be sued out of business. Legal collusion.
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Since those 12 companies don't control the patents, they can't ensure anything.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/worlds-biggest-patent-troll-saves-kodak-from-bankruptcy/
However, many Kodak patents may still end up out "in the wild" and could be used in lawsuits. The group of 12 paid for a "portion" of the sale, but Intellectual Ventures is actually going to own the portfolio and can use it as it wishes—it just can't sue already-licensed companies, such as this group of 12 buyers.
 
The 12 companies don't control the patents, the patent troll company Intellectual Ventures controls the patents for them and sues all non-signatories in their place. They're basically outsourcing the business of monopolizing on innovation.
 
John Albert said:
The 12 companies don't control the patents, the patent troll company Intellectual Ventures controls the patents for them and sues all non-signatories in their place. They're basically outsourcing the business of monopolizing on innovation.
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How do you know this ?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/worlds-biggest-patent-troll-saves-kodak-from-bankruptcy/

However, many Kodak patents may still end up out "in the wild" and could be used in lawsuits. The group of 12 paid for a "portion" of the sale, but Intellectual Ventures is actually going to own the portfolio and can use it as it wishes—it just can't sue already-licensed companies, such as this group of 12 buyers.
 
OnlyTellsTruths said:
Latest news:

Judge Koh tells both sides to "pick their best cases".

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-21/apple-samsung-judge-says-companies-must-narrow-lawsuit.html
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And if anything illustrates the sheer folly of these software patents it's the judge's acknowledgement that they're not even important enough for the court to hear. This is why Koh gets it wrong, if some of the patent claims are irrelevant then all of them are. Judge Posner got it right when he threw the whole mess out when it was before his court, I have no idea how Koh justifies "well just give me 25 of your claims" from a legal standpoint.

Software patents are sheer idiocy.
 
BenBurch said:
The jury's decision cannot be questioned. As I understand it, only matters of law or matters of redress may be.
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BenBurch said:
What a jury SAYS is never considered.
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The judge called for a re-trial specifically because of what the jury said the used to make their decision... Just like Christian Klippel said would happen the day we found out what they jury had done.

http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10016008.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-5...ew-trial-on-some-damages-cuts-award-by-$450m/

Some damages in the Apple-Samsung trial need to be recalculated, Judge Lucy Koh said Friday, as she slashed $450.5 million off the more than $1 billion initial patent infringement judgment and ordered a new trial devoted to determining a new final figure. The jury blundered when determining damages linked to some Samsung products, she said. Here's a look at them. Above, the Samsung Transform.
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"The Court has identified an impermissible legal theory on which the jury based its award, and cannot reasonably calculate the amount of excess while effectuating the intent of the jury," Judge Lucy Koh, of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, said in an afternoon ruling.
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