ITC Investigates Xbox 360 After Motorola Complaint 71
FlorianMueller writes "The US International Trade Commission, which is increasingly popular as a patent enforcement agency, voted to investigate a complaint filed by Motorola against Microsoft last month. Motorola claims that the Xbox infringes five of its patents. In October, Microsoft complained against Motorola, alleging patent infringement by its Android-based smartphones. Apple, Nokia and HTC are also involved with ITC investigations as complainants and respondents. A new one-page overview document shows the ongoing ITC investigations related to smartphones and the products that the complainants would like to have banned from entry into the US market. The good news is that any import bans won't be ordered until long after Christmas. The ITC is faster than courts, but not that fast."
Patents are terrible for the little guy (Score:4, Insightful)
While patents, on the one hand, provide a measured amount of protection against aggressive and litigious competitors, they are only useful in bulk. This leaves many little guys hamstrung and at the whim of big guys like Motorola and Microsoft. Here we see to goliaths go at each other, and it's interesting because both sides have deep patent portfolios that they can wield against each other. The ultimate solution will be some sort of cross licensing deal, no doubt.
But for the little guy, a company like Microsoft can extinguish in short order due to a limited amount of leverage. Where Moto can respond with a set of infringed patents, the little guy won't have that type of MAD defensive position. As a result, the big guys get bigger, and the little guys get snuffed, and the consumers get screwed.
Patents were meant to foster competition and promote a plethora of ideas. It has not done that at all in the software sphere. Perhaps it is time to rethink the whole software patent system.
Re:Patents are terrible for the little guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of the problem is that one patented idea/process/implementation isn't enough to do anything in today's world - a system like a game console or smartphone is built on thousands of patentable components.
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When you say "finished product" are you precluding the possibility of inventing a useful component that could be used in many different applications? Let's say you invented a new kind of drain stopper that only makes sense used in tandem with existing drains. Surely, you would want to assign patent rights to the inventor of the new drain stopper even though his invention isn't a complete device but rather a part of a larger device.
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So you don't think a patent should have been awarded for something like a transistor?
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It's built by Thousands of "should not be patented" components.
Honestly, If I buy your company's chips to make a product, YOU CANT SUE ME FOR PATENT INFRINGEMENT FOR USING YOUR PRODUCT!
Patent law ,like copyright law has gone spiraling out of control to the point that it's all useless bullshit designed to do nothing but provide extortion leverage against your competition.
Three is NOTHING in the Xbox360 that violates a Motorola patent. Just like how there is NOTHING in a Android phone that violates a MSFT p
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Yes, but the red and blue ones are not approved for that sandbox.
Re:Patents are terrible for the little guy (Score:4, Insightful)
Patents exist to motivate inventors to invent, and then to put the inventions into the public domain after a due period.
Would any of these companies have decided not to develop their phones, and hence do the R&D that led to these patents, if there had been no patent system? I very much doubt it. And the fact that the other companies are, allegedly, infringing means that the first inventor has not been able to keep it secret - or, as is often the case, the idea was "in the air" as a result of the way the industry was developing.
The patent system is severely broken for the IT industry as it now is. For the industry as a whole, it is a zero sum game: no R&D is being done because the developer hopes to profit from license fees. On the contrary, it is a burden because to the time and effort filing patents, the effort of working around other people's patents, and the cost of fighting patent wars or negotiating patent armistices. Of course, interested parties (patent lawyers, including trolls, and the Patent Offices, insist that it is invaluable. But show me an engineer who would not like the whole thing swept away. (I speak only for the IT industry, though I think it apples much more widely).
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But in these cases, either the defendants in the cases deliberately infringed by reading the patents, which I strongly doubt, or they copied an obvious feature, in which case secrets are of no value, or the parallel-invented it, just a bit later, which is a common case.
Too many patents, of which one-click is the most notorious, are ideas which become obvious when a certain state of the art is reached. Nobody has the idea before the underlying technology reaches a certain point; once it reaches that point, a
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The patent system isn't going to be thrown out because people find it inconvenient. In fact, it's going to be kept because those inconveniences keep the system working.
What's your definition of working? Unless Adding tens of billions of dollars of costs for marginal or non-existent consumer benefit is your definition of working, the current system doesn't work. See Boldrin and Levine "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
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Name me /one/ patent that is protecting some companies product.
Yes, I do believe that companies will do as you say they won't. Has Apple dominated the MP2 player, smart phone, and tablet markets because patents stop people building competitive products? No, it has succeeded because it is a better systems and marketing company. Patents don't stop people competing: it is too easy to work around most of them. They add obstacles and add to the cost of doing business, which harms the whole community. But, outsid
Re:Patents are terrible for the little guy (Score:4, Funny)
One click.
Amazon.com would have went bankrupt 30 years ago without it.
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This is about patents... Reality and Sanity has nothing to do with this subject.
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Companies would most certainly still do R&D if there were no patents, they would just keep the results secret until they had a product for sale... That way they would still get a lead on anyone else, who would have to reverse engineer and develop their own clone of the product (even without patents, copyright law would prevent them from making direct copies).
Also, doing away with patents would actually reduce the cost of R&D... Instead of having to work around or license patents, not to mention all
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If you honestly believe companies would spend 10's/100's of millions of dollars on R&D if everyone was allowed to copy it then I have a bridge to sell you, slightly used but I promise I am the owner... really.
R&D is EXPENSIVE, The patent system is fucked up beyond repair, it needs a fresh start, but something definitely needs to exist, companies will not throw millions down the tube on research and innovation if the only advantage it gives them is the 2 weeks it takes for their competitors to copy.
It's not hard: keep your invention under wraps until its release and reap the rewards of a having a monopoly on the market until your competitors can tool up.
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The issue in rethinking the software patent system is that the big companies have invested insane amounts of money in their patent portfolios and have projected income on these portfolios for the coming years. Their shareholders certainly won't agree with invalidating software patents.
Heinlein springs to mind (Score:5, Interesting)
Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line, 1939.
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and the big guys (Score:2)
Look at how much time and money big companies have been sinking into patent litigation lately? Their intention is to lock out big companies out of markets, but they just result in a counter attack. Eventually someone settles, and the lawyers are sent home with nothing to show for it.
I feel like we're on the brink of some sort of patent reform, once the big companies realize that the system is no longer beneficial to them.
As for the little guy, nobody cares about the little guy. politicians might talk about
Well (Score:2, Redundant)
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Motorola invented, among other things, the Cellular phone.
To clarify, they "invented" ("engineered" would be more apt here, IMO) the first handheld cellphone. Heavier systems which used the same cell technology were in use long before that.
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Well I don't like these ridiculous patent claims, but seeing Microsoft as a victim makes it worthwhile
No, it doesn't.
upnp? wmv-vp9? (Score:1)
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More likely they'll just settle out of court, pay cash to one another, kiss, and that's the end. I doubt we'll see a battle between M and MS.
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Seen many IPX/SPX networks around lately? No? I thought not.
The facts are that (a) Novell came late to the networking game (TCP/IP, Banyan Vines, NetBEUI, SNA, X.25, and others predate Novell's offering) and (b) lost the networking battle about 20 years ago. Therefore, any networking patents that Novell has or had are probably
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Novell came and went in the low end small lan arena...
TCP/IP came first, and has outlived IPX/SPX, novell was only used in small companies that wanted to network together dos and early windows machines on a small scale. Unix, VMS and mainframe systems were being networked together long before novell ever introduced networking to the lowest end microcomputers.
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Eh?
At the time Netware was popular, half the offices in the world still had serial ports on the wall for a terminal. Networking was for big iron. Novell had some massive installations (and others too, 3Com comes to mind with it's XNS based stuff that eventuall became Lan Manager). We're talking tens of thousands of employees in a single setup, not just lawyers offices with two guys and a secretary.
Netware could have been a contender but it smelled too proprietary in an era when "Open" was the catch cry.
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I would like to compain about Microsoft to. (Score:1)
With all the trouble they cause we should call them Stupid phones.
To promote the Progress ... (Score:1)
I can't help thinking this is not how patent law should be used.
It would be nice if a lot of this could be struck down on grounds of constitutionality, or on
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"products that the complainants would like to have banned from entry into the US market."
Quite simply, if those products infringe on your "exclusive right" they you can ask that they be made to stop infringing. The simplest and most immediate way is to prevent their sale.
If you can't stop infringement then the "exclusive right" is pretty much useless.
My head just exploded (Score:2)
Should I support patents & oppose Microsoft?
Or should I support Microsoft & oppose patents?
Patent Wars. (Score:2)
Patent Chess (Score:2)
company1: "Hey company2, I hold a patent vaguely describing what you do with product X"
company2: "Hey company1, I have two patents even more vaguely describing what you do with product Y"
company3: "Hey both of you, I hold ten patents that you both infringe on"
company1: "Oh yeah, well guess what, I have twelve other patents, that
It's getting ridiculus...
Re:Patent Chess (Score:4, Interesting)
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not true. I've done it, people I know have done it. You just aren't capable so you assume it's impossible.
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It's really not possible to "invent" anything anymore as an individual. You'll inevitably violate some company's patent. You need your own war chest of patents to defend yourself.
What do you mean by 'as an individual'? Because I'm still seeing plenty of startups - that don't have large patent portfolios - succeeding.
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Microsoft: Pawn takes Pawn
Motorola: Hey that's illegal
Apple: it's called en passant...
Oracle: You sunk my battleship!
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Why innovate when you can litigate?
What specific innovation is this legal action stifling?
I think this is all planned (Score:2)
Here's what I think.
The big Corps don't actually like patents anymore. So some of them, mainly hardware/software makers, figure out if they start suing each other, and putting in patents for blatenly obvious stuff, that sooner or later the gov will stop sucking the MIAA & RIAA's dick long enough to invalidate all patents.
Or at least, that's my spin on some obvious greedy corporations.
It's tempting to guess what others think... (Score:2)
Much as I'd like to believe you're right, you should never underestimate the power of the literal interpretation.
I, for one, have a hard time believing that fundamentalists actually believe in a 6000 year old Earth (and most of the rest of it). Surely, they must just think that 'people are inherently selfish and they need our stories to keep them in line'. And that could be true of some of 'em. But unless they come clean, it's impossible to know. May as well deal with them as though they mean what they
R&D Costs versus total product budget (Score:2)
If you want an idea of how little R&D spending is, you only need to look at medicine where you would think that R&D costs would be huge and they would want to protect their work fearsly. You might be surprised to know that R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more of the sales of drugs. It is urban legend that medicine companies spend huge portions of their budgets on R&D, they simply don't. You should also realize t
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When you are only fixing the problem at hand, there is no way you will come up with something so unique that no one else will think of it. Sorry, but if your trying to solve a problem I can guarantee you someone else out there is trying to solve the same problem and is going to come up with basically the same thing as you do.
Well, damn, that's just great. So, If I want to create innovative ideas, I have to work on stuff that doesn't fix any known problems or else others will be working on the same problem, and come up with the same obvious "inventions". Yeah, and these "innovations" are by definition not going to help our civilization in any meaningful way...
Look, with patents on the book such as "Method for swinging on a swing -- sideways", I think you totally misunderstand the patent system. It's about patenting something
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" R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. "
False.
"The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more "
not on new drugs. older drugs that aren't patents see 50% of their total costs in marketing. That's because the cost of manufacturing has dropped for the drug, and the RnD costs have been depreciated. It's harder to make money froma drug with an expired patent, that's why they have a larger push.
They money the companies get from the government, for the vast large part, is so
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" R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. "
False.
"The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more " not on new drugs. older drugs that aren't patents see 50% of their total costs in marketing. That's because the cost of manufacturing has dropped for the drug, and the RnD costs have been depreciated. It's harder to make money froma drug with an expired patent, that's why they have a larger push.
They money the companies get from the government, for the vast large part, is so they will produce drugs they make little to know money producing, like vaccines.
The RnD for Drugs and the RnD for 'tech' is vastly different. It's far FAR more expensive for drug companies. The exception being that medical devices are about the same in RnD has Drugs. When was the last time a mp3 manufacture had to have the plays go through a series of animal test? Develop a new molecule?.
And software RnD is DIRT CHEAP compared to any other RnD.
All RnD is NOT tax deductible.
Regulatory approval can constitute up to 80% of the cost of bringing a drug to market. Drug companies are a little weird because they aren't just drug companies, but drug effectiveness research companies. This creates a huge conflict of interest. The same people who want to sell the drugs are the same people designing the studies to try to prove that they work. The solution is to find a way to separate the two. Have insurance companies and doctors or a separate agency be responsible for making sure that dru
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If you want an idea of how little R&D spending is, you only need to look at medicine
Why would you look there and infer numbers for the tech industry - which is the context of this discussion - instead of just looking at the tech industry itself? In the tech sector the average spend is around 12-15% [wikinvest.com] of total revenue, so as a percentage of their costs it is generally significantly higher.