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Apple faces $600m damages claim

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#21

Post by natch »

glhaynes wrote: post #16
hugh3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on, so what is the difference between your company and a patent troll? Not that I'm accusing you guys, I'm just not sure how I can readily draw the line between the two.

Perhaps they actually invent and design useful things and then license them.

Good answer and I agree with it, but most of the time these ideas are invented and reinvented many times, easily, and they should not be protected by the government. You can describe a problem to a six year old and they can come up with patentable inventions that solve the problem. This says more about our patent system than it does about six year olds.

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#22

Post by gruseom »

I find it hard to believe that Gelernter's work played any role in the creation of Apple's products. I've read some of his stuff (admittedly unrelated) and the thing that leapt out at me was how hard it would be to do anything with it. (Edit: frankly, I don't think it's all that hard to sit around "inventing" things if all you have to do is write about them and never back them up with real products. Research prototypes don't count, either.)

These judgments are really hard to stomach. Perhaps, though, if enough powerful companies get hit with them, they'll lobby to stop the insanity. That's how the legislative process works, isn't it?

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#23

Post by MrMatt »

OK, so I get that a patent allows an inventor to protect their invention from exploitation, but I don't understand why a patent is transferrable - surely the idea is to allow an inventor to license the patent so that even if they couldn't realise a commercial product with their idea, they could allow others to do so, and still get something in return.

I could sympathise if Mirror Worlds were the originators of the patent, but as they bought it, then I get the impression that the whole thing stinks.

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#24

Post by commandar »

unexpected wrote: post #20
lkjuhygthyujk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand the difference between a patent troll and an IP company. The company I work for designs antennae for cell phones, wifi, GPS receivers etc. We barely have a website, just a couple of PhDs and a lawyer. We rely on licencing our designs and file a lot of patents. It's judgements like this that stop cell phone makers deciding that it's cheaper to just copy our inventions than pay us a licence…

I don't even think you should receive a patent unless you intend to commercialize it. In this system, you have incentives to make your patent as broad as possible, as well as look for "me-too" patents that you can get by studying existing ones. If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll. The initial patent wasn't intended for this. The patent wasn't originally i…

>If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll.

Isn't that essentially ARM's business model?

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#25

Post by IgorPartola »

unexpected wrote: post #20
lkjuhygthyujk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand the difference between a patent troll and an IP company. The company I work for designs antennae for cell phones, wifi, GPS receivers etc. We barely have a website, just a couple of PhDs and a lawyer. We rely on licencing our designs and file a lot of patents. It's judgements like this that stop cell phone makers deciding that it's cheaper to just copy our inventions than pay us a licence…

I don't even think you should receive a patent unless you intend to commercialize it. In this system, you have incentives to make your patent as broad as possible, as well as look for "me-too" patents that you can get by studying existing ones. If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll. The initial patent wasn't intended for this. The patent wasn't originally i…

Are you telling me that if I come up with a way to build a cold fusion reactor, start to finish, that is commercially viable but will cost me $1,000,000,000,000 to build but can power the entire human civilization, my only option is to either build it or forget it? That if I obtain a patent it is somehow my obligation to actually make the damn thing?

Also, how do you propose the patent office make sure that I am actually going to build something? Isn't the workflow "invent, patent, produce"? Or should I alter that workflow and go with "invent, produce, patent"? If so what happens to everyone that imitates me in the produce phase once I get my patent? Seems to me I'd be much more of a troll then.

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#26

Post by gruseom »

lkjuhygthyujk wrote: post #18
tnorthcutt wrote: post #6

It added that the patents had been sold and any damages awarded should reflect that market value. The patent package is believed to have been sold for $5m. If the patent package was recently sold, doesn't that do a pretty good job of establishing the value of the patents, and thus, the appropriate judgment against Apple?

No it represents what a market maker thought the value of the patent was multiplied by the chance of collecting on it. What would the idea of the iPod have been worth in the 90s? The then value of Apple's consumer electronics sales (ie 0) or the current and future value of Apple?

What would the idea of the iPod have been worth in the 90s?

Very little indeed.

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#27

Post by jcl »

gruseom wrote: post #22

I find it hard to believe that Gelernter's work played any role in the creation of Apple's products. I've read some of his stuff (admittedly unrelated) and the thing that leapt out at me was how hard it would be to do anything with it. (Edit: frankly, I don't think it's all that hard to sit around "inventing" things if all you have to do is write about them and never back them up with real products. Research prototyp…

Be careful of what you wish for, though. Powerful companies would most likely lobby for changes to patent law that benefit powerful companies.

For example, they might lobby to require the invention be a "real product", defined as N x 100,000 units or $N million dollars revenue. While that would eliminate patent trolls, it would also destroy small companies and individual inventors.

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#28

Post by dschoon »

jcromartie wrote: post #3

It's unbelievable that a company that doesn't even have a website can win a suit like this. For Apple to have caused "Mirror Worlds" any harm, they would have to be competing with each other. For Mirror Worlds to compete with ANYBODY , a good start would be appearing to be a real business in any way shape or form. Maybe I don't really understand patent law, but David Gelernter just sounds like a total scumbag here. I…

David Gelernter is a CS professor at Yale, an author, and as far as I can tell, not really a scumbag. But who knows, he did name his coordination language Linda, because "'Ada' is to 'Ada Lovelace' as 'Linda' is to 'Linda Lovelace'".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_%28coordination_language%...

He's got quite a few essays on edge.org of some repute, including this one from 2000 in which he eerily and in detail predicts the move to event stream-based information presentation. Quantity, not quality, he says.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759763

In any case, all the Mirror Worlds patent trial documents are available here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759843

From the summary there:

The document display lawsuit involved Apple's Cover Flow, Time Machine, and Spotlight displays. Plaintiff Mirror Worlds LLC alleges that Defendant Apple, Inc. infringed on U.S. Patent Nos. 6,006,227 and 6,638,313 B1 entitled "Document Stream Operating System" and 6,725,427 B2 entitled "Document Stream Operating System with Document Organizing and Display Facilities," 6,768,999 B2 entitled "Enterprise, Stream-Based Information Management System".

Re: Apple faces $600m damages claim

#29

Post by jcromartie »

commandar wrote: post #24
unexpected wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even think you should receive a patent unless you intend to commercialize it. In this system, you have incentives to make your patent as broad as possible, as well as look for "me-too" patents that you can get by studying existing ones. If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll. The initial patent wasn't intended for this. The patent wasn't originally i…

>If your sole source of revenue is licensing the patents that you've created, you're a patent troll. Isn't that essentially ARM's business model?

ARM actually designs and licenses whole chip architectures. You can license a design from ARM and have it built it without much additional engineering.
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