This reads like a stolen and automatically translated German article. The end suddenly talks as if the current website is PCGH.de, and contains the German sounding phrase "your opinion is asked". The mentioning of the sources doesn't provide any links and inexplicably says "those" instead of "source".
Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#22What is wrong with the titles in this article? "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers" No, AVM is the company producing them, they are not threatening themselves to ban selling their own product And then one title has "regional court" in small caps, another has "Regional Court" with caps
Some AI translation from German?
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#23AVM recently announced that the business might be sold by the founders. This law suit somehow seems to me that the price for the company should be influenced artificially. On the other hand China just saw protectionism by the US happening and now they are shifting gears. How long will it take until sanctions by the US will be useless?
According to the Heise article (https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat...), the lawsuit is from 2022, so before the intention of the founders to sell was announced, and was against several companies, including Amazon, Stellantis and Netgear. So, if there is any ulterior motive behind this, it's maybe tit-for-tat because of the US and EU efforts to exclude Huawei from government and network infrastructure projects, but not something directed specifically against AVM...
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#24AVM is notorious for GPL violations. I cannot say anything about these patents (aside from stating the fact that all software patents are bogus, because math cannot be patented), but I would not be surprised if they intentionally violated them.
I wasn't aware of that, do you have sources? It's really odd seeing Chinese companies taking someone to court for IP infringement given that that is the modus operandi of Chinese companies and has been for decades.
The PRC started enforcing US/Berne copyrights quite seriously for big companies 5-10 years ago, after negotiations with the US under the Obama administration. They actually licence, buy, or invent huge amounts of IP today, straight rip-offs in China now are mostly just small time hustlers on Alibaba that everyone hates. For example, Huawei spends gigantic amounts of money on R&D, equivalent to Apple and more than Samsung.
Part of those negotiations would have been that China is not unfairly excluded from being able to own IP and prosecute others for the same laws it was agreeing to be subject to.
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#25This reads like a stolen and automatically translated German article. The end suddenly talks as if the current website is PCGH.de, and contains the German sounding phrase "your opinion is asked". The mentioning of the sources doesn't provide any links and inexplicably says "those" instead of "source".
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
Also one of the headings was mistranslated horribly.
In linked the article: "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers". The original in German: "AVM droht Verkaufsverbot für Fritzbox-Router". Right translation is roughly: "AVM is threatened with a ban on the sale of Fritzbox routers".
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#26AVM is notorious for GPL violations. I cannot say anything about these patents (aside from stating the fact that all software patents are bogus, because math cannot be patented), but I would not be surprised if they intentionally violated them.
The patent is about how packets could be structured and sent on a wireless network, so not necessarily a "software patent". https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0581867...
It seems to be about the "structure" of a packet, meaning bit fields that indicate if the packet is for a single user or multicast?
That seems more to me like a mere protocol convention, exactly the kind of stuff that should be in a standard communication protocol just so everyone agrees on the same fields.
How is that a new "invention"?
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#27Weird choice of this site to mention their sources, but not linking them. - Heise reported this originally: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat... - Golem basically summarized the Heise article: https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsve...
And the article seems to be a stolen version of this German one:
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#28Today I learned SEPs, standard essential patents, are a thing. How on earth adhering to a public standard can be considered an invention is beyond me, nor is how we got to the point that it is common enough to require its own special treatment. Maybe someone can change my mind on why this is an invention worth monopolising, but I doubt it.
Sadly it works the other way around, and this has a tendency to infect standardization proceedings. If you can put some technology that uses your patents in a standard like WiFi or 5G, that is a license to print money. There are plenty of good ideas that should be in a standard that are patented. Leaving aside the issue of whether it's good those patents exist, you do want that technology in the standards. So it's no…
The typical standards process is an adaptation to a world where patents exist. It tries to clearly determine what patents are required to build a technology, and will typically lump them up into a patent pool available for a nominal licensing fee. Participants are strongly incentivized to disclose any essential patents they hold and include them in the pool, so as a standards implementer you know that once you pay the fee, nobody will sue you.
The alternative - again, in the same real world where patents exist - is to craft a very fragile standard around the patents that you know of, without the participation of the industry, only to be whacked with a submarine patent as soon as the standard becomes dominant and can't - in the legal opinion of the "inventor" - be implemented without their innovative brainberry. That can still happen within the previous workflow, but at least you involve early on most holders of IP related to that field.
Of course, none of this precludes the notion that a better world is possible, say one where any inventor has to prove substantial investment before patentability (say, medical studies and drug approval), and can only recoup those investments up to a limited multiplier.
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#29this site has 1 sentence than ad, and it contains like a 100 sentences which equals about 100 ads. wouldn't recommend visiting it.
Re: Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
#30AVM is notorious for GPL violations. I cannot say anything about these patents (aside from stating the fact that all software patents are bogus, because math cannot be patented), but I would not be surprised if they intentionally violated them.
What GPL violations? I can't really find anything on than a single case from 2011 where AVM tried to prevent another company from distributing modified firmware for their routers. There's a lot of things you can say about that, but it's arguably not really a "GPL violation" as commonly understood, and a single incident in almost 40 years of history doesn't make a company "notorious".
Back in 2020 they also attempted to stop the sale of modified AVM second hand products running custom firmware based on the code they had to publish because of the GPL restrictions. They're still trying very hard to prevent people from modifying their hardware after purchase.
The freedom to take a device and modify it to run your own changes is what the GPL is all about. Let's not forget the modern open source movement was the result of someone not being able to load a custom font into a printer. Do you think Stallman would've been satisfied if Xerox had given him the source code he asked for, but then indicated they'd sue him if he tried to load any modified software onto the printer?
AVM's interpretation of the license ("you can modify the GPL software but you're not allowed to flash it onto the device") was shot down by the court, and rightly so.
I think a company actively going after another to prevent exercising the software freedoms granted by the GPL makes them deserving of being called "notorious". It's a shitty practice in general, but it's especially shitty when you do it for GPL firmware.