The iPhone Patent Wars: Early patent skirmishes of Apple, Inc., in pictures
The iPhone Patent Wars have now been raging for nearly four years, not in the competitive market for smartphone sales, but rather in contentions over intellectual property, expressed in the government-enforced monopolies over inventions known as patents.
These wars have been waged in the courts over damages related to patent infringement, within private negotiations for settlement and in Executive Branch decisions considered by the International Trade Commission, a quasi-judicial federal agency with the power to block imports and ban sales. ITC bans are a particularly devastating weapon for patent holders to wield.
One of the biggest Federal Court trials yet isn't even set to begin until next summer: a second case between Apple and Samsung following the original trial that resulted in a jury award of $1 billion in damages for Apple last fall. That case is still on appeal, too.
This series provides a look at what's happened so far, and why many in the general public aren't even aware of the extent and intrigue in the patent shenanigans occurring among Big Phone players, starting with how Apple got its reputation for abusing patents even before the iPhone appeared.
As the once beleaguered Apple Computer transitioned itself into the very successful Apple, Inc., a metamorphosis fueled by profitable sales of tens of millions of iPods in the first half of the 2000s, existing companies that failed to successfully compete in the market (or simply didn't bother to try) turned to patent litigation in order claim a cut of Apple's earnings.
Source: AAD Patent
In March 2005, Advanced Audio Devices sued Apple over patent 6,587,403 for a "music jukebox," presented above from the patent filing as "a perspective view of a music jukebox in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention." Apple denied any infringement but eventually settled over an "undisclosed" sum.
The U.S. government, through the Patent Office, had in August 2000 granted Advanced Audio Devices "inventors" Peter and Michael Kelley a legal monopoly over the "invention" of a music jukebox that could play songs in playlists.
Using the legal system, the "inventors" demanded royalties from Apple to "practice this invention" four years after the company had invested millions into designing the iPod and building a viable business around it in a competitive marketplace where other companies were seeking to do the same, generally without being able to turn a profit.
Source: Contois Music Patent
A year later, in May 2006, Singapore-based Creative Technology sued Apple in court for damages over its "Zen patent" 6,928,433, officially titled "automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata," concerning the presentation of menus on a portable music player based on song metadata.
Source: Creative Zen Patent
In parallel, Creative also filed an injunction with the ITC seeking to ban imports of Apple's iPods. Apple countersued with patent claims of its own. Just three months later, the two companies settled out of court, with Apple agreeing to pay Creative $100 million and Creative joining Apple's "Made for iPod" licensing program.
"I believe that, with this patent in hand," he stated in 2006, "Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos."
That never happened however. Apple didn't exercise its supposed "billion dollar patent" in a royalty offensive designed to syphon off the profits earned by the rest of the industry.
Instead, it essentially buried the patent, preventing Contois itself from suing "every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer" on earth, including Apple's customers, its partners and its competitors.
However, new companies continued to come out of the woodwork, all demanding from Apple millions in royalties of their own related to dubious patent claims. Note that in addition to the major cases above, there were lots of smaller claims and suits targeting technologies in Apple's Macs and other devices and peripherals, including the Nike+iPod pedometer sensor.
In 2005, after three years of legal wrangling, Microsoft settled with Burst, agreeing to pay $60 million to license its patent portfolio.
Burst planned to leverage its winnings in the patent lottery against Apple, hoping to claim, according to a report by BusinessWeek, a 2 percent cut of Apple's revenues related in any way to media playback, reaching in the ballpark of $200 million.
Burst's threats loomed just as patent holding "Non Practicing Entity" NTP, Inc. had successfully won a jury award against Blackberry maker RIM for $33 million, an amount the judge punitively increased to $53 million for being "willful," along with ordering an injunction that would not only block Blackberry sales but turn off the company's core messaging network that served RIM's installed base of subscribers.
The case was eventually settled in early 2006 for $612.5 million, a number considered low by some observers because it stopped NTP from claiming any future, ongoing rights to additional patent royalties.
Fed up with the flood of shameless patent extortion going on, Apple fired the first shot against Burst in early 2006, filing a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Non Practicing Entity's entire patent portfolio. Burst then filed suit against Apple for infringements of 36 claims related to its four patents, just over a year after it first began asking Apple for money.
After Apple was successful in getting 14 of the claims on the patents tossed out, Burst agreed to a settlement in November 2007 that for "only" $10 million ended all of Burst's future and ongoing claims.
Source: PBS
In January 2006, he described the preemptive strike as "an enormous mistake for Apple," noting that "since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong," he explained.
He continued by predicting, "Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything."
By September 2007, "I, Cringely" was complaining under the curious headline, "I Report, You Decide: Patent cases like Apple v. Burst.com deserve better news coverage," that "there has been a heck of a lot of spinning going on having to do with a story I broke years ago and have followed off and on ever since -- the trials of little Burst.com -- and even the revered New York Times (and nearly everyone else) this time got it shamefully wrong."
He linked to what he called "an especially deplorable story in Ars Technica," which had summarized the case in the sentence, "a tiny firm with a few patents is trying to get some big bucks from Apple in licensing fees," stating that "Apple looks to be taking a stand" and that "other patent trolls may want to take some notes."
At that point, Burst was now gunning for $500 million from Apple, of which Cringely noted, "that's a lot more than the $60 million Burst got from Microsoft and for a good reason: Microsoft generally gave away the technology they stole from Burst while Apple sells it."
Patents 5,057,932 from 1991 and 5,995,705 from 1999 describe a digital VCR-ET ("editor/transceiver," pictured below) with the ability to store, edit and transmit recorded videos to another VCR-ET.
Source: Burst Patent
With these patents, Burst was alleging broad infringement involving "the iTunes Store, iPod devices, iTunes software, iLife software (GarageBand, iMovie, iWeb) separately and in conjunction with the .Mac service and Apple computers sold with or running iTunes or iLife," essentially everything Apple sold at the time.
Cringely was more than a little sympathetic to Burst, which he noted "is a three-person company based in Santa Rosa, CA, where I used to live" and which at the time had "almost no sales."
However, he added that "Burst's technology was developed over a period of 20 years by far more than three people at a cost in excess of $66 million," complaining that "the implication in many of these stories is that Burst cobbled together some dubious patents and tried to coerce real companies into taking licenses, that they are so-called 'patent trolls.' Trolls don't spend 20 years and $66 million building the bridges they defend."
Source: Richard Lang, LinkedIn
Three quarters of Lang's "patent portfolio" asserted against Apple in 2006 were filed between 1990 and 1991, just a year or two after he founded Burst. The company subsequently tried to set itself up as a proprietary toll link between consumers and video streamers, but after failing to sell its ideas to Microsoft, Burst turned into a litigation company in 2002, and after three years of suing Microsoft, spent two years suing Apple.
Burst had demonstrated a digital streaming prototype VCR in 1991, but wasn't able to develop, produce or market a successful product. Using the patent system, it hoped to gain a monopoly over the entire concept of streaming digital video, long before the idea was really practical.
Using the legal system, Burst then began to retroactively "sell" other companies the right to have implemented their own technology for a fee in the millions of dollars, with negotiations that began only after those other companies had finished their products and gainfully sold them for half a decade.
Of the $10 million settlement Burst finally negotiated with Apple, $5.4 million went to the company's attorneys and legal fees, not to an inventor. The rest appeared to be largely paid to the firm's shareholders as a dividend.
This kind of use of the patent system and the courts doesn't have much in common with Apple's attempts to stop Samsung, for example, from selling virtually identical products to the iPhone and iPad in an obvious, immediate response to Apple's products selling and Samsung's not being nearly as successful.
Overwhelmingly however, virtually all reports of patent infringement are presented by journalists with a presumption of guilt. Once "infringement" of a patent is alleged, the question is rarely "is the patent legitimate?" or "does this product actually infringe valuable intellectual property?" but rather "how many millions will this company need to pay?"
After having survived a barrage of patent attacks on the iPod and iTunes (among those also targeting its other products), Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs expressly noted at the iPhone's introduction that the company had patented every aspect of its new mobile phone that it could, in order to protect itself from having its own work taken.
However, just as Apple never threatened to use its supposed "billion dollar patent" on the rest of the industry, it also didn't begin arming its iPhone patent missiles for launch until 2010, three years deep into the iPhone's existence.
Major smartphone vendors watching their sales collapse were more than willing to resort to legal action, however, as a future segment in the iPhone IP Wars will outline. The next segment focuses on Apple's shifting role as a litigator and as an innovator in the intellectual property wars that birthed the current world of patent conflicts, looking at the computing world before patents were in widespread use.
These wars have been waged in the courts over damages related to patent infringement, within private negotiations for settlement and in Executive Branch decisions considered by the International Trade Commission, a quasi-judicial federal agency with the power to block imports and ban sales. ITC bans are a particularly devastating weapon for patent holders to wield.
One of the biggest Federal Court trials yet isn't even set to begin until next summer
One of the biggest Federal Court trials yet isn't even set to begin until next summer: a second case between Apple and Samsung following the original trial that resulted in a jury award of $1 billion in damages for Apple last fall. That case is still on appeal, too.
This series provides a look at what's happened so far, and why many in the general public aren't even aware of the extent and intrigue in the patent shenanigans occurring among Big Phone players, starting with how Apple got its reputation for abusing patents even before the iPhone appeared.
Apple becomes one of the most sued companies on earth
In 1985, there were fewer than 2,000 computing-related patents granted in the US. But by 2006 there were over 150,000 in effect, and over 17,000 more were being granted every year in the U.S. alone. Patents were not just being granted; they were increasing being leveraged to extract millions of dollars up front and in demands for ongoing royalty fees.As the once beleaguered Apple Computer transitioned itself into the very successful Apple, Inc., a metamorphosis fueled by profitable sales of tens of millions of iPods in the first half of the 2000s, existing companies that failed to successfully compete in the market (or simply didn't bother to try) turned to patent litigation in order claim a cut of Apple's earnings.
Source: AAD Patent
In March 2005, Advanced Audio Devices sued Apple over patent 6,587,403 for a "music jukebox," presented above from the patent filing as "a perspective view of a music jukebox in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention." Apple denied any infringement but eventually settled over an "undisclosed" sum.
The U.S. government, through the Patent Office, had in August 2000 granted Advanced Audio Devices "inventors" Peter and Michael Kelley a legal monopoly over the "invention" of a music jukebox that could play songs in playlists.
Using the legal system, the "inventors" demanded royalties from Apple to "practice this invention" four years after the company had invested millions into designing the iPod and building a viable business around it in a competitive marketplace where other companies were seeking to do the same, generally without being able to turn a profit.
The Contois and Creative monopolies on ordered lists and menus
In June 2005, Contois Music Technology sued Apple over patent 5,864,868, alleging that iTunes infringed upon its "Computer Control System and User Interface for Media Playing Devices," depicted below. The firm also sued Sony, Napster, Real and MusicMatch over the same patent.Source: Contois Music Patent
A year later, in May 2006, Singapore-based Creative Technology sued Apple in court for damages over its "Zen patent" 6,928,433, officially titled "automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata," concerning the presentation of menus on a portable music player based on song metadata.
Source: Creative Zen Patent
In parallel, Creative also filed an injunction with the ITC seeking to ban imports of Apple's iPods. Apple countersued with patent claims of its own. Just three months later, the two companies settled out of court, with Apple agreeing to pay Creative $100 million and Creative joining Apple's "Made for iPod" licensing program.
Apple and the Billion Dollar Patent
That same month, Apple also settled with Contois, buying the disputed patent for an "undisclosed" sum. Michael Starkweather, the lawyer of the patent's inventor, later issued a press release describing the patent as being worth a billion dollars and predicting that Apple would use it to shake down the entire industry for royalties."I believe that, with this patent in hand," he stated in 2006, "Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download of not just music but also movies and videos."
"Apple will eventually be after every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer to pay royalties on every download"
That never happened however. Apple didn't exercise its supposed "billion dollar patent" in a royalty offensive designed to syphon off the profits earned by the rest of the industry.
Instead, it essentially buried the patent, preventing Contois itself from suing "every phone company, film maker, computer maker and video producer" on earth, including Apple's customers, its partners and its competitors.
However, new companies continued to come out of the woodwork, all demanding from Apple millions in royalties of their own related to dubious patent claims. Note that in addition to the major cases above, there were lots of smaller claims and suits targeting technologies in Apple's Macs and other devices and peripherals, including the Nike+iPod pedometer sensor.
The Burst bubble in the iPod patent offensive
One of the most famous was Burst.com (the Burst.com domain is now operated by a different company) which had been suing Microsoft, then the world's leading technology company, for years over four patents related to "fast start" video streaming; essentially, buffering.In 2005, after three years of legal wrangling, Microsoft settled with Burst, agreeing to pay $60 million to license its patent portfolio.
Burst planned to leverage its winnings in the patent lottery against Apple, hoping to claim, according to a report by BusinessWeek, a 2 percent cut of Apple's revenues related in any way to media playback, reaching in the ballpark of $200 million.
Burst's threats loomed just as patent holding "Non Practicing Entity" NTP, Inc. had successfully won a jury award against Blackberry maker RIM for $33 million, an amount the judge punitively increased to $53 million for being "willful," along with ordering an injunction that would not only block Blackberry sales but turn off the company's core messaging network that served RIM's installed base of subscribers.
Fed up with the flood of shameless patent extortion going on, Apple fired the first shot against Burst.That promised to not just drive RIM out of business, but also be so disruptive to critical U.S. government operations that the U.S. Department of Justice and Department of Defense intervened to stop the injunction.
The case was eventually settled in early 2006 for $612.5 million, a number considered low by some observers because it stopped NTP from claiming any future, ongoing rights to additional patent royalties.
Fed up with the flood of shameless patent extortion going on, Apple fired the first shot against Burst in early 2006, filing a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Non Practicing Entity's entire patent portfolio. Burst then filed suit against Apple for infringements of 36 claims related to its four patents, just over a year after it first began asking Apple for money.
After Apple was successful in getting 14 of the claims on the patents tossed out, Burst agreed to a settlement in November 2007 that for "only" $10 million ended all of Burst's future and ongoing claims.
Apple gets maligned for fighting back
Much of the coverage of Burst's lawsuit against Apple flowed from columnist Mark Stephens, writing under the name Robert X. Cringely for a variety of sources, including "I, Cringely" for PBS.Source: PBS
In January 2006, he described the preemptive strike as "an enormous mistake for Apple," noting that "since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong," he explained.
He continued by predicting, "Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything."
By September 2007, "I, Cringely" was complaining under the curious headline, "I Report, You Decide: Patent cases like Apple v. Burst.com deserve better news coverage," that "there has been a heck of a lot of spinning going on having to do with a story I broke years ago and have followed off and on ever since -- the trials of little Burst.com -- and even the revered New York Times (and nearly everyone else) this time got it shamefully wrong."
He linked to what he called "an especially deplorable story in Ars Technica," which had summarized the case in the sentence, "a tiny firm with a few patents is trying to get some big bucks from Apple in licensing fees," stating that "Apple looks to be taking a stand" and that "other patent trolls may want to take some notes."
At that point, Burst was now gunning for $500 million from Apple, of which Cringely noted, "that's a lot more than the $60 million Burst got from Microsoft and for a good reason: Microsoft generally gave away the technology they stole from Burst while Apple sells it."
What did Apple "steal" from Burst?
Burst's patent 4,963,995 from 1990 and 5,164,839 from 1991 describe compressing video and sending it over a network for faster than real time remote playback "from one video tape to another using only a single tape deck."Patents 5,057,932 from 1991 and 5,995,705 from 1999 describe a digital VCR-ET ("editor/transceiver," pictured below) with the ability to store, edit and transmit recorded videos to another VCR-ET.
Source: Burst Patent
With these patents, Burst was alleging broad infringement involving "the iTunes Store, iPod devices, iTunes software, iLife software (GarageBand, iMovie, iWeb) separately and in conjunction with the .Mac service and Apple computers sold with or running iTunes or iLife," essentially everything Apple sold at the time.
Cringely was more than a little sympathetic to Burst, which he noted "is a three-person company based in Santa Rosa, CA, where I used to live" and which at the time had "almost no sales."
However, he added that "Burst's technology was developed over a period of 20 years by far more than three people at a cost in excess of $66 million," complaining that "the implication in many of these stories is that Burst cobbled together some dubious patents and tried to coerce real companies into taking licenses, that they are so-called 'patent trolls.' Trolls don't spend 20 years and $66 million building the bridges they defend."
Two years of writing patents, ten years of failed sales, five years of suing
But neither did Burst. According to the LinkedIn profile of Burst (now known as Democrasoft) inventor/patent holder Richard Lang, he "co-founded this company with Lisa Walters in 1989. Went on to develop, patent and introduce burst-mode (faster-than-real-time) media delivery to optimize quality, reliability and user experience of video & audio over networks. Developed portfolio of U.S. & international patents. Company became public in 1992."Source: Richard Lang, LinkedIn
Three quarters of Lang's "patent portfolio" asserted against Apple in 2006 were filed between 1990 and 1991, just a year or two after he founded Burst. The company subsequently tried to set itself up as a proprietary toll link between consumers and video streamers, but after failing to sell its ideas to Microsoft, Burst turned into a litigation company in 2002, and after three years of suing Microsoft, spent two years suing Apple.
Burst had demonstrated a digital streaming prototype VCR in 1991, but wasn't able to develop, produce or market a successful product. Using the patent system, it hoped to gain a monopoly over the entire concept of streaming digital video, long before the idea was really practical.
This kind of use of the patent system and the courts doesn't have much in common with Apple's attempts to stop Samsung.
Using the legal system, Burst then began to retroactively "sell" other companies the right to have implemented their own technology for a fee in the millions of dollars, with negotiations that began only after those other companies had finished their products and gainfully sold them for half a decade.
Of the $10 million settlement Burst finally negotiated with Apple, $5.4 million went to the company's attorneys and legal fees, not to an inventor. The rest appeared to be largely paid to the firm's shareholders as a dividend.
This kind of use of the patent system and the courts doesn't have much in common with Apple's attempts to stop Samsung, for example, from selling virtually identical products to the iPhone and iPad in an obvious, immediate response to Apple's products selling and Samsung's not being nearly as successful.
Overwhelmingly however, virtually all reports of patent infringement are presented by journalists with a presumption of guilt. Once "infringement" of a patent is alleged, the question is rarely "is the patent legitimate?" or "does this product actually infringe valuable intellectual property?" but rather "how many millions will this company need to pay?"
Apple shifts patent target from iPod to iPhone
Apple's efforts to quickly settle the various iPod-related patent lawsuits being waged against it in 2006 seems, in retrospect, to have been part of an effort to get past the litigation in order to focus on its innovative new iPhone that was due for introduction in 2007.After having survived a barrage of patent attacks on the iPod and iTunes (among those also targeting its other products), Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs expressly noted at the iPhone's introduction that the company had patented every aspect of its new mobile phone that it could, in order to protect itself from having its own work taken.
However, just as Apple never threatened to use its supposed "billion dollar patent" on the rest of the industry, it also didn't begin arming its iPhone patent missiles for launch until 2010, three years deep into the iPhone's existence.
Major smartphone vendors watching their sales collapse were more than willing to resort to legal action, however, as a future segment in the iPhone IP Wars will outline. The next segment focuses on Apple's shifting role as a litigator and as an innovator in the intellectual property wars that birthed the current world of patent conflicts, looking at the computing world before patents were in widespread use.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by jungmark
Cant wait for iPhone Patent Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Samsung clones.
The force is strong in Apple. They'll find a way to setup a deflection field against the clones.
And have the evil ways of the clones exposed to the Galaxy.
Although it's true that journalists should try to distinguish between good and bad patent suits, I think the focus on "how many millions will this cost company X?" happens not because journalists think the patents are all good, but because the cases are almost always settled, whether they're good or not. There are three separate accounts in the post of Apple itself settling against dubious claims.
I wish that was the case but "millions of dollars" draws readers more than "validity of patents".
Quote:
Originally Posted by jungmark
I wish that was the case but "millions of dollars" draws readers more than "validity of patents".
Too true.
Dang it! I thought, finally, that I'd be able to understand and better comprehend all of these lawsuits because they'd be explained with pictures.
But when I clicked on the article, once again, I saw a whole bunch of those word thingys.
Whoa is me, I guess I'll never understand...
I'm sorry but some of these patents that have been granted are BS patents. If you are going to put together a music player, it OBVIOUS that someone would need to identify the artist, album and song titles and that metadata is the only way to make a product that plays music. I wouldn't uphold that portion of the patent. Metadata and using metadata is an Industry Standard. Sorry, I think that portion of a patent is COMPLETE BS.
Apple gets sued, but a lot of the lawsuits have been dismissed and some I think were BS lawsuits. Even Apple had patents issued and then later were pulled once Apple sued another over a patent.
Microsoft got themselves sued more than Apple, heck they were getting sued daily due to Anti Trust violations and unfair business practices for years and I think they settled a $1 Billion lawsuit with State of Ca, but instead of handing them a check, they gave them vouchers to buy more Microsoft product, which was about the most chicken $hit form of settlement. That's like saying "Oh, we're sorry, here's some coupons to buy more of our product", instead of here's some cash to buy someone else's product, so to me, that's not a REAL settlement. That's just getting a discount from already over valued licensing. That's just keeping suckered into buying more product instead of going to a competitor.
I guess since Apple has traditionally been the lowest in terms of spending money on lobbyists, they get unfair treatment in the legal system. MIcrosoft spent the most in lobbying money spent, but now, it's Google that spends the most in lobby money for high tech companies.
W
Smartphone patent lawsuits, as visualised by George Kokkinidis at designlanguage.
Link to article here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/nov/01/smartphone-patent-lawsuits-diagram#_
He left out all those lawsuits Google filed against it's competitors.
I can understand that there is a natural progression with ideas and designs that can happen in different places at different times, but when Microsoft build Windows after developing for Apple and Samsung change the whole look and feel of Tablet computers after building components for Apple, this is where I get angry.
Copy-cat technologies are just sheer laziness.
I know Apple have used "ideas" from other companies (e.g.:WIMPS from Xerox)... but they where really the first to bring it to a home computing and professional computing environment. It's about being the first to say "let's create something different and take a risk".
I also realise the iPod was nothing new, but at least Apple made it more than just an "mp3 player" and they took the risk getting it to the masses. Microsoft and Samsung just keep seeing where Apple have succeeded, so it's the "we'll do the same" mentality that I find a little tiresome.
Don't get me wrong, I like the competition, but if you look at Microsoft and Samsung BEFORE they got their hands on the Apple product, you'll know why I get angry. Stop copying and do it for yourself guys!
You forgot to mention that Apple paid PARC/Xerox
http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-stole-gui-from-xerox-parc-alto/
They're in yellow:
http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/08/googles-motorola-files-new-german.html
Google? No pretty sure they're shown in black,
Oh I see, you're using the the Mueller word-play of substituting Google for Motorola. Tricky tricky Marvin.
So Motorola Mobility continues to push the same H.264 patent claims they've used for the last three years or so (that got them an injunction against Microsoft last year but stayed by a US judge) to better position themselves for a cross-licensing settlement with Microsoft. The same posturing Microsoft/Motorola cross-licensing efforts they've both been pursuing for a few years now. So not really new patent claims at all but more of a Motorola/Motorola Mobility continuance of the same old H.264 patent suits then. Thanks for the link.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gatorguy
Google? No pretty sure they're shown in black,
Oh I see, you're using the the Mueller word-play of substituting Google for Motorola. Tricky tricky Marvin.
So Motorola Mobility continues to push the same H.264 patent claims they've used for the last three years or so (that got them an injunction against Microsoft last year but stayed by a US judge) to better position themselves for a cross-licensing settlement with Microsoft. The same posturing Microsoft/Motorola cross-licensing efforts they've both been pursuing for a few years now. So not really new patent claims at all but more of a Motorola/Motorola Mobility continuance of the same old H.264 patent suits then. Thanks for the link.
Google owns Motorola Mobility and gets to choose whether it continues its behavior or not, as it did in the letter above.
Saying Mueller is using "word play" to supposedly conflate Google with its wholly-owned subsidiary, particularly one which Google replaced the CEO with an ad executive of its own, is a pretty sketchy accusation even coming from you.
Gothcha. So you've gone from "Google is suing Apple/Microsoft" to "really they aren't but they could stop MM's old existing lawsuits". You and I might actually agree then. Google didn't stop MM from using an older Android version on the MotoX either but they probably could (should) have. Aggressive micro-management of a Google subsidiary could take care of that.
Either that or you lay the blame for all of Motorola and Motorola Mobility actions and licensing efforts over the past several years at the feet of Google who's owned them since... last May, about a year .Fair enough. Doesn't make it factual but your opinion is certainly yours.
To paraphrase Apple's pledge to not assert SEP's, I'm sure Google could tell Motorola management to stand down and drop the Apple/MS lawsuits if Apple and Microsoft would do the same.
Kinda good Google's around now to keep new patent infringement claims from Motorola in check. Not much danger of anything really new, and certainly not initiated by Google, wouldn't you agree?
That's designed to make it look like Apple took an offensive position first. Apple feels that with Google releasing Android, that was taking the primary offensive position because it would be like Apple doing the equivalent of Bing, knowing full well how close the two companies were:
http://gizmodo.com/5941817/what-really-made-steve-jobs-so-angry-about-google
Google even comically said they didn't see Android as competition to the iPhone:
"Eric Schmidt defiantly publicly represented that Google is not a "primary competitor" to Apple's iPhone. Under pressure from the FTC, Schmidt resigned from Apple's board in August 2009. In November 2009, Google outbid Apple to acquire mobile advertising leader AdMob. Then Google launched its first smart phone, the Nexus One, in January 2010, just seven months after Google's Schmidt publicly represented that Google did not compete with Apple's iPhone.
Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt made a potentially incriminating admission at Motorola's new phone launch in publicly admitting that "we were late to tablets" and that only 70,000 of Google's 1.3 million daily Android activations are tablets. That's potentially incriminating because during 2008-2009, when Mr. Schmidt was still on Apple's board, Steve Jobs made sure to keep Eric Schmidt in the dark about development of the iPad. Isn't it interesting that when Mr. Schmidt was on Apple's board and aware of the iPhone, Google was not "late" to the smart phone market (Google-Android now has dominant market share), but when Google's Schmidt was out of the loop as a board director on the existence of the iPad, Google is somehow "late" to the tablet market?
The big overall takeaway here is that if Google's leadership is willing and comfortable stealing from longtime personal friends and colleagues who have given generously to them and greatly helped them succeed at most every stage, Google could be expected to have no compunction stealing from people they don't know. This also helps explain why Google has by far the worst intellectual property infringement record of any major American corporation and why so many companies and people are suing Google around the world for intellectual property infringement."
The author there has a few bad things to say about Google as the disclosure at the end highlights but the point is that Apple's lawsuits are being used as a response to what they perceive as some form of theft and abuse of the trust they had with Google. I've always felt it was a necessary move for Google because there was no way Apple could control the overwhelming majority of the smartphone market with their quality (and price) bar.
The problem came with the hardware competitors because they used Android in order to closely mimic Apple's products as a whole, the worst offender by far being Samsung. That wouldn't have happened (at least as quickly) without Android. Just look at how long it took Microsoft and RIM to have competitive products.
I personally prefer that Google has taken the dominant competing position and not Microsoft or RIM though because they promote open standards like unix, webkit and H.264, which the others wouldn't have. This means that two very like-minded companies control the majority of computing devices in the world and push these things forward.
It's a difficult situation to resolve in a way that benefits everyone. I don't want to see Microsoft succeed in mobile because they don't deserve it and I think that would be more damaging than Android succeeding. That requires that Android sticks around. Something needs to be done about Samsung. They aren't going to stick by Google so it doesn't matter from Google's point of view:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/09/buh-bye-samsung-why-googles-new-bestie-asus-is-making-the-new-nexus/
Other Android manufacturers are making better products than Samsung but aren't making any money. Samsung is succeeding because they mimic Apple.
The lawsuits against the hardware manufacturers are justified. I think Apple has benefitted from the lawsuits as the public is now clear that Samsung has been ripping them off. This hasn't necessarily been financially beneficial but that perception is important because Samsung would have ripped them off anyway and the public wouldn't have been any wiser. They'd have just bought what they'd see as the next best thing to Apple's devices for a lower price. Counterfeit markets all over the world thrive on the indifference to originality of the public.
I'd like to see an opportunity arrive for Apple to wind down their litigation but the likes of Samsung have made it clear they won't let up and Google has no choice but to be caught in that because they were so instrumental in allowing them to become so damaging to Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple and Google were driven apart but Google made the choices that led to it, not Apple.
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The suggestion that Apple "buried" the billion dollar patent for altruistic reasons is puzzling- Why would they do that? If is really is that powerful then surely they should be using in the on going Samsung case?