US District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco said that the Canadian mobile phone maker had established a "likelihood" of proving that Typo infringed its patents, while mentioning that Typo had not sufficiently challenged the patents in question.
The preliminary injunction prohibits Typo from the sale of its keyboard, which is a part of the relief sought by Blackberry. Easier to get an injunction on hardware than software, even without the case being proven. ]]>
BlackBerry hasn’t shown that its mobile phone sales are driven by the popularity of its keyboards, he told [Judge William] Orrick.
“The Q10 by and large was a failure” and “has literally not sold,” Taillieu said. BlackBerry “hasn’t provided any evidence of nexus between the keyboard and the commercial success of this device,” he said.
Typo didn’t copy the BlackBerry keyboard and is a “grain of sand” compared to BlackBerry’s, he said.
“BlackBerry’s problems are not related to Typo,” Taillieu said. “We don’t believe Typo is the reason for any loss of sales to BlackBerry.” The Q10 failed? Harsh. And it would be pretty easy to find BlackBerry users who bought because of the keyboard. Orrick says he will issue a ruling on whether to block Typo sales "promptly".]]>
The App Developers Alliance is working to fight patent trolls like Lodsys. Will you help us by completing this survey?]]>
More immediately though, the consolidated Lodsys case that Apple is now out of is still going to trial. Depressing, but Lodsys - suspected of being tied to patent super-owner Intellectual Ventures - seems to have a sort of patent golden ticket which is applicable to lots of current uses.]]>
His company got a little blip of publicity back in 2011, when it won an $8m jury verdict against Apple. But it became truly infamous earlier this year when it started telling podcasters that they had to pay up for a license to its patents. But Logan didn't back down from telling his story. When NPR's This American Life and Planet Money ran more stories about patent trolls this summer, they featured an interview with Logan in which he defended his practice. Then Logan even went "into the lion's den," fielding a question-and-answer session at Slashdot. Logan had a business sending people audio tapes by mail back in the 1990s, which he says gave him critical intellectual property rights that justify his request for money from podcasters.]]>
If that's accurate, the data will bolster VirnetX's arguments that its patents are technologically significant, hard to work around, and deserve a high royalty rate. The judge and lawyers present at the hearing didn't discuss numbers regarding what a reasonable ongoing royalty might be, but VirnetX is asking for royalty payments of more than $700m for the ongoing use of FaceTime, according to Lease. Only one query on this: how do people complain about FaceTime call quality? It seems unlikely that people would make a Facetime call and then call Apple to complain. ]]>
"It is the guy with this scanner patent," says one.
"They claim that anyone who uses a scanner to scan documents, email the documents, owes them a royalty of $1,000 [£645] per employee." Horrible irony that this programme went out on the day that Groklaw closed.]]>
“Simply saying ‘on a mobile device’ is not an invention,” Motorola Mobility lawyer Charles Verhoeven, of Quinn Emanuel in San Francisco, said today.
Microsoft’s patent for a way phones synchronize calendars with computers is little different than techniques used by Apple’s failed Newton personal digital assistant of the 1990s, or Microsoft’s desktop software, Verhoeven said.
Motorola Mobility is seeking to invalidate the patent that it concedes it has infringed. Microsoft seems to have nailed Motorola on a non-essential patent - which it doesn't have to license. Motorola's been affected by the ban since May 2012.]]>
"I think the bulk of the increase came from licensing," said Cem Ozkaynak, co-founder of Trefis.
Microsoft declined to comment beyond what it has disclosed in securities filings.
For the first nine months of fiscal 2013, Windows Phone revenue has risen $948 million including patent licensing and increased sales of Windows Phone licenses to manufacturers, the company disclosed in an April filing. Up 56%? Was there a concomitant rise in Windows Phone sales?]]>
... It can and will be appealed by Apple to the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice).
…This patent isn't even remotely as strategic as it is famous. Every user of a smartphone with a touch screen needs to perform this gesture frequently, but the patent does not cover all slide-to-unlock mechanisms but only some, and Apple's rivals have all developed workarounds. So it's a defeat that was a victory anyway. The crux of the invalidation was that it's simply a software solution to a problem - and in Europe, you can't patent implementations which consist only of software. The US is different. And:
the most important prior art reference, a Swedish mobile phone named Neonode N1m that was launched approximately a year before the iPhone, may not be eligible as prior art under US law.]]>
Contrast that with Judge Lucy Koh's federal court in the Northern District of California.]]>
Apple would like to turn you and other people around you with iOS device, into a mobile ATM.
The basic idea, described in a patent application “Ad-hoc cash dispensing network” is pretty simple. Create a cash dispensing server at Apple’s datacenter, to which iPhones, iPads and Macs can connect via a specialized app. Need some quick cash right now and there’s no ATM around? Launch the Cash app, and tell it how much do you need. The app picks up your location, and sends the request for cash to nearby iPhone users. When someone agrees to front you $20, his location is shown to you on the map. You go to that person, pick up the bill and confirm the transaction on your iPhone. $20 plus a small service fee is deducted from your iTunes account and deposited to the guy who gave you the cash. Whaaat? It sounds like a monitored version of Hawala. (Thanks @sputnikkers for the link.)]]>
Particular care needs to be taken with allegations that a claimed invention is obvious in the light of common general knowledge alone.]]>
ZTE retaliated the next day, saying it had filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Huawei in China, accusing it of infringing ZTE's LTE-related patents.
The lawsuits, among the many that have taken place in the telecom industry, reflected that companies want to gain the upper hand in a new round of construction related to next-generation networks by accusing rivals of infringing on property rights, analysts said.
Huawei said ZTE is infringing on its patents related to data-card and Long Term Evolution (LTE) - a high-speed mobile Internet standard - technologies. It also said ZTE used a trademark registered by Huawei on some of its products. Android handset maker v Android handset maker. Pick a side.]]>
In Stallman's view, the idea that society might be able to eliminate "bad patents" while keeping good ones is a kind of Jedi mind trick. Offering patents as a reward for software development—a system where the prize is a right to shut down someone else—is fatally flawed.
"Consider the MP3 patent," said Stallman. "That caused a lot of harm. It's not trivial, it came from a research institute. But we can fund research institutes in other ways." (Thanks @doarunner for the link.)]]>
"There has been a great deal of controversy and disagreement about whether they stifle innovation and whether they are an anticompetitive problem," said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. "What we want to do is understand the industry better." (Subscription required.)]]>
But it wasn't just the jury that goofed, Samsung says. It was also the court, in that the jury instructions did not properly explain aspects of the law of trade dress, for example, or what is required to establish willfulness (see footnotes 8, 10 and 11).
Samsung also says that no rational jury could find Apple's design patents valid. First, they are all functional, Samsung argues, and hence not protectable, there's at least one issue of double patenting, and there is prior art.]]>
Ilagan told CNET in an exclusive interview that the jury had several sometimes "heated" debates before reaching its verdict yesterday. He also said nothing in the deliberation process was rushed and that the jury carefully weighed the evidence.
"We found for Apple because of the evidence they presented," Ilagan said. "It was clear there was infringement…What was happening was that the appearance [of Samsung's phone] was their downfall. You copied the appearance.... Nokia is still selling phones. BlackBerry is selling phones. Those phones aren't infringing. There are alternatives out there."" Worth reading in full as an insight into the jury's deliberations.]]>
Richard Posner, a prolific jurist who sits on the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, told Reuters this week that the technology industry's high profits and volatility made patent litigation attractive for companies looking to wound competitors. Patents are in effect a serious cost of entry as well as a source of ongoing litigation. Hard to argue against Posner on their applicability to software.]]>
“It’s not reasonable to go searching through all this paperwork, not for an engineer,” Rubin remarked. “You need to be a trained lawyer for that.”
Possibly recalling the blog post by former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, which has become a sticky subject for Oracle, Rubin confirmed that Sun’s reaction to the debut of Android offered “more confidence” that Google wasn’t violating any patents.
“Over the period of the development, we felt it just wasn’t necessary anymore to worry about this stuff,” Rubin said. Unfortunately, "we didn't look" isn't a defence against patent infringement. Can Oracle prove Android infringes, though?]]>
"Netscape Communications (NSCP) quietly received a patent last month for one of the most popular types of encryption on the Internet, but the company says it will continue to give it away for free.
"The encryption in question is the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, or SSL. Both Navigator and Internet Explorer browsers use it to secure Web-based information, including credit card numbers, stock information, and private documents. Netscape applied for the patent back in 1995. The US Patent and Trademark Office granted the patent last month.
Even though SSL is heavily used in servers, browsers, and other networked products, Netscape said it has no plans to start charging developers for the source code or to impose other conditions.
"We don't want to discourage developers from using our platform," said spokesman Christopher Hoover. "An SSL license would be a real hurdle. It's not an income source that's necessary to exploit." Guess now: which company bought the SSL patent from AOL last week?]]>