Pinboard (guardiantech)

Apple, Google settle smartphone patent litigation | Reuters

guardiantech — 2014-05-18T21:13:29+00:00

Apple Inc and Google Inc's Motorola Mobility unit have agreed to settle all patent litigation between them over smartphones, ending one of the highest-profile lawsuits in technology. In a joint statement on Friday, the companies said the settlement does not include a cross license to their respective patents. "Apple and Google have also agreed to work together in some areas of patent reform," the statement said. Apple and companies that make phones using Google's Android software have filed dozens of such lawsuits against one another around the world to protect their technology. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called Android a "stolen product." Google and Apple informed a federal appeals court in Washington that their cases against each other should be dismissed, according to filings on Friday. However, the deal does not apply to Apple's litigation against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

This is quite odd. Motorola had been suing Apple since 2010, claiming that Apple infringed its standard-essential patents on 3G. Apple said it had a licence via its chip supplier. Back and forth, and no result. But now with the Lenovo deal about to get approved, this never-ending litigation is abruptly settled. It feels like Motorola - or Google, or Lenovo - wanted things wrapped up. Florian Müller calls it a "second-class settlement".

Apple to FTC: Samsung and Google lose most of their cases over declared-essential patents >> FOSS Patents

guardiantech — 2013-02-26T16:27:19+00:00

Apple's letter raises the very important point (starting on page 6) that most patents that are declared essential to a standard (by their holders, typically without any independent verification of essentiality) actually aren't - and if someone wants to get paid for an allegedly standard-essential patent, a defendant must have the right to challenge the validity of the patent and its essentiality in court without having to pay for a portfolio license based on an arbitrated or court-determined value of an unverified portfolio. While the proposed consent decree generally mentions that challenges to validity, essentiality and infringement allegations don't make a company an unwilling licensee, a very recent InterDigital filing in lawsuits targeting Huawei and ZTE shows that some SEP owners nevertheless argue that they should receive royalties even without having to prove that their asserted patents are valid and actually used by an implementer of the standard in question.

Something of a new wrinkle that many of these claimed "standards-essential" patents actually aren't. Shouldn't there be a clear register of such things? And if not, why not?

Open Standards consultation – important update >> Government Digital Service

guardiantech — 2012-04-26T20:35:07+00:00

Dr Hopkirk is a respected advocate for “openness and interoperability of systems, of people, processes and information technologies”. He has in the past, for example, been an invited observer at events such as Open Forum Europe.

However, at the time he was engaged to facilitate the Open Standards roundtable, while we were aware that he represented the National Computing Centre on the Microsoft Interoperability Executive Customer Council (along with 40 other CIOs/CTOs across the public and private sector who participate in a voluntary capacity) he did not declare the fact that he was advising Microsoft directly on the Open Standards consultation.

When this came to our attention we asked Dr Hopkirk for an explanation and he has told us that he has “not been paid to specifically write their response to the Open Standards consultation but he is engaged to help them tease out the issues”.

Ahem.

Urgent Call to Inaction from the W3C >> Webkit Developments

guardiantech — 2012-02-10T00:26:44+00:00

Developer Dave Balmer is not pleased:

Rarely do I find a need to call out the W3C folks (or anyone, for that matter), but the recent post by Daniel Glazman (@glazou), co-chair of the W3C CSS working group, pushed me over the edge. In his article, he calls for everyone to, get this, stop using -webkit in their sites. He equates webkit, now a popular engine for most new mobile browsers, to IE6. Moreover, he calls it a “threat to the open web”. Seriously?

Moving to standards-based web graphics in IE10 >> MSDN Blogs

guardiantech — 2011-12-08T16:29:16+00:00

Microsoft is dropping its own DX filters for CSS3 standard alternatives in IE10 (as it began to do with IE9). Essentially, Internet Explorer 10 is looking like the most standards-oriented browser Microsoft has produced since - and perhaps even more than - Internet Explorer 1.0.