German Police Raid 51 CeBIT Stands Over Patent Claims

LeCaddie writes "Last week German investigators raided 51 exhibitor stands at CeBIT, the German information technology fair in Hanover, looking for goods suspected of infringing patents. Some 183 police, customs officers, and prosecutors raided the fair on Wednesday and carried off 68 boxes of electronic goods and documents including cellphones, navigation devices, digital picture frames, and flat-screen monitors. Of the 51 companies raided, 24 were Chinese. Most of the patents concerned were related to devices with MP3, MP4, and DVB standard functions for digital audio and video, blank CDs, and DVD copiers, police said." In the US there are no criminal penalties associated with patents, and such a raid could not be conducted, especially in the absence of a court ruling of infringement.

HA-HA

[megaditto]

Guess that's the last time there'll be another IT fair in Germany.

Re:HA-HA

[arivanov]

This is an annual event. Same as CeBIT itself. It is not the fist time, it is not the last time. And frankly as far as some manufacturers are concerned infringing until you get nailed is the way to do business so I do not quite see what does this change. So I will disagree. There WILL be another IT fair in Germany and there will be another bust there.

Shh, don't give them ideas.

[thisissilly]

In the US there are no criminal penalties associated with patents, and such a raid could not be conducted,

I'm sure our lobbyists and politicians will get right to work on fixing that.

Re:Software patents?

[IANAAC]

You still need a passport for traveling between (european) countries... We're not there yet...

And here in the US we're on our way to needing passports to travel from state to state :-)

I kid, but only a little.

It looks like...

[magunning]

..a police station just got new kit on the cheap.

Re:Software patents?

[rucs_hack]

Europe isn't a country...

Indeed, its more a sort of political soufflé

Re:MiniOne

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, when you leech off of someone else's R&D budget, you can sell stuff cheap. Of course, that scales really well. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:HA-HA

[Belial6]

An item is only a 'counterfeit' if it tries to pass itself off as the original. So, if the MiniOne does not have the iPhone name or logo on it, it is not counterfeit. So, I have to ask anyone who has seen this product... Does it say iPhone, or have an Apple logo on it?

Re:Software patents?

[mrvan]

The situation is complex. Traditional definitions of country include issuing money and sovereignty (ie no other states have power over what happens in your territory); many EU countries do not have their own currency (and hence monetary politics) and although sovereign countries can 'give away' part of their sovereignty in treaties while still remaining a sovereign country you can make a convincing case that current European decision making *and* judiciary is going beyond that.

On the other hand: there is no european army or police force; the Iraq war showed convincingly that there is no European foreign policy; european 'law' only becomes law by national legislatures passing national laws that implement European directives; there is *no* european constitution since some members decided not to ratify it (but there are tons of treaties that could be interpreted as forming the constitution); there is no sensible European Parliament; the european equivalent of the 'bill of rights' is the European Convention on Human Rights which is the Council of Europe rather than the EU, which includes Russia and Switserland. Very importantly, EU citizens in the great majority consider themselves national citizens first, and europeans second (or third, after region/city), and the elections that count are national elections, which are generally about national issues.

"Country" is a useful abstraction that has high explanatory power, but it is ultimately a projection of a complicated continuum on a dichotomous variable. Entities like Pennsylvania, Scotland, Liechtenstein, the EU, Kosovo, Taiwan, Hongkong, etc. show that the discussion is a lot more complicated than that.

IMHO, the really interesting question is not whether the EU is a country or not, it is whether we want to delegate more power to
'Brussels' and how we can control such power. The colonies that became the USA went through the same process more than two hundred years ago, and they had an external threat to convince people that a confederation was not enough. Also, the US shows that even a constitution framed by very intelligent people who did their utmost to limit the power of the federal government to an enumerated set can gradually become a much more centralized state without changing its constitution, so without giving the member states and direct say in the matter. This makes me (as an EU citizen) wary of the EU becoming a confederacy or even federal state, as I would be afraid that it will gradually shift to a more centralized state.

Anyway... :-)

Re:Software patents?

[quanticle]

Pointing to the Confederacy and saying that individual states are welcome to break away is like pointing to an apprehended criminal and saying that we are free to commit crime. If states in the US break away, the US government is willing to go to war to bring them back. Contrast this with the EU, where the right to secede is enshrined in the founding charter.

Re:This was mostly about 'product piracy'.

[Achromatic1978]

My cousin (engineer at Airbus) tells me there even is an Airbus 320 that went to China some time ago. That was it's only flight and it never appeared again. He suspects it's lying around somewhere dismantled and analysed.

Airbus sent a 55 million Euro aircraft to a client in China, it never came back, and they never asked for it back, and this has never been discussed in any media that I can find?

I'm not entirely convinced just yet.

Re:9 from German

[Heir Of The Mess]

24 were from mainland China, three from Hong Kong and 12 from Taiwan

I'd like to say 39 were Chinese.

Nice troll, and quite a hot topic in the region at the moment. Interesting how an off topic, political troll got modded +5 informative. Must be a lot of pro one china types with mod points today who read slashdot before they started work. Interesting times ahead I think.

Not counterfeit

[nephridium]

According to one of Germany's reputable news sources Spiegel Online [spiegel.de] (in German) early reports suspected counterfeit claims by companies such as Apple, but it has since become clear that the Italian company Sisvel has filed suit over MP3 patent infringements and thereby caused the raid of stands offering mp3/4 players et al.

There have since been further confiscations of GPS/navigation systems too.

Re:This was mostly about 'product piracy'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably they paid for it. If they did, I don't see why Airbus would ask for it back or why it would make the news.