Visual Depiction of Who Is Suing Who in Mobile

Although the graphic itself won't win an award for design, Norman submitted a story about who's suing who in the mobile universe. From Apple to Qualcomm and pretty much everyone in between, it's a pretty impressive mess.

Re:Hey Microsoft

[maxume]

Microsoft does, on an annual basis:

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar09/10k_fr_dis.html [microsoft.com]

If you read through a bit, you will see that they currently incur legal expenses of about $500 million a year and spend about $9 billion a year on R&D.

(Of course, those legal expenses include settlements...)

Re:The Era of Stupid Computing

[tool462]

I had to question your assumption that patent suits were less common in the 80s, so I did some googling. Turns out the 80s were pretty bad too:
http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/papers/HallZiedonis07_PatentLitigation_AEA.pdf [berkeley.edu]
The pretty and relevant charts are on page 24 (Figures 3 and 4)

The excerpt from the paper that describes those charts (page 10-11):

Figure 3 shows that litigation has risen along with the increase in patenting, and also that
there has been a substantial increase in suits involving non-rival entities during the past ten years,
supporting the claims of some in the industry (FTC, 2003). Figure 4 shows how litigation
probability for our firms has changed over time. As suggested by interviews reported in Hall and
Ziedonis (2001), the overall probability of litigation on a per-patent basis rose steeply after the
creation of the CAFC and the strengthening of patent enforcement that followed. However, it then falls again to the pre-1982 level, possibly because of the success of the defensive portfolio
strategy in reducing litigation between rivals.

The number of patents in the mid 80s was quite high, only about 1/3 less than ~2000. As Fig 4 shows, lawsuits per patent peaked in the mid 80s. The most interesting change to me is the increase the number of patent lawsuits between non-rivals. It would also be interesting to see data from 2001 to 2010 to see if the trends continued.

The message to take from this though is that 80s were hardly a time of free IP love and openness.

Re:Looks like NOKIA is the king of suing

[pavon]

I won't defend the lawsuits against Apple, and Qualcomm, as I think they are crap, but the graph does seriously misrepresent the situation against Nokia.

Nokia is suing LG, Samsung, Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp (and others not on this graph) over the fact that they were involved in LCD price-fixing. Government probes have found those companies guilty of doing so, and it is perfectly legitimate for Nokia to seek damages as a result of those.

I have no idea what the lawsuit against Motorola is. The closest thing I can find is Motorola is suing a previous exec who took a job at Nokia.

Does that diagram look familiar?

[doronbc]

Probably because we've seen something similar to it before. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-mobile-patent-lawsuits/ [nytimes.com]

Re:Microsoft..

[Rockoon]

Because Microsofts patent portfolio is so large and varied that its preferable to enter into a cross licensing deal.

The end result is that most companies *do* cross license with Microsoft without the muss and fuss of a legal battle, because by all rights Microsoft does have some patents of value that you want.

A non-comprehensive list of companies that Microsoft has cross-licensing deal with:

Alpine, Amazon, Apple, Autodesk, Centrify, Denso, Epson, Fuji, Funai, HP, JVC, Kenwood, Lexmark, LG, Lotus, Nikon, Olympus, Onkyo, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, TomTom, Toshiba, and Xerox.

..thats just the short list of companies I found in the first few pages of a google search.

Re:Size?

[Art3x]

The author of Information Is Beautiful also tried his hand at a better picture: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/ [informatio...utiful.net]