Study: Royalty Charges Almost On Par With Component Costs For Smartphones 131
Bismillah (993337) writes "An interesting study by WilmerHale lawyers and Intel's assistant general counsel Ann Armstrong looked into how much royalty payments and demands actually amount to per device, and found the cost so high it threatens industry profitability and competitiveness. 'As the bank robber Willie Sutton is reported to have said, he robbed banks 'because that's where the money is' - so too of smartphones for patent holders,' the authors wrote."
Re:so apple and samsung should just research it al (Score:5, Insightful)
and then they won't pay any royalties just do all the R&D for the thousands of patents that cover antennas, modulation, encryption, LTE, beam forming the signal and everything else it takes for a modern phone to work
And yet if they did reinvent the wheel, they'd get sued into oblivion by these companies nontheless. With the speed at wihch technology progresses increasing as drastically as it has been, we need to rethink the we we grant patents. Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel), and important hardware patents should have a shorter lifespan.
Patents and Copyrights are obsolete. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The people that invent things must be compensat (Score:2, Insightful)
You seriously think that a company could keep secrets for more than a product cycle? The spying-security arms race would be won by the spies in a matter of minutes.
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:4, Insightful)
That depends on whether you consider yourself the one being stood on.
Re:so apple and samsung should just research it al (Score:5, Insightful)
With the speed at wihch technology progresses increasing as drastically as it has been, we need to rethink the we we grant patents. Software patents need to pass the CS201 stink test (if a CS201 student can figure it out, it ain't novel), and important hardware patents should have a shorter lifespan.
Part of the problem is the complexity of the product being built, which naturally increases the number of technologies, and therefore the number of patents being included in the product.
Invent a plow today and you need... 1 patent. Its a sheet of metal for cutting the earth. Throw on a yoke and use a new alloy and may be a couple more for hooks and leather straps and you're still around 5 patents. Granted I'm not a plow engineer so I really don't know everything that goes into one, but how complicated can one plow really be... when compared to a modern smart phone?
We're no longer standing on the shoulders of giants, we're standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants who are standing on the shoulders of giants... and every single one of them wants to get paid for holding us up. (Atlas shrugged cause he wasn't getting paid).
I'm having trouble linking royalty costs to "stifling innovation" though. Getting paid via royalty payments is a pretty good reason to innovate: invent something, get paid. Increases in the amount people are paying in royalties just increases the incentive to invent something and get paid. In fact, it is doing exactly that. Companies invent stuff, or buy inventions, just to use those inventions as collateral to get access to other inventions. That $120-$150 estimate they put on there is not cash payments, it is $120-$150 of something... such as their own inventions.
I don't particularly recall that many "Cant afford royalty payments so our product is cancelled" stories. I do see Apple's $160 billion bank balance though, which to me says there is no problem with royalties or lawsuits over royalties or profit margins. In fact that tells me the royalties have saved Apple quite a bit of money in R&D costs.
Re:Shoulders of giants (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really pro- or anti-patent, unless you believe the absence of patents would cause most companies to resort to trade secrets, in which case, it's a pro-patent notion.
Trade secrets were a more charming concept. You could see what a competitor was achieving. So you could look into their product and reverse engineer their results - often coming up with a completely different solution. It was based on effort and merit. Whoever implemented it first had a head start, and if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)