Judge Invalidates 13 Motorola Patent Claims Against Microsoft 109
walterbyrd writes "Microsoft scored a victory against Google-owned Motorola Mobility this week after a judge scrapped 13 of the latter party's patent claims in a years-long dispute over H.264-related royalties. Waged in U.S. and German courts, the battle involves three patents (7,310,374, 7,310,375, and 7,310,376) that Motorola licenses to Microsoft for several products, including the Xbox 360, Windows and Windows Phone. PJ is commenting on the case over at Groklaw.net."
A humble suggestion to tech companies: (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a simple plan to help you survive these times of financial strife.
1. Stop wasting money on lawyers.
2. Start making quality products.
3. ??? (actually you can skip this step)
4. profit.
A Judge did? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there any point in lodging a complaint to the Patent Office, when a Judge appears to be able to do it quicker, and knows the parties involved?
So in future, don't waste time with going the usual route, just get a Judge to decide on complex matters, and then the Patent Office, now with more time on it's hands, can start ruling in criminal trials.
What a mess.
Trouble on screen for all who write software. (Score:3, Insightful)
Software patents are so problematic because if you expose your essential algorithm which uses code blocks then all someone has to do is code to it with different variable names.
It is the same problem as why technology stagnated during the times before the renaissance and then industrial revolution, methods were kept secret by guilds.
We are placing far too much monetary value upon "the intellectual property of software" and if too much software is granted "a Royal Monopoly" like status. Because that status can then be horded we are headed for a technological dark age.
Who can blame the Chinese for employing industrial espionage when much of the technology they seek to achieve is being bartered by those who would squirrel it away in medieval style corporate guilds.
Queen Elizabeth the First at the end of her reign had the foresight to abolish the monopolies, we are reversing the trend and it will eventually cause stagnation and strife in the advancement of technology if left unchecked to run amok. The same as the imaginary mortgage security products market did to us all.
We either open up the patent system and let the best engineers and manufactures win or have a bunch of coders at desks trading ideas for imaginary devices in a ponzi scheme of so called intellectual property rights for products and services.
Re:A humble suggestion to tech companies: (Score:4, Insightful)
The way to end that war is to take away the sharp sticks from everyone involved.
Re:Bullshit Headline Again (Score:2, Insightful)
The headline clearly states "invalidates patent claims", so how come the headline is bullshit?
Go RTFH(eadline).
Re:No, that's good news for corporations (Score:1, Insightful)
For Apple, and the rest of the corporate world, it's bad news, because it seems it's getting harder and harder to use patents as weapons.
For Apple it's great news.
No Apple lawsuit has had any real effect to date. The biggest one is a not negligible 1 billion dollar payout by Samsung - but that's not even certain yet.
So by with all these patents folding like a house of cards, it saves Apple a lot of money that would otherwise go to "fruitless" lawsuits.
Basically corporations (not just Apple) kind of have to sue to protect patents. It''s like a legal reflex. With that need removed, they will spend less on litigation.
Apple (and other companies) have done just fine competing in a world where companies are making using of technologies patented by the other side. So the weak patents being thrown out will have no impact.
Congratulations, you have somehow managed to make a lawsuit between Microsoft and Google be mostly about Apple. At least you stopped short of trying to explain why Apple patenting 'rounded rectangles' is bad but Google suing people for violating a patent on 'encoding and decoding stuff on a computer' is good like a diehard fanboy would have.
Re:Microsoft undoing their own patents? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is arguing that as a 'means plus function' patent, it isn't specific enough because it doesn't specifically give an algorithm. Surely if this goes through it will invalidate the vast majority of software patents?
It's not really about an algorithm per se. It's about specifying precisely what the algorithm is going to achieve. "Pick some block using some algorithm" isn't specific enough. "Pick some block using the following algorith: blablabla" is. "Pick some block by choosing among all blocks with distance less than 5 units the one that minimises the prediction error defined by the formula xxx" is specific enough, even if the implementor has to find their own algorithm.