Dept. of Justice Blesses IEEE Rules On Injunctions and Reasonability 32
Andy Updegrove writes During the mobile platform patent wars of recent years Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Motorola and the rest of the major vendors sought injunctions against each other to prevent their competitor from selling their products at all. The suits were often based on claims that a vendor had to pay a reasonable royalty on a 'standards essential patent.' The resulting litigation clogged up the courts, and the regulators were not amused. Now, after almost two years of vigorous debate, the standards development organization behind WiFi and thousands of other ICT standards (IEEE-SA) has received the blessing of the U.S. Dept. of Justice to forbid members that have pledged to license such patents from seeking an injunction until all other remedies have been exhausted. Whether other standards organizations will follow suit remains to be seen.
Reasonable royalty (Score:2)
The problem comes from "reasonable royalty". The price list should be set by the vendor and once set they shouldn't be able to change it depending on who wants to pay for it.
You can't ask one million or 1$ per unit from company XYZ and then turn around and ask a company that is your competitor ten times the price "just because".
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Or, since everyone has everyone else by the balls because of the way our patent system works, we could reform it so that software patents are either extremely hard to get, or to where they have a painfully-short shelflife...
Typical reflex post. The article doesn't mention software patents with one word. There are plenty of standard essential patents in the mobile phone area that have nothing at all to do with software.
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I think the big uproar is all the other phone manufacturers had lots and lots of patents between them and offered up their 'share' of patents + peanuts for the use of the others. Apple comes along, wants to just pay peanuts, but was unwilling to share any of their stuff and then complained.
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What really irks me about Apple and the judgements it's won is that they can get billions of dollars for the fluff-stuff yet the holders of the patents which make the damn phones work in the first place are screwed.
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Those "shared" patents are FRAND as well. As in those companies decided to trade patent licenses because everyone needed to license them anyhow.
Apple had NO patents in the pool. There is nothing anyone has to license from
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The price list should be set by the vendor and once set they shouldn't be able to change it depending on who wants to pay for it.
I would rather go with, they can change the price at any time they want but must make it available to all: e.g. within any private negotiation, once they reach a price, before they are allowed to enter into an agreement, they must conspicuously publish a neutral non-discriminatory offer at the price in a public price, the offer must be optionally redeemable by any entity w
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The problem comes from "reasonable royalty". The price list should be set by the vendor and once set they shouldn't be able to change it depending on who wants to pay for it.
You can't ask one million or 1$ per unit from company XYZ and then turn around and ask a company that is your competitor ten times the price "just because".
I would add that no standards essential patent should ever be allowed to require a percentage of the final product price as a licensing fee. Your contribution to, say, a networking technology is not necessarily more valuable because someone else added a more expensive case, screen, or battery. It can hardly be "non-discriminatory" when the price is different for each product.
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But think of the profits! The snag is all that money makes people try to get some of it. So they see Google or Microsoft of Apple using these standards and they want LOTS of royalties (hurray, free money!), but then that prices out the little guys.
To me, a reasonable access to "standards" should be in the $200-$1000 range, period, no per-unit royalties. Otherwise someone gets locked out of the system, and you may as well have some pseudo-standard from a consortium of rich companies instad. A good standa
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"Profits".. Samsung pays Apple for rounded corners. Apple pays Samsung for rectangular screens. Total profit = $0.
Both pay lawyers to argue about this shit. Total profit = $-a lot.
Nobody wins except the lawyers in these stupid patent wars when all contenders hold something that the others need. And of course all that wasted time and effort just gets passed on to the consumer as part of the "R&D" justification for selling $150 worth of electronics for $700. (Not that that justification is completel
Full disclousre (Score:3)
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I think we'd be better off if all contracts were required to be public in order to be enforceable in a court of law.
OK...but what about the courts? (Score:2)
The "Department of Justice" sounds nice, but it's this a fight that any one vendor could still take straight to court (since DoJ is just a wing of the administrative branch)?
(Seriously - IANAL...or anything close to it!)
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Basically, what the DoJ has done is said that the IEEE can as part of its membership rules and participating in various standards committees, ban any member who agreed to have their patents licensed FRAND from pursuing an injunction without going through other avenues of remedy first.
Basically the rules are if your patent is required fo
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...and this is why Apple was hitting Samsung with design patents, as those are never part of a standard. That's why Apple succeeded with their patent suit, yet Samsung failed with their rebuttal -- because their rebuttal was using a FRAND patent they'd already agreed to share with Apple.
So basically, Apple lawyers noticed that any patents that were part of FRAND were no longer part of the patent war chest, and didn't have to be defended against. Samsung missed out on this subtlety, and paid the price. No
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I'd say what's going to happen now is that every company will hold back a key patent that's not directly related to the standard, and FRAND the rest. That way, they get their patents into the standards, get the revenue, but should anyone decide to play nasty, they can pull out the extra patent and hit them over the head with it.
But that's only the big players. I can also see the big players abusing the new situation to take advantage of anyone who FRANDs their patents, which could easily suppress the numb
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but apple and microsoft in this case were in the bad because of their initial suits. no one liked them, so you really couldn't blame samsung and motorola using the only ammo they got.
Legally speaking, Apple and Microsoft were well within their rights. Whether people liked the lawsuits or not is irrelevant. And yes, we *can* blame Motorola and Samsung for using that "ammo", because doing so was clearly a violation of the well-understood FRAND principles.
The IEEE-SA rules are legally binding (Score:3)
The IEEE-SA rules are legally binding, so with standards subject to the new rule, such an injunction would be relatively easy to fight off.
The DoJ was involved to make sure the IEEE-SA was not engaging in conduct that would fall afoul of anti-trust law. They don't personally have any dog in the patent fight; they are just making sure the IEEE was not trying to discourage competition by new market entrants by working out rules designed by current competitors.
Where's my serial port? (Score:1)
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I miss the good old serial port.
It's on your universal serial bus.
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I've been thinking about a project to emulate USB over X.25 which could then run RS232.
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http://www.moxa.com/product/nport_5110.htm
Among other such devices... You would be surprised how many modern devices still come with RS232. In the case of Micro-Ohm resistance bridges, that would be all of them(that I have seen).
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I miss the good old serial port.
Then... go and buy one? There are plenty of PCIe and PExpressCard (make sure it's not a USB one in disguise) adapters which give you real quality serial ports with proper signalling and very low latency. For everything else there's USB serial adapters.
Why the DoJ was involved... (Score:3)
In case anybody was wondering why the DoJ was involved, it was most likely to ensure that the IEEE's rules passed anti-trust muster. A bunch of erstwhile competitors gathering together and deciding jointly on restraints on their conduct (and the conduct of future competitors) is subject to heightened scrutiny to make sure that the rules are not written to discourage new market entrants.
Patent Law and the 2yr Product Cycle (Score:2)
Half the time these injunctions are issued they apply to some ancient product anyway, because the suit was initially brought 18 months ago. So then they fight over whether they can add new products to the suit, the defendant argues against it, and the whole thing drags another 12 months until the original product is no longer being sold and the injunction is moot anyway.
I'm not a huge fan of patent law in general, but it strikes me as absurd that the legal system does not consolidate these sorts of claims i