This is how you do parallel technology development these days. A large company invests billions in research and patents their ideas, if you want to use their ideas in your product you license their patents already knowing that the technology will work, saving you billions.
Without patents there is no way for Ericcson to recover their investment in research, so they just don't do it, so you never get 4GLTE cellular signals you're stuck in some form of Analog. Or you get no roaming at all because everyone has their own proprietary radio infrastructure.
I agree that there is a lot wrong with the patent system, I also recognize that there is tremendous value in being able to fund research in this way.
On the other hand, it's software and business process "patents" that I think are harder to defend. Those are better protected IMO through Copyright as opposed to patents. OpenSource licenses (Apache and GPL, Mozilla, Eclipse) have particular provisions set aside to grant licenses to patents based on usage (BSD and MIT make no claims on patents), but Copyright is maintained. Trolls don't "use" anything, so the OpenSource license doesn't protect you from them (maybe indirectly GPLv3).
I think it would better the industry if we properly talk about which types of patents we have issues with.
The way the consumer electronics market is currently structured, what drives your ability to monetize created value is strong, vertically-integrated manufacturing capability. That's what Apple's and Samsung's profits are built on. Creating technology delivers value, but you can only monetize it to the extent you can build and deliver Chinese-made products into the hands of consumers at high efficiency.
A great example of this is Apple buying P.A. Semi. A7-A9 have created tremendous value for consumers. But Apple purchased P.A. Semi for a pittance. The value-creation potential in P.A. Semi was not monetizable without access to Apple's incredible manufacturing muscle.
Isn't using patents and other anticompetitive protections easier and cheaper than delivering value? Sounds like you are agreeing that the patent system is bad.
"...the best patent is making yourself obsolete. So the person who steals your patent steals yesterday’s technology..." [0]
That's exactly what companies usually patent - things or methods that deliver value, because theoretically it's what patenting is all about.
Because it's considerably harder to do than you're making it out to be. It's not just the iPhone hardware that makes it valuable to customers, it's the support infrastructure Apple has in place, the software they write for it, the ecosystem of other products, etc. And let's be honest here - companies basically are cloning the iPhone for all intents and purposes and Apple basically clones other companies' successful products as well. They sue the crap out of each other as a cost of doing business and a bunch of lawyers buy new BMWs and lake homes and we all pay a few bucks more for our electronics. It's absurd.
Although Google took it out of the Chrome store it's still up on Github[1]. All you have to do is download the zip file, change the extension to "crx", and then install.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/paywall-pass/
Feature suggestion: change the text to 'search' instead of 'web'.
Firefox and Chrome, unfortunately, when doing auto-complete in the address bar, highlight the auto-completed part, overwriting your clipboard. This becomes a problem when you copy something and then open a new tab and begin to type out the URL of the site where you intended to use the copied string.
My way of dealing with this problem has been to add shortcuts on the new tab page to the sites where I frequently want to use copied content; archive.is, reddit and HN as well as a few others. That way I can at least navigate to those sites without touching the address bar.
One could of course turn off auto-complete in the browsers but aside from the situation mentioned above, auto-complete is such a useful feature.
I wish the browsers could find another way of implementing the auto-complete, not overwriting clipboard, but still retaining easy removal of the auto-completed part of the string.
Also, while we're on the subject of browsers and text highlight, I wish the drag-and-drop-ability of links from the webpage could be turned off by the user. Sometimes I want to start highlighting in the middle of a hyperlinked text. I never want to drag the link anywhere. I still like being able to drop files into the browser, though -- either to open them in the browser or to drop them onto an upload area of a page.
What works in Germany, though, is pressing "share via email" and using that link.
No matter how good your idea or, ahem, sorry, "intellectual property" is, if you don't know HOW to turn it into a multi-billion dollar product or you don't have the means to do so, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money when somebody else becomes successful? If anything, years of inaction on your "idea" proves that the idea has NOT been worth all that much to you.
Meanwhile, there could be literally thousands of unique components in an iPad, the products of tens of thousands of brilliant minds, many of whom get virtually nothing. Heck, I give more credit to the tertiary industries such as the people delivering the iPhone packages to my door, than I do to any owner of a patent for a product that they didn't build.
If you don't know HOW to build a multi-billion dollar product without stealing prior work that isn't yours, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money by preventing somebody else from getting paid for what they did?
Furthermore, a current lack of sufficient resources to pursue an idea does not mean that you never intend to do anything with it. The poster seems to think that the arbitrary amount of "a few years" discredits any prior work, as if it doesn't take people much longer periods of time to get their life in order and bring their life's work and ideas to fruition.
The current system unreasonably rewards arbitrary subsets of the total group of people responsible for making useful things. It also manages to include essentially middlemen in the rewarded set.
The assumption being, of course, that you actually stole prior work instead of coming up with the same idea. From what I can tell, most of the time these patents cover obvious stuff.
A touch screen on a phone? Who would have thought of that? Everybody, actually. Everybody.
(obviously kidding)
The iPhone would be shit if it wasn't for the advanced radio it uses that is based off of Ericsson's technology. There are lots of patents in the agreement and some may seem dodgy, but you can't deny that Ericsson had a huge hand in developing all the radio stuff that we just take for granted. Apple isn't part of the 3GPP and had nothing to do with inventing any part of 2G/3G/4G/LTE.
Even Apple doesn't deny this, they just wanted a different royalty rate after their previous agreement with Ericsson expired.
If slavery was still legal, you'd better fucking believe that the corporation that owned you would be suing other corporations over getting a percent of the revenue for some work you did.
But alas, you are just a person, and as such you don't get to write laws and international trade agreements, so your contributions to a product aren't litigated over.
http://www.gsmhistory.com/ericsson-r380/
This model R380 had a plastic flip in front of the touch screen. With the flip closed, it looked like an average chunky Ericsson phone (the keys on the flip pressed the touchscreen). With the flip open, it became essentially a widescreen PDA with mobile data access (although browsing the Internet on GSM data sure wasn't fast or cheap).
The successor model P800 had a color screen and was more pocketable. It was so far ahead of its time that "Steve Jobs was heard raving about it" [1].
Patents aside (I'm not qualified to comment), it's not quite so far-fetched that Apple's iPhone project does actually have a spiritual debt to Ericsson.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/04/sony_ericsson_p990i_...
1. Some wild-eyed visionaries (sometimes from academia) come up with crazy visions of what computing might be like in the future. This vision is usually highly impractical, requiring vastly more compute power or vastly cheaper components than exist. Further the software is the quality you'd expect from academic professors (garbage) and barely works for a few minor demos. This is the pre-prototype phase.
2. Someone brings a more realistic version to market. Sometimes the first to market fails badly because they arrive too soon. The product is too limited or the market isn't ready yet.
3. Finally someone brings a version of the invention to market that is a sellable product.
What matters is execution.
Ericsson had a touch screen phone? So what. In high-school in the late 90s I had a PocketPC predating the Ericsson phone; it was fucking obvious back then that they'd add a cellular radio to it as soon as it became practical (I know, I carried a Windows Mobile phone for a while). They were all garbage. They took no risks. They didn't have the animation or feedback systems that made iOS so pleasant to use. None of them even pretended to offer a real web browser - it was WAP if anything. Everything before the iPhone was qualitatively and quantitatively inferior, even if it happened to have a janky plastic touch screen. They sure as hell weren't running slimmed down desktop operating systems with fully-featured frameworks. They ran whatever software your carrier deigned to offer at vastly inflated prices.
There's a good reason the engineers at Blackberry thought the iPhone was a faked demo. There's a good reason Apple waltz in and completely upended and transformed the cellular industry.
Of course this all ignores that Apple had the Newton because it doesn't matter who had something first. It matters who can productize that thing and sell it to customers for money.
Yay, glitter is the only thing that matters!
> None of them even pretended to offer a real web browser - it was WAP if anything.
Worked fine from what I remember.
> Everything before the iPhone was qualitatively and quantitatively inferior, even if it happened to have a janky plastic touch screen.
At least it wasn't the capacitive junk that all of them are now.
> They sure as hell weren't running slimmed down desktop operating systems with fully-featured frameworks.
iOS is definitely not a desktop OS. Where are the files? Multi-user support? Terminal?
> They ran whatever software your carrier deigned to offer at vastly inflated prices.
As opposed to whatever software Apple deigns to offer at vastly inflated prices?
http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/guides/9000i_usersguide_e...
It could make calls, email, print documents over IRdA, it could telnet, it had a calendar, and even a rudimentary web browser!
For those curious, I believe that these are the 7 patents in question:
1. 6445917 - Mobile station measurements with event-based reporting [1]
2. 6985474 - Random access in a mobile telecommunications system [2]
3. 7660417 - Enhanced security design for cryptography in mobile communication systems [3]
4. 8023990 - Uplink scheduling in a cellular system [4]
5. 8036150 - Method and a device for improved status reports [5]
6. 8169992 - Uplink scrambling during random access [6]
7. 8214710 - Methods and apparatus for processing error control messages in a wireless communication system [7]
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6445917B1/en
[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6985474B2/en
[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7660417B2/en
[4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8023990B2/en
[5] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8036150B2/en
The result is this huge coercion machine that pretty much randomly chews up small companies and rewards attorneys and (somewhat randomly) large ones.
All I need to do is drop tens of thousands of dollars patenting anything and everything to do with anything up and coming - drones and delivery, autonomous cars, autonomous taxis, space stuff, solar stuff, energy storage and selling etc. etc.
"Method to hail autonomous taxi"
"Method to identify and optimize autonomous taxi routes"
Etc. etc.
Your comment was posted just 30 minutes after the comment listing the patents, so am I correct in guessing that you are judging based on the titles, or perhaps the titles plus the abstracts?
If so, then you very likely don't have anywhere near enough information to figure out whether they are absurd.
A patent title just tells you the very general area that the patent is in. If patents were books, the title would just be telling you what section of the library it goes in.
Continuing the book analogy, the abstract is like the description on the back of the book. It will give you a better idea of what area the patent is in, but still doesn't tell you what is actually patented.
You have to read and understand the claims to know what the patent is actually covering. To understand the claims you must read the specification, because the claims are interpreted in light of the specification. In particular, the specification can narrow the meaning of the claims.
If you really want to be thorough, you also should get the "file wrapper" for the patent. That's the collection of documents associated with the application. In particular, the file wrapper includes copies of any correspondence between the examiner and the applicant. In such correspondence the applicant may say things that narrow some of the claims.
Why Ericsson should pay Apple?
From the iphone5s it was $19 for the A7 but $32 for the wireless section. It may not be as bad anymore. But for quite a few releases the wireless parts seemed unnecessarily expensive.
https://technology.ihs.com/451425/groundbreaking-iphone-5s-c...
So what is there to prevent company x paying for 1% of of the whole sale price, while another company only paying 0.1%?
Some speculated Apple is now paying a much smaller %. Which is fine by me because they are like the ONLY player on the market selling premium smartphone. And the total amount will likely still be much larger then other players.
I thought the system using % is kind of unfair, Anyone knows why the telecom industry is doing such practice?
And premium feature set is subjective at best.
Basically, it allows you to go to a site as if you came from Google. This avoids most paywalls.
It was basically a licensing agreement that went poorly and delved into IP lawsuits. It wasn't about Apple copying anyone.
Ericsson said that under the agreement it will be paid an undisclosed amount by Apple, along with ongoing royalties over seven years. ... Details of the contract are confidential ... Including the new settlement and business with other licensees, Ericsson estimates its revenue from intellectual property rights will be [around]$1.53 billion
What was the estimation of revenue before the settlement? It could have been $1.52 billion or $1 million.
EDIT:
From the Verge article[1]: but an estimate by investment bank ABG Sundal Collier pointed out by Reuters has Apple paying out 0.5 percent of its iPad and iPhone revenue.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10633084/apple-ericsson-p...
Eastern District of Texas? Shocking!
One of the largest problems with the patent system is large corporations try to position themselves as the go-between on some obvious and useful technology. It's not about protecting real innovation to them, it's about stifling competition.
None of the major corporations (technology or otherwise) are innocent here as far as I can tell.
