BONEPOSNEWS . There are some developments in the Apple VS Samsung lawsuit, after the later lost the patent trial and was doomed to pay over ...
BONEPOSNEWS. There are some developments in the Apple VS Samsung lawsuit, after the later lost the patent trial and was doomed to pay over 1 billion to Apple they reviewed the (not so conclusive) sentence and decided to appeal to a higher court in order to review and eventually let them have a second hearing in order to try and reverse the decision.
If we will ignore the enormous amounts of money poured, the insanely long time things take and the ridiculously lengthy descriptions laid down during that trial it might seem to a viewer on the sides as 2 kids fighting, one of them said “he stole my toys”, the parents answer “you are right – Sammy, please give then back” and then the later says “no I didn’t”.
By the way, it’ll take several months for us to know the parents response to poor little Sam.
The patent war may seem like a new hot trend by companies to “lock down” enemies, get some money and lowering the competition, however, dragging weaker rivals in court until they give up due to lack of ability to fight is a very old tool used quite effectively for most of the computers history.
Back in 2008, a small company named VLingo was created, the company had a great product under their hands, allowing machine a understand human speech, the company have been approached among others by Apple in order to have the technology integrated in their products (read: SIRI), the wheels have started to turn and things looked good for the company, however, one gloomy day (maybe it was sunny) at 2008, VLingo have been contacted by a much bigger company claiming they are infringing one of their patents and were offered 2 options: agree to sell the company or face a lawsuit.
The owner of VLingo, Michael Phillips, refused to sell the company now that things are going so well and was slapped with a subpoena, the first of six lawsuits VLingo was about to be hit with according to the rival company, the trial didn’t go that well for the small voice recognition company as right after it was started and with 5 more trials meant to hold the company down it was clear to VLingo’s partners that betting on them, even if they do have the more superior technology, was a bet that had little to gain and a lot to lose in the mobile world where things change in an increasing pace, so they lost Apple and most of their other clients who migrated to the bigger rival that locked them down in the lawsuits.
3 years later, VLingo won the battle and proved they didn’t infringed any patent by Nuance, who meanwhile closed a major deal with Apple (and are being used by SIRI), and it cost them 3 million dollars, money that they’ll never see again, and since most major clients left due to this case – no income has come into the company, plunging their market value as well as any hopes for saving themselves, having won the battle proved nothing as ultimately VLingo have lost the war, and with 5 lawsuits in their grim future, the company gave up and was sold to Nuance.
But patent lawsuits is not only a case of goliath holding David at bay until the later gives up, at the year of 2000 a small company named Immerson sued both Microsoft and Sony for using a vibrating remote on their respectable game consoles (Xbox and PS), not wanting to go to court MS settled outside of court walls with buying 10% of Immerson’s shares while Sony stood to trial, 6 years later after a trial and a second hearing (which Samsung got in the Apple trial) Sony lost the case and were forced pay $82 million as well as remove the vibrating feature from their remote, which they announced to do for PS3, a year later they settled an agreement with Immerson and got the feature back.
But the most interesting case in this regard is one that actually didn’t happen back in the 80′s, the PC market and the micro computers (the stationary desktop you have in your room right now) was just starting to evolve, the creators of this market were none other than IBM and the ones to be powering most of the computers’ operating system were Microsoft with their PC-DOS, however not signing exclusivity to MS they allowed them to sell the DOS operating system to other hardware manufacturers who wanted under the brand MS-DOS, the IBM computer, sold since 1980 gained so much popularity that they needed to find some sort of a hook in order to prevent customers from getting any rivals cheaper models.
IBM created the first BIOS for their micro-computers, basically it is a piece of code written on the hardware layer (think a world before frameworks, java and 3rd generation languages) meant to give a piece of software, namely – the OS, basic access to the hardware, (reading keystrokes, writing to the screen etc.), the OS would know how to get to the hardware in a unified way and any program written that uses these system calls can run on this type of computer, but not on a different one if it doesn’t have the exact same system calls.
Having the popularity they got, being the PCs of most of the world software developers didn’t take the time to write programs (games, utilities etc.) for PCs other than IBM made, much like many developers bother writing apps to iPhone and android and pretty much ignore the rest, so hardware manufacturers decided to build an IBM compatible (or IBM clone) machine that will have the same BIOS with the same system calls and therefore any software written for IBM PC would essentially be able to run on their hardware as well.
Problem was – the BIOS was protected by patent and in addition – it wasn’t an open source and no documents have been written so not many outside of IBM knew exactly how it works, several companies such as Columbia data products (CDP) reverse engineered (learned how it works and created a copy) of an IBM machine in order to have an IBM compatible computer however many of them got sued and didn’t even have the chance to get their hardware on the market (or did it a lot later than anyone else), there was one company that did the same, but decided to protect itself from being sued in order to have a fighting chance against the PC giant, they reversed engineered IBM’s BIOS using a clean room that can basically prove they did not copy anything, however – since there was always a chance IBM would sue them in order to delay their entrance to the market – they also bought a huge insurance(InfoWorld – Apr 29, 1985 – Page 69) against lawsuits which basically had IBM turning away from a battle they cannot win with no chance of depleting the competition’s funds, the story from there is history – Phoenix sold out their IBM compatible BIOS to Compaq and others, fueling the growth of PC and enabling other hardware manufacturer selling cheaper PCs that ate and eventually demolished IBM foothold of the PC market.
It is pretty obvious that the patent law as it is today is largely exploited for better or worse and serves more as a tool by the large companies then keeping the hard-earned intellectual properties, however – there were enough cases throughout the history that these set of rules actually helped the “smaller fish at the sea” see the fruits of their labor, but usually it takes several years and huge depletion of funds in order to achieve that, it is clear that careful planning and seeing far enough will save a lot of trouble and cash to said companies in order to guard themselves from the big sharks but there is a limit to how far one might see, other ideas such as having the loser covering the winner’s trial expenses might actually refrain small companies from suing the large ones, creating an opposite effect to what intended and I doubt anyone will give insurance against infringing lawsuits with all the trials flying around these days. And this is all even before discussing on the bad effect on innovations the patent rule has.
If we will ignore the enormous amounts of money poured, the insanely long time things take and the ridiculously lengthy descriptions laid down during that trial it might seem to a viewer on the sides as 2 kids fighting, one of them said “he stole my toys”, the parents answer “you are right – Sammy, please give then back” and then the later says “no I didn’t”.
By the way, it’ll take several months for us to know the parents response to poor little Sam.
The patent war may seem like a new hot trend by companies to “lock down” enemies, get some money and lowering the competition, however, dragging weaker rivals in court until they give up due to lack of ability to fight is a very old tool used quite effectively for most of the computers history.
Back in 2008, a small company named VLingo was created, the company had a great product under their hands, allowing machine a understand human speech, the company have been approached among others by Apple in order to have the technology integrated in their products (read: SIRI), the wheels have started to turn and things looked good for the company, however, one gloomy day (maybe it was sunny) at 2008, VLingo have been contacted by a much bigger company claiming they are infringing one of their patents and were offered 2 options: agree to sell the company or face a lawsuit.
The owner of VLingo, Michael Phillips, refused to sell the company now that things are going so well and was slapped with a subpoena, the first of six lawsuits VLingo was about to be hit with according to the rival company, the trial didn’t go that well for the small voice recognition company as right after it was started and with 5 more trials meant to hold the company down it was clear to VLingo’s partners that betting on them, even if they do have the more superior technology, was a bet that had little to gain and a lot to lose in the mobile world where things change in an increasing pace, so they lost Apple and most of their other clients who migrated to the bigger rival that locked them down in the lawsuits.
3 years later, VLingo won the battle and proved they didn’t infringed any patent by Nuance, who meanwhile closed a major deal with Apple (and are being used by SIRI), and it cost them 3 million dollars, money that they’ll never see again, and since most major clients left due to this case – no income has come into the company, plunging their market value as well as any hopes for saving themselves, having won the battle proved nothing as ultimately VLingo have lost the war, and with 5 lawsuits in their grim future, the company gave up and was sold to Nuance.
But patent lawsuits is not only a case of goliath holding David at bay until the later gives up, at the year of 2000 a small company named Immerson sued both Microsoft and Sony for using a vibrating remote on their respectable game consoles (Xbox and PS), not wanting to go to court MS settled outside of court walls with buying 10% of Immerson’s shares while Sony stood to trial, 6 years later after a trial and a second hearing (which Samsung got in the Apple trial) Sony lost the case and were forced pay $82 million as well as remove the vibrating feature from their remote, which they announced to do for PS3, a year later they settled an agreement with Immerson and got the feature back.
But the most interesting case in this regard is one that actually didn’t happen back in the 80′s, the PC market and the micro computers (the stationary desktop you have in your room right now) was just starting to evolve, the creators of this market were none other than IBM and the ones to be powering most of the computers’ operating system were Microsoft with their PC-DOS, however not signing exclusivity to MS they allowed them to sell the DOS operating system to other hardware manufacturers who wanted under the brand MS-DOS, the IBM computer, sold since 1980 gained so much popularity that they needed to find some sort of a hook in order to prevent customers from getting any rivals cheaper models.
IBM created the first BIOS for their micro-computers, basically it is a piece of code written on the hardware layer (think a world before frameworks, java and 3rd generation languages) meant to give a piece of software, namely – the OS, basic access to the hardware, (reading keystrokes, writing to the screen etc.), the OS would know how to get to the hardware in a unified way and any program written that uses these system calls can run on this type of computer, but not on a different one if it doesn’t have the exact same system calls.
Having the popularity they got, being the PCs of most of the world software developers didn’t take the time to write programs (games, utilities etc.) for PCs other than IBM made, much like many developers bother writing apps to iPhone and android and pretty much ignore the rest, so hardware manufacturers decided to build an IBM compatible (or IBM clone) machine that will have the same BIOS with the same system calls and therefore any software written for IBM PC would essentially be able to run on their hardware as well.
Problem was – the BIOS was protected by patent and in addition – it wasn’t an open source and no documents have been written so not many outside of IBM knew exactly how it works, several companies such as Columbia data products (CDP) reverse engineered (learned how it works and created a copy) of an IBM machine in order to have an IBM compatible computer however many of them got sued and didn’t even have the chance to get their hardware on the market (or did it a lot later than anyone else), there was one company that did the same, but decided to protect itself from being sued in order to have a fighting chance against the PC giant, they reversed engineered IBM’s BIOS using a clean room that can basically prove they did not copy anything, however – since there was always a chance IBM would sue them in order to delay their entrance to the market – they also bought a huge insurance(InfoWorld – Apr 29, 1985 – Page 69) against lawsuits which basically had IBM turning away from a battle they cannot win with no chance of depleting the competition’s funds, the story from there is history – Phoenix sold out their IBM compatible BIOS to Compaq and others, fueling the growth of PC and enabling other hardware manufacturer selling cheaper PCs that ate and eventually demolished IBM foothold of the PC market.
It is pretty obvious that the patent law as it is today is largely exploited for better or worse and serves more as a tool by the large companies then keeping the hard-earned intellectual properties, however – there were enough cases throughout the history that these set of rules actually helped the “smaller fish at the sea” see the fruits of their labor, but usually it takes several years and huge depletion of funds in order to achieve that, it is clear that careful planning and seeing far enough will save a lot of trouble and cash to said companies in order to guard themselves from the big sharks but there is a limit to how far one might see, other ideas such as having the loser covering the winner’s trial expenses might actually refrain small companies from suing the large ones, creating an opposite effect to what intended and I doubt anyone will give insurance against infringing lawsuits with all the trials flying around these days. And this is all even before discussing on the bad effect on innovations the patent rule has.
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