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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Apple and Broadcom have been told to pay the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) a beefy billion bucks for ripping off three of the US university's Wi-Fi patents. A federal jury in Cali decided on Wednesday that technology described in the data signal encoding patents owned by Caltech is used in millions of iPhones without wireless chip designer Broadcom nor phone slinger Apple paying the necessary licensing fees. Broadcom supplies radio communications components to Apple for various iThings.
The jury took just under five hours to decide its $1.1bn patent-infringement prize following a two-week trial, with Apple being forced to pick up the bulk of the damages, $837m, compared to Broadcom's $270m. The figures were what Caltech asked for.
[...] Despite the massive award, the news had no noticeable impact on Apple's share price coming a day after it announced better-than-expected results. Broadcom's slipped just a quarter of a per cent.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:56PM
Patents are bad. Generally speaking.
You are buying into the myth that some inventor comes up with something that is truly novel, non obvious, and of actual value. eg, a real advance, not just a trivial improvement that he came with first, but that anyone else would have done soon.
Royalties are only "deserved" IMO, if you invented something of genuine value that advanced the state of the art. That is worth something.
That is rare. Many patents are on obvious improvements. Things that given the same problem to solve, anyone else would have come up with the same idea.
Apple's slide to unlock, for example. If you had to come up with a way to prevent a phone from being accidentally unlocked in your pocket, but the phone only had one button, but had a new touch screen, what would you do? Obviously, you would require some type of on-screen touch gesture! That gesture is almost certainly a sliding motion of some type, or alternately multiple touches in sequence (such as a keypad). But you want it to be easy, so a single slide gesture is the winner.
Another one: Apple's bouncy scrolling! Yes, seriously.
Apple thinks both of these were worth a billion dollars and worth the entire profits that Samsung made on its sold phones.
I think maybe you get an idea of what I think of the patent system. It's broke. This lone inventor myth is just that. Patents are not a measure of innovation (looking at your state of the onion speech Obama!), but rather patents are a measure of hinderance of innovation, in practice.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.