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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: 2) by theluggage on Thursday January 30 2020, @11:02PM
They certainly both have problems, some of them similar, but copyright does have some sort of moral core - if you spend a lot of time and effort creating something novel and I just copy it, then I should owe you something - whether its money or just the right to be credited, and whether your rights should be time limited is up for discussion...
The problem with patents is that copying doesn't need to be involved - however hard it might be to prove/disprove a claim that one thing is a copy of another (remember to add your trap streets, folks..!) for a patent claim, that's irrelevant.
...which would be nice, but it's the opposite of how patents work. The whole point is to grant a monopoly to the first person to obtain the patent, and 'independently' doesn't come into it. In the case of software patents, it's probably the key difference between patents and copyright.
So that's the 1% of inventions that you still can't figure out even when you've taken it apart and reassembled it twice sorted out - but not the 99% of inventions in the "[facepalm] why didn't I think of that!" (at least, if you are skilled in the art) category... and ultimately who is making this decision? Ans: judges and juries who aren't skilled in the art advised by opposing "expert witnesses" saying what they're paid to say (...anybody ever been done for perjury for falsely claiming that an invention was non-obvious?)
Even evaluating a patent application requires a patent officer who is a genius polymath that somehow got stuck in a low-paid government McJob. AFAIK there's only been one of those, and he was too busy daydreaming about riding on beams of light to make any difference to the patent system.