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, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:11PM (5 children)
Patents filed for publicly funded research and software patents.
I guess it's marginally better that the university holds the patents than a private individual, but I still don't like it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by exaeta on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:32PM (1 child)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:59PM
Yes. That is indeed constitutional. States have essentially unlimited power under the tenth amendment to raise funds as they see fit. It's dumb, but constitutional.
For state constitution, it actually makes it easier, because they have article XIII of their constitution which mandates they not raise more than 25% of their annual funds from property taxes. The state of california, in spite of its reputation of a hive of evil leftism has a constitution that makes taxation all but impossible. These kinds of alternate funding sources are probably important to their increasingly overstretched university system.
(Score: 5, Informative) by captain normal on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:49PM (2 children)
Publicly funded? Cal Tech is a private institution. Do you have any citation for the statement that any of the research behind the patents received public funds? I hate it as much as anybody when large corporations rip off research that is paid for by taxpayers, but as far as I know Cal Tech has a huge endowment from prior research and patrons, and pretty much pays it's on way.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:28PM
Backing this up, Wiki says CalTech is private. Unless the commenter meant that the research itself was publicly funded.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_Technology [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday January 31 2020, @02:15AM
A vast amount of research is publicly funded, even if the institution is private. I don't have the patience to dig through who-knows-what amount of stuff to find the original publications, but I bet it'll say something like "this research was funded by DARPA grant #abc123" or similar somewhere.
OTOH should multibillion-dollar corporations be allowed to profit from taxpayer-funded research? It's not like either Apple or Broadcom are short of money to pay a license fee.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:56PM (2 children)
Forget that, I want to know if this is going to have any noticeable impact on their future tuition price.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:10PM
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:15PM
You bet! It will go up even more.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:10PM (2 children)
What I'd like to know is what idea is worth a billion dollars? I had an idea for a genetically engineered pineapple with pizza topping, but that didn't make it to a billion dollars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:17PM (1 child)
More like $0.10 or less per license, a few billion times over.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:13PM
Wish my brain had those expensive neurons.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RandomFactor on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:13PM
Apple reduces the 2.5 billion it is paying to fight California's housing crises by $837m
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @04:15PM (10 children)
I fear that these patents cover some dangerous wifi technology.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:03PM (7 children)
Then use some safer wifi technology which isn't patented.
But seriously now . . .
<no-sarcasm>
Patents are bad. Unlike copyright, you can't just build your own implementation. Or at least, not easily, not always.
Juries don't understand technology. Lawyers count on being able to manipulate a jury on any technology case. This much because clear during the SCO vs IBM days of Groklaw.
</no-sarcasm>
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:07PM (4 children)
I'm not sure that patents are intrinsically bad, but the implementation sure is. But then so is the implementation of copyright.
E.g., if two people independently invent something, they should have equal rights to the patent. And if four people independently invent something, the patent should be denied on the grounds of being obvious to someone sufficiently skilled in the art.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:19PM
Only if they invent it simultaneously.
I should not be able to get a patent on the fidget spinner even if I have never seen one -- it was already invented years ago.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:49PM
If two people independently invent something, about the same time (within some short time frame), then yes they should have equal rights -- as long as those patent rights are ZERO.
eg, NO PATENT
If two people independently invent the same thing, this is evidence that it is "obvious to someone skilled in the art". And a third, and fourth, etc would have done the same thing at that same point in history. If Amazon hadn't done 1-click purchase, then someone else would have. It's not that much of a stretch to think of if you're brainstorming about how to make purchasing easier.
Patents are supposed to be for things that are NOT obvious. Something ingenious.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:35PM
I would very much prefer the way things worked before patent law. That a company can keep their inventions secret. Everyone who can reverse engineer the invention shoud be allowed to do so. This way sufficiently ingenious and complex inventions will survive as secrets the longest and earn the most profit and if it is important enough for humanity it will be reverse engineered quicker and benefit everyone.
IMO burn all patents.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:15PM (1 child)
What? No!
Patents are not bad. They provide incentive for invention and (are supposed to) protect the inventor.
That's right!
Nor can a huge corporation build their own "implementation" and cheat the inventor out of his/her deserved royalties.
(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.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:18PM
Translation: "I'm bored, get me out of here."
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 31 2020, @02:27AM
I wonder if Lin is related to Trump? Trump has never met Lev Parnas despite being in photos and recordings with him, Alvin Lin doesn't know what an LDPC is despite having [google.com] multiple [google.com] patents [google.com] for it [google.com] in his name [google.com].
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:25PM (13 children)
"The patents' methods form the basis of error correction used in Wi-Fi standards 802.11n and 802.11ac"
Did IEEE learn NOTHING from Rambus and SDRAM?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @05:59PM (12 children)
Anyone have time to dig up the patents and figure out who are the inventors and assignee(s)? While someone posted an allegation that this was government funded research, it would also be interesting to know the funding history... (follow the money). Universities also do research for private and public companies, as well as patent stuff that they fund internally (maybe less of the latter?)
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:17PM (9 children)
The full story linked them:
( https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/30/caltech_apple_broadcom_patent_win/ [theregister.co.uk] )
And yes it's not only possible, but it's rather likely Alvin Lin had no idea what they're talking about since he's just a software guy and the patents here are hardware details.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:34PM (5 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Thursday January 30 2020, @10:46PM (4 children)
Practically speaking I don't think the government should have let Broadcom and their customers use it for free. I mean, sure, in principle, all publicly funded research should be in the public domain. But, which public? Broadcom and Apple aren't paying taxes in the US. They're paying it in Ireland or Singapore or whatever. Caltech, on the other hand, does pay their taxes in the States. So, considering the realities of intellectual properties and the US tax code, the court's decision is likely closest to serving the American public's best interests.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday January 31 2020, @06:55PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday February 01 2020, @03:10AM (2 children)
Not in a competitive market.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Saturday February 01 2020, @04:53AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday February 01 2020, @03:22PM
If and buts. It's not every company. It's Broadcom and its customers. And their competitors will be rewarded where Broadcom was punished.
They'll take less profits and they'll keep the prices the same or watch their customers move to their competitors.
Honestly they're some of the most profitable and least cost-effective companies that ever existed. And, Apple specifically, does very little good with their profits so every cent you pry off their hands into the public treasury is doing public service.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 31 2020, @02:42AM (2 children)
He knew exactly what they were talking about, see this post [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday January 31 2020, @03:20AM (1 child)
Seems you're right. Maybe he gone senile or took a few too many anxiety pills? Well, I'm sure they'll appeal so we'll know more in the next trial.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Friday January 31 2020, @04:46AM
More likely he's quite introverted in normal life (as many techies are), and being put under intense scrutiny and pressure in a public courtroom caused him to have problems even remembering his own name. Seen it happen in job interviews, the poor kid really knew his stuff but was so nervous he literally forgot his own name. Unfortunately I was overruled about hiring him, I think he would have done well.
(Score: 2) by exaeta on Thursday January 30 2020, @06:35PM (1 child)
The Government is a Bird
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @08:23PM
Caltech isn't a government university.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 30 2020, @07:59PM
how is this even news? the papple (!sic) stock didnt care.