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| Authored by: nsomos on Tuesday, October 23 2012 @ 12:38 AM EDT |
Is the parent claiming that Apple and MS hold
standards essential FRAND patents?
Somehow, I don't think so. There is a big difference
between being late to the party, and bringing a little
something with you, and being there at the beginning
and bringing the main courses.
Moto made an offer. Instead of making a counter-offer,
MS went crying foul. What MS did is NOT negotiating.
Moto is contracted by standards body, to negotiate for
allowing others (including MS) to use their standards
essential patents.
It is not Motorolas fault, if MS does not do their part.
After all, it does take TWO to negotiate.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 23 2012 @ 08:13 PM EDT |
> The contract between Intel and Samsung was not made public but was
shown first to Judge Kohl and then to the jury.
Yeah, and we can be certain that the jury read it, too, and took sufficient time
about that, and that the jury was infallible in its interpretation. Right?
Right.
One of the severe problems with this case is that the jury made a few too many
decisions which seemed to be done with extreme haste or, some of them, seemed to
fly in the face of the facts and the law. For example, the ignoring of
decades-old prior art on one patent because the original code would not run on
an Apple CPU. So how is the public supposed to react when the jury has managed
so well to undermine its own credibility? How does one know that this decision
about letting Apple off because of "patent exhaustion" followed the
law and made sense when so much else simply does not?
Another point: Someone said this above. I think it was you:
"The fact is that both Moto and Samsung are using FRAND patents to try to
obtain injunctions."
This is of course half of the truth. Samsung contacted Apple, and Motorola
contacted Microsoft, and it was pointed out that they had certain
standards-essential patents which Apple and Motorola need to license. On
initiating contact, they asked, IIRC, for a 2.5% royalty. The response of both
Apple and Microsoft was to refuse to pay the asking price, to refuse to
negotiate, and to try to get the matter settled in court. And also put out press
releases complaining that Samsung or respectively Motorola were asking an
exorbitant fee for the use of the standards-relevant patents.
In this regard, the following quote from higher up in the thread is relevant,
too. Someone said (and again I think it was you but I obviously can not be
sure):
"With inclusion in the standard, you might get fees of 1-2%, but you'll
have several orders of magnitude more units on which to collect those
fees."
If this is true, then it is simply implausible that, by the standards of the
industry, Samsung and Motorola were guilty of gouging for standards-essential
patents by naming an initial price of 2.5%. They did not ask for 25%, but 2.5%.
Moreover, if someone who needs to license a patent in order to do business
refuses to license the patent and refuses to negotiate about a license and acts
like no license is needed and refuses to pay even one thin dime, then the usual
thing to do is to seek an injunction. This is obviously true regardless of
whether the patent is standards-essential and supposed to be subjected to FRAND
licensing, or not. The whole system was not set up so that somebody can shout
"King's X" and refuse to license the patent just because it relates to
a standard.
Moreover, it seems obvious that the price for both Apple and for Microsoft would
have gone down from 2.5% if they had not at the same time refused to
cross-license some other patents of their own, wanting instead of
cross-licensing to use those patents to destroy the companies which held the
standards-essential patents. In this regard, the stance of both Microsoft and
Apple simply reeks of hypocrisy. There is no other way to call it.
Now, as far as the question of all those (mostly phony) patents running up the
cost of the equipment that the rest of us use, I do very much agree. But the
solution to that problem is to get rid of those mostly phony patents. That much
is very clear. The solution is not to let a couple of big companies, which
obviously intend to use their mostly phony patents as tool for extorting
everyone else, to make us pay for their patents and they don't have to pay
anything to other companies which actually seem to have invented the technology.
Or, OK, if those "standards-essential" patents are phony, too, then
let's by all means get rid of them as well.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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