60 points 0xedb 2 hours ago 35 comments
nickdothutton 1 hour ago | parent
vincnetas 1 hour ago | parent
Apple ordered to pay $5.7bn after losing vibration tech patent suit (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6je85n2vyleo)
You can ask AI to summarise the list of when for example apple ignored patents. I get 16 cases.
phatfish 1 hour ago | parent
Someone has to tear it down, and it's not going to come from within. No balls on this side.
zoobab 1 hour ago | parent
Like FFII.org predicted in 2006:
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of software, they are now seeking to create a central Unitary patent court (UPC), which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators."
Not to mention the judges in that court are part time working for Nokia or Airbus.
dudisubekti 1 hour ago | parent
newsclues 1 hour ago | parent
whatever1 1 hour ago | parent
And now they are just giving it away ?
vachina 1 hour ago | parent
Qualcomm will benefit greatly from this arrangement.
earldennison 1 hour ago | parent
kotaKat 1 hour ago | parent
Canada remembers how fucked over we got in espionage.
Now Qualcomm’s just giving them it on a silver platter.
AlanYx 53 minutes ago | parent
Is it potentially anticompetitive? Yes.
dozerly 46 minutes ago | parent
AlanYx 39 minutes ago | parent
Consumers will likely pay incrementally higher prices though.
whizzter 39 minutes ago | parent
No breakdown on the age of the patents though so it'd be interesting to see how things evolve over the years.
AlanYx 35 minutes ago | parent
Qualcomm does more than 5 billion a year in patent licensing revenue. It's a licensing behemoth.
jillesvangurp 51 minutes ago | parent
There's a long history of various companies doing patent license deals like this in the telecom industry. Nokia still earns a lot of money this way, for example. Apple settled with them on a few occasions.
Speaking of which; Apple has its own 5G chips now so they are a bit less dependent on Qualcomm now. Huawei and Apple both have a lot of their own in house technology at this point. But of course Qualcomm always was a strong IP company with lots of patents and its impossible for either to make phones without infringing on at least some of those patterns. And vice versa, a lot of Qualcomm's stuff would necessarily infringe on some patents by others.
That's why these cross licensing deals like this are usually the outcome of disputes around IP.
zoobab 1 hour ago | parent
rwmj 1 hour ago | parent
nicce 1 hour ago | parent
Havoc 1 hour ago | parent
ovi256 1 hour ago | parent
mirekrusin 1 hour ago | parent
zoobab 9 minutes ago | parent
quincy_jones 6 minutes ago | parent