

Motorola vs. Apple: Apple may no longer sell iPhone 3 and 4 in Germany - Mitt
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-apple-on-motorola-ip-claims-in-germany-this-old-pager-patent-is-invalid/

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raganwald
Allow me to save everyone the trouble of reading the inevitable comments.
Here’s everything that has already been said 2^n times before and will
continue to be said:

1\. Fuck Apple, they deserve it for trying to use patents themselves. All they
do is make overpriced pretty black plastic toys, there’s nothing remotely
innovative about selling jewellery to metrosexual fanboys.

2\. Patents are fundamentally broken. They should all be thrown out, and
miraculously everyone will rush to build great products with razor-thin
margins.

3\. INAL, but _< <Insert two paragraphs of dense legal opinions>>_.

4\. Apple is innovative and deserves its patents, these people are just
leeches and trolls.

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aristidb
"miraculously everyone will rush to build great products with razor-thin
margins"

Not a very neutral reproduction of a hypothetical comment! I would even say
that it is suggestive.

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raganwald
Feel free to make a different comment, I’m just reproducing the ones that are
made on a regular basis. I don’t judge whether they’re correct, just whether
they’re frequent!

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aristidb
"Patents are fundamentally broken. They should all be thrown out!"

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raganwald
Nonsense, just throw the _obvious_ ones out!

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Retric
No, we should only grant obvious patents! They expire the 3rd Sunday after the
second full moon. Also the application should cost 1 billion dollars and must
be written is Sanskrit.

More seriously, rather than trying to only throw obvious ones out I would
suggest applicants submit a bounty on each patent to be paid out when prior
art is discovered. Or returned after 5 years. The patent office can then
charge a small fee to compare prior art to a patent or patent application and
it becomes expensive and pointless to submit most dumb patents without costing
the taxpayers anything.

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talmand
I liked Apple's defense quoted in the article, "this old pager patent is
invalid". I'm willing to bet some people have used that defense against Apple
patents. What a farce this whole patent war is turning into.

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arikrak
Q: Why did Apple launch so many patent wars, aren't patents just supposed to
be used like nukes? (Don't sue me, or I'll sue you, and we'll both lose tons
of money.)

A: Maybe because Apple has so much money, patent lawsuits cannot threaten them
too much, but they have a chance at badly damaging the competition, who might
run out of money.

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rsynnott
This particular little war was launched by Motorola, which sued Apple before
Apple sued it.

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pinaceae
in Apple's _online_ store. sales through mobile providers, which make up the
majority of sales are still permitted.

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samarudge
Is there a particular reason they refer to themselves in 3rd person? Is it a
journalistic habit or something to do with syndication etc.?

> Apple’s emailed response to paidContent also indicates that it will be
> appealing the decision

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a_a_r_o_n
Widely used journalistic convention, to promote the appearance of objectivity,
or similarly to remove the writer (who is usually irrelevant) from the story.

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jacquesm
It's high time that Apple and all the other participants in these silly
lawsuits buried the hatchet lest they achieve that which they want least of
all: that the patent system will be overhauled.

In the end the little guys would win so I'm all for it but this whole saga so
far is a great example of starting a fire without having the ability to put it
out once it gets out of control.

Compete in the marketplace on excellence of product and service. And like them
or hate them, if Apple would just stick to that they'd be winners all around,
these lawsuits might just backfire.

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Xylakant
According "Der Spiegel" the injunction has been (temporarily) overruled by the
OLG Karlsruhe which is the next-higher instance in the lawsuit. Off to the
next round. Iphones are still not available in the store though

Source: <http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/0,1518,813264,00.html>

(The linked article has been updated to reflect that as well)

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nickik
I have not read this article in depth but in general, when are the lawmaker
going to see that this patentwar stuff profits only bureaucracy and lawers?
Its time to threw out this system or at least fundamentally rework it.

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VMG
I think the lawmakers know this already and like it that way. Maybe the large
companies will someday realize this is a negative-sum game and put a stop to
it.

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nickik
Why do you think politicians like it the way it is? They don't win anything. I
think the don't understand what going on.

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jfno67
They understand how lucrative it is for lawyers. Check what they were doing
prior to being politicians.

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nickik
Yes I know that alot of them are/were lawyers (and thats a problem) but then
they fall into the lawyer category. More of them where not lawyers, im still
holing on to my knowledge argument.

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jrockway
I miss not having Steve Jobs around. His commentary on issues like this was
always amusing.

Apple always won by playing their own game. Now they are playing the game of,
"if we can't beat them on the merit of our products, we'll sue them out of
existence." It turns out that other companies have been playing this game for
decades and are much better at it.

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rimantas

      > if we can't beat them on the merit of our products
    

The problem with your statement is that Apple still can. See e.g. the latest
changes of iOS market share vs. Android market share, or what percent of
smartphones sold by Verizon was iPhone, or the sales trend of iPad.

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jessa
How about iPhone 4s?

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microtherion
It appears that the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 no longer use the chip set that
forms the basis for the present litigation, so they are not affected (Apple
presumably will be absolutely _devastated_ at being forced to only sell their
high end models).

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jessa
I see. Do you think it would affect its price on the market?

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shinratdr
It shouldn't. The numbers show that Apple 4S business outstrips their previous
generation model sales by insane amounts, something like 80% of iPhones sold
are 4S models.

The tiers aren't as important to their success as people make them out to be.

