

Third Nokia lawsuit accuses Apple of multiple patent violations - optiplex
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/04/third_nokia_lawsuit_accuses_apple_of_multiple_patent_violations.html

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martythemaniak
Remember when Steve Jobs proudly introduced the iPhone and said "works like
magic…and boy have we patented it"?

Apple plays very nasty on the IP front, so I can't muster any kind of sympathy
for them.

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jacquesm
I'm sure nokia doesn't give a damn about my one-man boycott but they can take
their lawsuits and shove them...

If their answer to the Iphone is a lawsuit instead of a better phone then
they've just admitted they stopped being a contender.

I'm pretty brand loyal, I've had nokia phones for more than a decade now with
one very brief excursion in to samsung land.

It's a pity, Nokia used to command some respect because of the quality of
their product, the quality has steadily gone down over the years (the old
stuff _NEVER_ crashed or froze) and now they're turning in to a milk-the-
patents shop.

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Tuna-Fish
Nokia did most of the legwork for developing cell networks early on. Everyone
else is paying them for using their patents. Why not Apple?

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jacquesm
Everybody else is paying the mobster, why don't you ?

That's a bad argument.

If Nokia had a leg to stand on they would have sued apple the day they first
released the iphone. Now that Nokia is losing in the marketplace they want a
piece of the pie.

I can't wait until we reach the 'lawyer event horizon' when progress outside
of open sourced hardware and software grinds to a messy halt because all the
time and money is taken up with lawsuits.

The phone was an invention worth patenting, the cell phone is variation on a
theme, and the research that went in to it was largely funded by the public.

 _LONG_ before Nokia got in on the act cell phones were a reality, it's true
that the current crop is a serious improvement over what was available at the
time but we're talking incremental improvements here.

In the name of interoperability that stuff got standardized, after that point
you compete in the marketplace, patents should get tossed out.

Otherwise patents become a measure to control the competition instead of a
device to foster innovation.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Everybody else is paying the mobster, why don't you ?

The patent system is set up so that innovators (like Nokia) share their
research in exchange for a limited time monopoly on the fruits of that
research. You can argue that the system is fucked up, but if Nokia hadn't been
promised that monopoly, they probably wouldn't have shared all that research.
They did, and now companies like apple can make phones with no need to do
basic research, instead letting them concentrate on building UI's and such.
This is how it works, and this is how every other phone manufacturer in the
world is comfortable with it working.

> If Nokia had a leg to stand on they would have sued apple the day they first
> released the iphone.

Not only do they have a leg to stand on, they have successfully defended many
of the patents in question in court in previous cases. And why didn't they sue
earlier? I'd be ready to bet you a lot of money they have been in talks with
apple all this time trying to make a deal without having to resort to a legal
battle.

> I can't wait until we reach the 'lawyer event horizon' when progress outside
> of open sourced hardware and software grinds to a messy halt because all the
> time and money is taken up with lawsuits.

Or then, people who clearly use other people's research to build stuff could
pay for it without wasting time taking stuff to court like _every other phone
manufacturer does._

> The phone was an invention worth patenting, the cell phone is variation on a
> theme, and the research that went in to it was largely funded by the public.

The cell phone was not worth patenting? Please. There is ridiculously lot of
manhours spent in thousands of little details that had to be worked out so
that lots of people can be served over limited radio channels in a noisy
environments. And, while it's true there was a lot public funding early on,
there were also many private companies spending a lot of money getting basic
research done, including, but not limited to, Ericsson and Nokia.

> LONG before Nokia got in on the act cell phones were a reality, it's true
> that the current crop is a serious improvement over what was available at
> the time but we're talking incremental improvements here.

Actually, Nokia has been in mobile telephony since NMT, and when things got
digital they were on the leading edge -- for example, the first ever
commercial GSM call was made on a Nokia phone in 1991.

> In the name of interoperability that stuff got standardized, after that
> point you compete in the marketplace, patents should get tossed out.

Or, people could agree on fair terms to licence each others patents like the
cell phone manufacturers decided. Nokia pays other people for using their
patents.

> Otherwise patents become a measure to control the competition instead of a
> device to foster innovation.

When you refuse to license them for reasonable terms, that's exactly what
happens. Good thing that's not what Nokia is doing.

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chaosprophet
Looks like a lot of hardware patents in there. Personally, I think Apple is
going to be having a tough time, but IANAL so let's see what happens.

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pierrefar
If only all this money paid to the lawyers goes to R&D and marketing to make
the Nokia products better.

