Apple pays 25$ millionin a settlement to a patent troll

[yt1993]

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12132806/apple-25m-patent-lawsuit-settlement-network-1-mirror-worlds

 

Quote

Apple has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Network-1 Technologies, which was suing over a patent from 1999 that basically just describes a simple file system function. "The present invention relates to an operating system in which documents are stored in a chronologically ordered 'stream,'" the patent begins.

And it looks like this patent is a gift that keeps on giving:

Quote

Microsoft recently paid $4.6 million to end a lawsuit over the same patent at hand today. Apple declined to comment.

It's amazing that every once in a while a patent troll is able to take down a company as big as apple.
I'm not extremely familiar with the patent system in America and how much it's being taken advantage of, but this seems like a prime example of how rigged it looks to be to outsiders.

Has anyone on the forum had any experiences with the judicial system regarding patents, or anything like that?

[AresKrieger]

John Oliver is hit oe miss but this one seems fine to me for reference

 

 

[yt1993]

3 minutes ago, AresKrieger said:

John Oliver is hit oe miss but this one seems fine to me for reference

 

 

Yeah, I've of course seen this clip, I meant my lack of knowledge in a more lack of personal experience kind of way - you can only learn so much from an 11 minute clip..

[Lurick]

Patent trolling is actually a pretty lucrative business because a lot of times businesses would rather settle for a nominal amount instead of going to court and fighting it in a lengthy battle to prove that the patent is bullcrap.

[CTR640]

25million is like 25 cents to Apple.

[Lurick]

8 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

25million is like 25 cents to Apple.

Yah but now they can take this patent and shake down tons of other smaller companies where hundreds of thousands or millions is not "pennies" to them.

[Trik'Stari]

13 hours ago, yt1993 said:

Yeah, I've of course seen this clip, I meant my lack of knowledge in a more lack of personal experience kind of way - you can only learn so much from an 11 minute clip..

Especially when that person has a blatantly unbiased agenda.

 

Admittedly, I do agree with him on some things.

[SImoHayha]

Patent trolls more like lazy motherfuckers with grubby hands.

[comicsansms]

I now want to be a patent troll because I want to be rich by doing nothing, but I also don't want to be an asshole everyone hates.

[Kimmers]

Patents need a reform in the US. I have always viewed patents as a way to protect inventors and innovators from other's laziness. Companies should not be allowed to buy patents that they have no intention of implementing.

[Bleedingyamato]

On July 9, 2016 at 9:56 AM, Lurick said:

Patent trolling is actually a pretty lucrative business because a lot of times businesses would rather settle for a nominal amount instead of going to court and fighting it in a lengthy battle to prove that the patent is bullcrap.

It might not always be trolling.  Companies like Apple or Microsoft could certainly be guilty of stealing ideas from time to time.  Idk one way or the other if this particular case is trolling or legitimate but I just mean in general it's not fair to assume a big company like Apple could never be at fault or that anyone suing them is just looking for a payday.  

 

Honestly I'd love to see Apple and Microsoft along with the tv, Internet, and cell phone providers all get taken down a few pegs and learn some hard lessons about how not to screw over the consumer. 

 

Microsoft likes to make Windows do things people hate, Apple is at least guilty of charging people insane amounts of money for inferior specs in their computers and phones that while nice lack features that much cheaper droid phones have, tv and Internet companies greatly overcharge for inferior service because in most areas there's only a few options and so with near monopolies Internet and tv companies get away with murder basically, and even with several major cell phone companies prices are far too high and the service frequently terrible. 

Edited July 10, 2016 by Bleedingyamato
Fixed spelling mistake.

[laminutederire]

20 hours ago, yt1993 said:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12132806/apple-25m-patent-lawsuit-settlement-network-1-mirror-worlds

 

And it looks like this patent is a gift that keeps on giving:

It's amazing that every once in a while a patent troll is able to take down a company as big as apple.
I'm not extremely familiar with the patent system in America and how much it's being taken advantage of, but this seems like a prime example of how rigged it looks to be to outsiders.

Has anyone on the forum had any experiences with the judicial system regarding patents, or anything like that?

Those guys are tightening the screws since they won't have any rights to do so in 3 years or so (a patent is only usable for 20 years, that's why some people don't patent their invention and try to keep it a secret)

[thekeemo]

20 hours ago, Lurick said:

Patent trolling is actually a pretty lucrative business because a lot of times businesses would rather settle for a nominal amount instead of going to court and fighting it in a lengthy battle to prove that the patent is bullcrap.

Especially because it means small people have to shut down because they cant afford it.

[WereCat]

6 hours ago, Comic_Sans_MS said:

I now want to be a patent troll because I want to be rich by doing nothing, but I also don't want to be an asshole everyone hates.

I am sure that if you had $25M a lot of people would suddenly start hating you but others would also start to like you.

6 hours ago, Comic_Sans_MS said:

 

[comicsansms]

11 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I am sure that if you had $25M a lot of people would suddenly start hating you but others would also start to like you.

I don't think I want that kind of people to start liking me.

[Builder]

On 7/10/2016 at 3:48 AM, Bleedingyamato said:

Microsoft likes to make Windows do things people hate, Apple is at least guilty of charging people insane amounts of money for inferior specs in their computers and phones that while nice lack features that much cheaper droid phones have, tv and Internet companies greatly overcharge for inferior service because in most areas there's only a few options and so with near monopolies Internet and tv companies get away with murder basically, and even with several major cell phone companies prices are far too high and the service frequently terrible. 

haha overcharging for inferior specs? apple's ARM chips are far and away the best in the industry, they had 64-bit two years before everyone else (hello overheating Snapdragon 810) and they still lead benchmarks.

 

as for the chips they put in their intel laptops, I suggest you compare directly the specs of Macs to PCs. you will find that they are very competitively priced for what you get, which isn't even taking into account build quality and the evident superiority of OS X over windows 

 

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-buy-MacBook-Pro-retinas-given-their-relatively-high-price?share=1

 

a few salient points from the top post:

 

Quote

 

Turns out that when you want to buy 250,000 chips, the people who wants to sell you such amount send someone high in their business to deal with you. And they were pretty upfront: there are different chip qualities, even though it's named exactly the same (like the fictitious  1300J). 

 

So, they had batches of this 1300J chip that would have a defect average of 10000 per million, for example, which was usually sold for cheap manufacturers, like the dreaded PC-Chips, or some american manufacturers that decided to go cheap in the last decades (coughlett** coughkard**). They had stuff that would have an order of magnitude less, which usually was bought by the traditional video card makers. And they had stuff another order of magnitude better, which they would sell under their own brand, somewhat more expensive than the previous ones. And they had a batch that was almost defect-free, and way more expensive. That batch was greyed out on their price list.

 

I asked what about this best batch, the most expensive one, as our goal was always to buy the best. The guy just said casually: "oh, those we can't sell you, as apple takes all of them".

 

 

Apple buys chips in such quantities that they are able to buy out the entire stock of the highest-binned product sold by any manufacturer that they want. They do this because they have somewhere around $200bn in cash in the bank and they want to make the best, most reliable product possible. If there are price discrepancies between products made by Apple and other manufacturers when all other recognizable specs are identical (i.e. SSD performance, high quality I/O ports, (thunderbolt, usb 3 etc), color-calibrated high-res displays, processor, graphics, network card, etc, this is why.

That, and this:

Quote

1. Historically, Mac OS offered great value out of the box. You get a professional Office suite (the new ones are not as good as the previous versions, but they are getting better again), whereas MS Office used to cost hundreds of dollars on the shop.
2. Besides the office, you had the Photo editing software, DVD creator, Web page designer, a decent e-mail/calendar/contacts suite and others, right out of the box. Things you would have to buy separately on windows and that would offset the price already. Hell, there's even a scientific grapher included there for free!

New Macs these days come with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I'll be the first to admit that I actually prefer Excel to Numbers and the Mac version of Excel is not great. However on Windows these are an extra cost whereas on Mac you can jump right in and start doing office work. I know they've made some progress on this front with the Universal Office apps but as far as I can tell they aren't really usable out of the box in the same way the free Apple ones are. 

 

Apple has never been about the low-end. If you want a low-end PC, buy a Windows computer. You can also get an amazing Chromebook for not a lot of money too.

[Unhelpful]

2 minutes ago, Builder said:

 

HOLY SHIT YOU'RE BACK!

 

PARTY HARD!

[Bleedingyamato]

1 hour ago, Builder said:

haha overcharging for inferior specs? apple's ARM chips are far and away the best in the industry, they had 64-bit two years before everyone else (hello overheating Snapdragon 810) and they still lead benchmarks.

 

as for the chips they put in their intel laptops, I suggest you compare directly the specs of Macs to PCs. you will find that they are very competitively priced for what you get, which isn't even taking into account build quality and the evident superiority of OS X over windows 

 

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-buy-MacBook-Pro-retinas-given-their-relatively-high-price?share=1

 

a few salient points from the top post:

 

 

Apple buys chips in such quantities that they are able to buy out the entire stock of the highest-binned product sold by any manufacturer that they want. They do this because they have somewhere around $200bn in cash in the bank and they want to make the best, most reliable product possible. If there are price discrepancies between products made by Apple and other manufacturers when all other recognizable specs are identical (i.e. SSD performance, high quality I/O ports, (thunderbolt, usb 3 etc), color-calibrated high-res displays, processor, graphics, network card, etc, this is why.

That, and this:

New Macs these days come with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I'll be the first to admit that I actually prefer Excel to Numbers and the Mac version of Excel is not great. However on Windows these are an extra cost whereas on Mac you can jump right in and start doing office work. I know they've made some progress on this front with the Universal Office apps but as far as I can tell they aren't really usable out of the box in the same way the free Apple ones are. 

 

Apple has never been about the low-end. If you want a low-end PC, buy a Windows computer. You can also get an amazing Chromebook for not a lot of money too.

Ah the Apple fanboy is revealed.  You can get a good quality PC laptop with specs that will put any Mac to shame for almost half as much or better depending on the brand and sales.  Apple computers never have a true sale btw just bs weak student discounts and maybe like $100 at most in any case.  

 

One, note one not the only, example is any of these laptops with mobile CPUs in them: https://www.sagernotebook.com/15-Inch-Gaming-Laptops/

 

Before you try to say the Retina display is so great there are laptops you can get 4K screens on.  Yes Macs have that speedy PCIE SSD but that just adds about $1000 for a mere 1TB if you upgrade since a wimpy 500GB is the default.  Great your overpriced Mac will boot up fast but it has been shown that most day to day uses that the majority of users will be doing do NOT benefit from.  Not to mention that once that PCIE space is filled you're back to a standard speed HDD.  

 

The crap GPU in the current MacBook pros is a joke compared to a Windows laptop of similar cost.  It's near the bottom of even the series of mobile AMD GPUs it's part of and nowhere near the best mobile GPUs currently available from either Nvidia or AMD.  Considering macs are famous for being used for graphic design/video editing, etc. this misstep by Apple is inexcusable. 

 

Then there's the cooling in Mac laptops.  I recently saw a YouTube video by that guy who everyone was worried Apple was going to sue that points out that MacBooks have terrible cooling and run too hot that makes them break sooner and easier than they should.  So higher binned chips is canceled out by an increased chance of failure.  

 

Next we come to the lack of io ports that force Mac users to buy various adapters just to add back ports that should've been included without needing them.  The worst offender is the basic MacBook that only has 1 USB c port that is needed for charging and next to nothing uses USB c yet so this forces the user to, you guessed it, buy a shiny adapter to allow them to plug in anything at all.  Which most sheeple Mac users will probably buy an overpriced adapter from the Apple Store at the suggestion of an employee.  

 

Not not having used Mac OS in years I can't speak to it being good or bad but even if it is good that's pretty much the only thing Apple has in its favor.  

 

I should point out that the insanely high prices for Macs and poor/inferior hardware customization options are likely why Hackintosh is a thing.  People want to use the OS and leave hardware out of the deal.

 

Macs may have fairly decent build quality (except for crap cooling) and some people like the OS but there's a laundry list of drawbacks to buying and using a Mac.  

 

Getting a Windows PC does not mean you're stuck with low quality.  There are plenty of good quality PC laptops and especially if you build your own desktop Apple gets left even farther behind in terms of quality, user customization, and performance.  Heck, Apple and a few third party programs make possible to use Windows on a Mac.  This highlights the fact that not everyone who buys a Mac doesn't still need Windows for some things.