..."they drew first blood."
I'm quite certain that other companies have been litigating for various reasons. But this event must certainly stick out as unique for the ludicrous 'intellectual property' that was being defended, the dodginess of the behaviour and circumstances surrounding members of the jury and the obscene amount of money that was being asked for (and even awarded).
Interestingly, none of the information covered in those (above) links are making much of a splash in the circles that followed this lawsuit so breathlessly.
“The Morning Briefing” is SmartPlanet’s daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we’re reading about patent battles and litigation.
1.) Can crowdsourcing kill the patent troll? A new Stack Exchange site, Ask Patents, aims to put patent trolls out of business by eliminating bad patents in the first place. Will it work?
2.) Apple, Tory, Restoration hardware: Intellectual property. Apple’s billion-dollar trial victory in August was tainted by the jury foreman’s failure to disclose a lawsuit and his personal bankruptcy, Samsung Electronics said in a request to a judge for the verdict to be thrown out.
3.) Via Licensing assembles an LTE supergroup to share standards-essential patents. Dolby spinoff Via Licensing has shone a signal into the night sky and assembled some of the world’s biggest telecoms players to form a patent supergroup. AT&T, NTT DoCoMo and Telefonica are some of the names that’ll pool their standards-essential LTE patents to prevent getting embroiled in litigation over FRAND licensing.
4.) Apple’s Passbook subject of patent infringement lawsuit. Apple’s Passbook, a new feature of the company’s iOS 6 mobile operating system, is the subject of a lawsuit filed last week by software firm Ameranth, Inc.
5.) Augmented Reality: AR patent trolling. To some extent, patent litigation is inevitable in any industry. And it can even be helpful if it ends up ensuring that innovators are rewarded and incentivized to create new ideas rather than cannibalizing the old. But the ongoing patent wars in the mobile phone industry set a troubling precedent for AR.
Image credit: Apple
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