HN Feature that might be helpful: you can click the "web" link underneath the article title that will launch a web search for the article. Clicking through from the search results will normally let you read an article without the paywall.
The "Wait, Google Sent Me!" extension is awesome for this- you just have to click a button in Chrome and it'll reload the page with the appropriate referrers.
Although Google took it out of the Chrome store it's still up on Github[1]. All you have to do is download the zip file, change the extension to "crx", and then install.
Yeah I always assumed it was just a duplicate of the title due to its nondescript appearance. Changing it to 'search' or something similar would be much better.
Yeah "google" may be good since the intent is to get around pay walls. That or some sort of phrase like "search url" or something less awkward that I apparently can't think of.
In Linux distros and many other Unix-like operating systems, any text highlighted anywhere is copied straight to the clipboard the moment it has been highlighted, always. You then paste with a simple click of the middle-mouse button (which nowadays usually means the scrollwheel of your mouse). It's an excellent feature.
Firefox and Chrome, unfortunately, when doing auto-complete in the address bar, highlight the auto-completed part, overwriting your clipboard. This becomes a problem when you copy something and then open a new tab and begin to type out the URL of the site where you intended to use the copied string.
My way of dealing with this problem has been to add shortcuts on the new tab page to the sites where I frequently want to use copied content; archive.is, reddit and HN as well as a few others. That way I can at least navigate to those sites without touching the address bar.
One could of course turn off auto-complete in the browsers but aside from the situation mentioned above, auto-complete is such a useful feature.
I wish the browsers could find another way of implementing the auto-complete, not overwriting clipboard, but still retaining easy removal of the auto-completed part of the string.
Also, while we're on the subject of browsers and text highlight, I wish the drag-and-drop-ability of links from the webpage could be turned off by the user. Sometimes I want to start highlighting in the middle of a hyperlinked text. I never want to drag the link anywhere. I still like being able to drop files into the browser, though -- either to open them in the browser or to drop them onto an upload area of a page.
This model R380 had a plastic flip in front of the touch screen. With the flip closed, it looked like an average chunky Ericsson phone (the keys on the flip pressed the touchscreen). With the flip open, it became essentially a widescreen PDA with mobile data access (although browsing the Internet on GSM data sure wasn't fast or cheap).
The successor model P800 had a color screen and was more pocketable. It was so far ahead of its time that "Steve Jobs was heard raving about it" [1].
Patents aside (I'm not qualified to comment), it's not quite so far-fetched that Apple's iPhone project does actually have a spiritual debt to Ericsson.
Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who came before. Furthermore if you have a good idea the odds are extremely high that someone else has had the same idea. "Inventions" are almost never worth the name. Things generally follow a natural progression (at least in technology):
1. Some wild-eyed visionaries (sometimes from academia) come up with crazy visions of what computing might be like in the future. This vision is usually highly impractical, requiring vastly more compute power or vastly cheaper components than exist. Further the software is the quality you'd expect from academic professors (garbage) and barely works for a few minor demos. This is the pre-prototype phase.
2. Someone brings a more realistic version to market. Sometimes the first to market fails badly because they arrive too soon. The product is too limited or the market isn't ready yet.
3. Finally someone brings a version of the invention to market that is a sellable product.
What matters is execution.
Ericsson had a touch screen phone? So what. In high-school in the late 90s I had a PocketPC predating the Ericsson phone; it was fucking obvious back then that they'd add a cellular radio to it as soon as it became practical (I know, I carried a Windows Mobile phone for a while). They were all garbage. They took no risks. They didn't have the animation or feedback systems that made iOS so pleasant to use. None of them even pretended to offer a real web browser - it was WAP if anything. Everything before the iPhone was qualitatively and quantitatively inferior, even if it happened to have a janky plastic touch screen. They sure as hell weren't running slimmed down desktop operating systems with fully-featured frameworks. They ran whatever software your carrier deigned to offer at vastly inflated prices.
There's a good reason the engineers at Blackberry thought the iPhone was a faked demo. There's a good reason Apple waltz in and completely upended and transformed the cellular industry.
Of course this all ignores that Apple had the Newton because it doesn't matter who had something first. It matters who can productize that thing and sell it to customers for money.
>> They didn't have the animation or feedback systems that made iOS so pleasant to use.
> Yay, glitter is the only thing that matters!
That's not what that statement says at all. Modes of interaction need refining. Apple have been doing it for a while. When it was released, it was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
>> None of them even pretended to offer a real web browser - it was WAP if anything.
>Worked fine from what I remember.
Confirmation bias in full right there. WAP was/is terrible.
>> Everything before the iPhone was qualitatively and quantitatively inferior, even if it happened to have a janky plastic touch screen.
>At least it wasn't the capacitive junk that all of them are now.
You are probably the only individual alive that is going to argue for resistive, probably because Apple...
>> They sure as hell weren't running slimmed down desktop operating systems with fully-featured frameworks.
>iOS is definitely not a desktop OS. Where are the files? Multi-user support? Terminal?
So the early versions of Windows/Mac OS/Amiga etc weren't desktop OS's? Now you are being ridiculous.
>> They ran whatever software your carrier deigned to offer at vastly inflated prices.
>As opposed to whatever software Apple deigns to offer at vastly inflated prices?
Really? Arguably, Apple sell software at a low price to attract users to it's hardware!
>>> Everything before the iPhone was qualitatively and quantitatively inferior, even if it happened to have a janky plastic touch screen.
>>At least it wasn't the capacitive junk that all of them are now.
>You are probably the only individual alive that is going to argue for resistive, probably because Apple...
Have you ever used a resistive screen? But of course, who would ever use a stylus to hit ridiculously small targets without having to zoom in...
>>> They sure as hell weren't running slimmed down desktop operating systems with fully-featured frameworks.
>>iOS is definitely not a desktop OS. Where are the files? Multi-user support? Terminal?
>So the early versions of Windows/Mac OS/Amiga etc weren't desktop OS's? Now you are being ridiculous.
Why does it matter that it's based on something that's ran on a desktop machine, if all the features that define modern desktop OSes are hidden/removed? Other than that it's just a form factor and a meaningless label.
>>> They ran whatever software your carrier deigned to offer at vastly inflated prices.
>>As opposed to whatever software Apple deigns to offer at vastly inflated prices?
>Really? Arguably, Apple sell software at a low price to attract users to it's hardware!
They sell an arbitrary pick of software at a ridiculous markup. But of course, that's great when Apple does it, and terrible when anyone else does!
Yes I've owned Newtons, Palm Pilots/Handsprings, Treos and XDA/SPVs all at launch. All had resistive screens, all were universally awful. The stupid styluses were rubbish.
You are confusing what is merely a paradigm (in this case WIMP) with what you think is a modern OS. Tell me, why do I need file system access? Do I really need to manually file away thing in this day and age? Why can I see MP3 files when I'm trying to open JPGs? A phone is a personal device, why does it need multi-user access? Why does it need terminal access, a relic of the pre GUI era? Any counter argument that you come up with I can pretty much guarantee will be an edge case.
Are you referring to the 30%? Go to any other retailer and see if you get that deal. Approval is arbitrary? Perhaps, but it does keep the malware count down. You do know that Google do it to, right? So do Microsoft. Other than that, running your own content delivery and payment system isn't cheap, and neither is managing it, but hey, you keep clutching at those straw men...
> Yes I've owned Newtons, Palm Pilots/Handsprings, Treos and XDA/SPVs all at launch. All had resistive screens, all were universally awful. The stupid styluses were rubbish.
I haven't tried any of those in particular, but they're all from pretty far before The Capaciting.
> You are confusing what is merely a paradigm (in this case WIMP) with what you think is a modern OS.
A modern desktop OS, which I'd define as following WIMP. If you have another definition then I'd be very interested. iOS (and Android!) might be remotely based on desktop OSes, but with all the defining features stripped out it's not really a useful or applicable label anymore.
> Tell me, why do I need file system access? Do I really need to manually file away thing in this day and age? Why can I see MP3 files when I'm trying to open JPGs?
Because files are a very useful abstraction if you use more than one application, or for moving between them. I don't want to use Okular in particular, I'm just trying to read this document. I should be able to take a piece of data, and the OS should find something that can open it.
> A phone is a personal device, why does it need multi-user access?
It was just an example of something that could be used to differentiate it from something that wasn't "based on a desktop OS". I'm still very curious about where you got that from in the first place, btw.
> Why does it need terminal access, a relic of the pre GUI era? Any counter argument that you come up with I can pretty much guarantee will be an edge case.
Because the terminal programs already exist, and nobody has bothered to make a GUI equivalent. For example, I would use my old N900 to repartition SD cards when needed, just like I could on my desktop machine. Niche? Sure, but it was useful to have the escape hatch when needed.
> Are you referring to the 30%? Go to any other retailer and see if you get that deal.
Why should I have to go through a retailer at all?
> Approval is arbitrary? Perhaps, but it does keep the malware count down. You do know that Google do it to, right? So do Microsoft. Other than that, running your own content delivery and payment system isn't cheap, and neither is managing it, but hey, you keep clutching at those straw men...
As opposed to when service providers ran it? Besides, just because all of them do it, that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
The last resistive screen I tries was in 2011 and it was still vastly inferior to capacitive. Please display art to the contrary.
Your definition of a modern desktop OS is just that, your definition. iOS and Android weren't designed to be desktop OS's. The were designed specifically for touch. A modern interface is going to be somewhere in between and, IMHO, closer to Android/iOS.
You still haven't explained why an exposed filesystem is necessary. Apps are aware of what files they can or cannot open and should display only those. Layers of nested directories are completely unnecessary and from experience supporting end users, confusing.
For a personal, single user device, multi user support isn't particularly useful. I suppose a "guest" mode might be. The question stems from this comment
>iOS is definitely not a desktop OS. Where are the files? _Multi-user support?_ Terminal?
As I said, terminals are an edge case and are ill-suited to the mobile form factor.
You don't have to go through a retailer - the choice here is to not develop for Apple. Also, consider the costs of what Apple/Google provide and ask whether it offers value to you, a consideration that arguments like this rarely (if ever) take into account. FYI, bricks and mortar vendors and those prior to the App Store we asking for between 70% and 90%.
There was also the Handspring Visor Phone (2000) and the Qualcomm PDQ (1999). And then there where a bunch of phones from Nokia, the Windows CE phones, etc. Apple wasn't the first, we all know that. I'd say that the iPhone has as much a spiritual debt to the Newton as it does to the touchscreen phones that came before it.
Don't forget the IBM simon (1994), and the Nokia 9000 (~1997-ish). The 9000 didn't have a touchscreen, but it could do a lot! Just have a look at the manual:
Many people forget the newton. And so it's important to remember that Apple has been dabbling in this area for a long time. Adding phone and Internet capabilities to these devices (and remember that music also drove this change) wasn't a huge step.
And both have spiritual debt to the telephone amongst all other knowledge/art before it. I don't know much about the details of this case but I don't like what I do know.
The entire patent system has become so absurd. You know what protects your profits? Delivering actual value to customers. It's something you can't patent, and you can't simply corner the market on. You have to fight for it every day and anybody can take those customers from you without recourse.
Interesting quote in the article: "“We invest about 30 billion kronor ($3.51 billion) a year in research and development and license our patents to the whole industry. We expect fair returns to be able to continue to invest,” Mr. Alfalahi said."
This is how you do parallel technology development these days. A large company invests billions in research and patents their ideas, if you want to use their ideas in your product you license their patents already knowing that the technology will work, saving you billions.
Without patents there is no way for Ericcson to recover their investment in research, so they just don't do it, so you never get 4GLTE cellular signals you're stuck in some form of Analog. Or you get no roaming at all because everyone has their own proprietary radio infrastructure.
I agree that there is a lot wrong with the patent system, I also recognize that there is tremendous value in being able to fund research in this way.
What you describe is what the patent system was created for. It's pretty easy to see the benefits in encouraging the advancement of costly technology.
On the other hand, it's software and business process "patents" that I think are harder to defend. Those are better protected IMO through Copyright as opposed to patents. OpenSource licenses (Apache and GPL, Mozilla, Eclipse) have particular provisions set aside to grant licenses to patents based on usage (BSD and MIT make no claims on patents), but Copyright is maintained. Trolls don't "use" anything, so the OpenSource license doesn't protect you from them (maybe indirectly GPLv3).
I think it would better the industry if we properly talk about which types of patents we have issues with.
What I don't understand with software patent and business process is that we have basically given up the "non-obvious to people of the trade" requirement.
You only need to see once, the "slide left to right to unlock" feature to be able to reproduce it in your platform without having to look at any piece of code. The idea is not obvious, but the implementation very much is and that's what patent are supposed to protect, implementations. (I'm picking on Apple there, but that's just an example on top of my head, software patent are all like that, except exceptional algorithms that are back by math behind and are therefore ironically non patentable )
It is like the light bulb patent. If just seeing a light bulb would have allowed any electrical engineer to make one over the we in his garage, I don't think it would have been patentable.
"Not obvious" means "not obvious on the day before the patent was filed". The point of the patent is to explain it to the point that it is that one ordinarily skilled can now implement the idea.
And copyright protects implementations. Patents protect ideas.
Profit is not co-extensive with value created. Profit is a function of value created but also your ability to control and monetize the delivery of value to customers. Software is a great example. Creating a shrink-wrapped software product creates a lot of value, but it's almost impossible to monetize shrink-wrapped software these days. That's why everything is moving to SaaS--it's much easier to monetize.
The way the consumer electronics market is currently structured, what drives your ability to monetize created value is strong, vertically-integrated manufacturing capability. That's what Apple's and Samsung's profits are built on. Creating technology delivers value, but you can only monetize it to the extent you can build and deliver Chinese-made products into the hands of consumers at high efficiency.
A great example of this is Apple buying P.A. Semi. A7-A9 have created tremendous value for consumers. But Apple purchased P.A. Semi for a pittance. The value-creation potential in P.A. Semi was not monetizable without access to Apple's incredible manufacturing muscle.
Under capitalism, faced with competition, people find the easiest and cheapest ways to protect profit. Delivering actual value is neither easy, nor cheap.
That could mean a few things. On the assumption that you mean people will simply copy existing products rather than making their own: It's true enough on the surface, and some degree of protection is warranted, but at the same time everything contains copying of something before it, either in whole or in part, and to allow large sections to be locked down effectively in perpetuity (all of us will be dead by the time patents rolling in today expire) is to stifle innovation in another direction. Both too great and too little protection are harmful.
> people find the easiest and cheapest ways to protect profit. Delivering actual value is neither easy, nor cheap.
Isn't using patents and other anticompetitive protections easier and cheaper than delivering value? Sounds like you are agreeing that the patent system is bad.
Delivering value does not immediately follow filing a patent. It's great that you came up with something novel (chances are it's not, you just beat everyone else to the patent office), but it's not worth anything until you actually figure out how to get someone to pay you money for it. That's the hard part, and that's where the value comes from.
Without patent system, what would stop someone from just cloning the IPhone and coming out with a lower cost version which doesn't factor in all the r&d that apple put into the development of the phone?
Because it's considerably harder to do than you're making it out to be. It's not just the iPhone hardware that makes it valuable to customers, it's the support infrastructure Apple has in place, the software they write for it, the ecosystem of other products, etc. And let's be honest here - companies basically are cloning the iPhone for all intents and purposes and Apple basically clones other companies' successful products as well. They sue the crap out of each other as a cost of doing business and a bunch of lawyers buy new BMWs and lake homes and we all pay a few bucks more for our electronics. It's absurd.
Yes, which is why Apple has such a market share lead over Android.
Being the "first mover" is more often than not a disadvantage, and being one entails taking huge risks. ("Copycats" by Oded Shenkar is supposed to be a good book about this. Google "first mover fast follower" and "copycat innovation" to find additional relevant references. )
Is there another source than wsj? Not because of the paywall, but because I can't find the 0.5% number in here:
Ericsson said that under the agreement it will be paid an undisclosed amount by Apple, along with ongoing royalties over seven years.
...
Details of the contract are confidential
...
Including the new settlement and business with other licensees, Ericsson estimates its revenue from intellectual property rights will be [around]$1.53 billion
What was the estimation of revenue before the settlement? It could have been $1.52 billion or $1 million.
EDIT:
From the Verge article[1]: but an estimate by investment bank ABG Sundal Collier pointed out by Reuters has Apple paying out 0.5 percent of its iPad and iPhone revenue.
"In January, Apple, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., filed a lawsuit in a U.S. district court seeking a ruling that it wasn’t infringing on seven of Ericsson’s patents."
For those curious, I believe that these are the 7 patents in question:
1. 6445917 - Mobile station measurements with event-based reporting [1]
2. 6985474 - Random access in a mobile telecommunications system [2]
3. 7660417 - Enhanced security design for cryptography in mobile communication systems [3]
4. 8023990 - Uplink scheduling in a cellular system [4]
5. 8036150 - Method and a device for improved status reports [5]
6. 8169992 - Uplink scrambling during random access [6]
7. 8214710 - Methods and apparatus for processing error control messages in a wireless communication system [7]
This isn't patent trolling. Apple and Ericsson had a license agreement and when it ended they couldn't agree on a new price and went to court about it. They've now reached a price they both agree to in this settlement.
Yes, it is for one specific handshake, similar to many others. At a quick glance, the claims don't seem to cover any earthshaking innovation, but the introduction claims this makes it resistant to weaknesses in the underlying crypto algorithms that have been shown to be broken.
Schadenfreude may amuse, but what we have here is not even a casino. It is a massive negative-sum (to the non-lawyer participants) game where winning usually turns on procedural points having nothing relevant to do with the actual conflict. (If you disagree, then kindly explain the Eastern District Court of Texas.)
The result is this huge coercion machine that pretty much randomly chews up small companies and rewards attorneys and (somewhat randomly) large ones.
> It is a massive negative-sum (to the non-lawyer participants)
To be fair, in this case Ericsson is a practicing entity and they probably have a salaried legal staff, so your specific criticisms don't really apply here.
More just general patent criticisms: ease of acquisition, non-specificity, valuation on market and legal leverage instead of marginal value, (if any of the above patents are software patents) software patents in general, etc
> Ericsson is a practicing entity and they probably have a salaried legal staff
I didn't say anything about NPEs.
Ericsson may have a stable of in-house patent litigators; it is one enterprise where that probably makes economic sense (I know Google has their own IP litigators). But most patent litigation that makes it to trial is handled by specialist firms.
It is trolling. Nobody would pay a license for these crap patents for the technology. They have to pay a license for this trivial obvious garbage because the USPTO doesn't know better.
So utterly absurd that those things can be patented.
All I need to do is drop tens of thousands of dollars patenting anything and everything to do with anything up and coming - drones and delivery, autonomous cars, autonomous taxis, space stuff, solar stuff, energy storage and selling etc. etc.
"Method to hail autonomous taxi"
"Method to identify and optimize autonomous taxi routes"
> So utterly absurd that those things can be patented
Your comment was posted just 30 minutes after the comment listing the patents, so am I correct in guessing that you are judging based on the titles, or perhaps the titles plus the abstracts?
If so, then you very likely don't have anywhere near enough information to figure out whether they are absurd.
A patent title just tells you the very general area that the patent is in. If patents were books, the title would just be telling you what section of the library it goes in.
Continuing the book analogy, the abstract is like the description on the back of the book. It will give you a better idea of what area the patent is in, but still doesn't tell you what is actually patented.
You have to read and understand the claims to know what the patent is actually covering. To understand the claims you must read the specification, because the claims are interpreted in light of the specification. In particular, the specification can narrow the meaning of the claims.
If you really want to be thorough, you also should get the "file wrapper" for the patent. That's the collection of documents associated with the application. In particular, the file wrapper includes copies of any correspondence between the examiner and the applicant. In such correspondence the applicant may say things that narrow some of the claims.
What I don't like about many of these patents though, independent of whether they are novel or not, is they're part of the 3GPP specs.
The specs for creating a 2G/3G/4G cellular network are all open specs and gratis, but man parts are covered by patents - meaning if you want to create a device that's part of such a network, including a mobile phone - there's a forest of patents in your way - something I don't agree with and that imo. should not be part of open specs.
It's frustrating that sales of a product can somehow be up for grabs over disputes in a mere component of that product.
No matter how good your idea or, ahem, sorry, "intellectual property" is, if you don't know HOW to turn it into a multi-billion dollar product or you don't have the means to do so, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money when somebody else becomes successful? If anything, years of inaction on your "idea" proves that the idea has NOT been worth all that much to you.
Meanwhile, there could be literally thousands of unique components in an iPad, the products of tens of thousands of brilliant minds, many of whom get virtually nothing. Heck, I give more credit to the tertiary industries such as the people delivering the iPhone packages to my door, than I do to any owner of a patent for a product that they didn't build.
I mean, this is what they agree to in order to keep making the product. This was a settlement and is what apple agreed to instead of having to discontinue the property theft and pay damages. consider this intellectual property in the way you would consider copyright, if i gave out an album but had stolen a song on it I could license the song and give the original artist a cut off the top or else i could be sued and give up my ability to keep distributing the album. It's not that this is up for grabs it's that this is what they are willing to give up to continue using ericsson's property and ameliorate previous damages.
If you don't know HOW to build a multi-billion dollar product without stealing prior work that isn't yours, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money by preventing somebody else from getting paid for what they did?
Furthermore, a current lack of sufficient resources to pursue an idea does not mean that you never intend to do anything with it. The poster seems to think that the arbitrary amount of "a few years" discredits any prior work, as if it doesn't take people much longer periods of time to get their life in order and bring their life's work and ideas to fruition.
One big reason is because the whole world runs on prior work. We have cities full of things built before we were born. We are only able to do what we do now because of massive amounts of work by millions of people who probably did not foresee what all their efforts would lead to. Should we be forever obliged to funnel millions of dollars to the estates of the dead because they contributed (like so many others) to the success of today's products?
The current system unreasonably rewards arbitrary subsets of the total group of people responsible for making useful things. It also manages to include essentially middlemen in the rewarded set.
Something of a straw man when speaking of paying off people who are long dead, versus people are were actively trying to get their products to market at the same time as you.
You also assume that there is an alternative to having arbitrary subsets. We're dealing with the law, which is almost by definition an imperfect compromise that we put up with simply because it's better than the alternative.
Kind of like how some people are arbitrarily thrown in jail, under the same legal system. Without rambling, I feel like you are just assuming an impossible and nonexistent counterfactual.
Furthermore, in this case, we aren't talking about paying off the guy who set up the sewer system 100 years ago, we're talking about paying off the people who had a patent 7 years before you, and you decided to say "screw them" and use it anyways. As if Apple didn't know it was violating those patents? Come on. Why should companies be allowed to operate outside of the system we, as a society, set up?
>If you don't know how to build a multi-billion dollar product without stealing prior work that isn't yours, WHY should you be able to sledgehammer your way into lots of money by preventing somebody else from getting paid for what they did?
The assumption being, of course, that you actually stole prior work instead of coming up with the same idea. From what I can tell, most of the time these patents cover obvious stuff.
A touch screen on a phone? Who would have thought of that? Everybody, actually. Everybody.
It's been a long time since I saw a patent that wasn't a description of the most obvious way to do something. Where I work the company is trying to patent everything (mostly, I would hope for defensive reasons). I have patents in my name.
And they're all written as broadly as the USPTO will accept, which is pretty damn broadly. The language is subtle, but in most cases the implications of the language are not subtle.
Do you read the claims and the arguments made to differentiate over any prior art the examiner finds? Trying to guess at the "implications" of the language is a futile endeavor unless you have a ton of context, because a ton of things need to be considered to understand the scope of a claim. In patent lawsuits, in fact, a Markman hearing is one of the most critical phases, as this is where it gets determined what terms in the claims actually mean, and hence what claims actually cover.
The "tech industry" is incredibly diverse to make such a broad generalization. I know for a fact that many players in, say, the telecommunications, chip design and semiconductor industries regularly read their competitors' patents. This helps them not only keep pace with the state of the art, it also helps gather competitive intelligence and guess at their competitors' future directions.
In software, sure, few people read patents. Primarily I'd say it's because a) 99.9% of software development is producing infinite variations of simple CRUD apps, not solving hard problems that require looking up any sort of references, and b) NIH is a like a congenital defect in developers.
No, don't you get it? They clearly weren't giants if they couldn't do everything themselves, so it's okay if we don't do everything ourselves, not pay them, and make more money.
> Heck, I give more credit to the tertiary industries such as the people delivering the iPhone packages to my door, than I do to any owner of a patent for a product that they didn't build.
The iPhone would be shit if it wasn't for the advanced radio it uses that is based off of Ericsson's technology. There are lots of patents in the agreement and some may seem dodgy, but you can't deny that Ericsson had a huge hand in developing all the radio stuff that we just take for granted. Apple isn't part of the 3GPP and had nothing to do with inventing any part of 2G/3G/4G/LTE.
Even Apple doesn't deny this, they just wanted a different royalty rate after their previous agreement with Ericsson expired.
A "component" needed to make a product is your salary and skills. Should you not get paid a salary for your effort and know-how? I mean, it's not like you are building "the whole product," you are just building some feature.
> I mean, it's not like you are building "the whole product," you are just building some feature.
If slavery was still legal, you'd better fucking believe that the corporation that owned you would be suing other corporations over getting a percent of the revenue for some work you did.
But alas, you are just a person, and as such you don't get to write laws and international trade agreements, so your contributions to a product aren't litigated over.
Assume that to use a patent you pay a licensing fee. Assume that the licensing fee is a percentage of the selling price for the product (because only a fool is paid a percentage of profit.) Assume that someone does not license your patent, and uses it anyway. Why shouldn't the penalty be based on the licensing fee that was avoided? Is 0.5% really that outside the range of valid licensing fees?
As it comes up for every WSJ article, scroll to the top of this page and click the "web" link. It's there to allow you to bypass the paywall for sources which allow Google search traffic.
> This agreement ends investigations before the U.S. International Trade Commission, lawsuits pending in the U.S. courts for the Eastern District of Texas ...
Considering Ericsson revenue/profit was on the order of 30/1.3 billion USD in 2014, and the iPhone only revenue will be somewhere between 100 and 150 billion for 2015 only and going up, this is great news for Ericsson.
Given that there was a license agreement on the same technology earlier, I think it is a reasonable guess that about a third of Ericsson's profits came from Apple in 2014.
That's not a very useful way to look at it. (1) If Ericsson overall costs were just 4% bigger, you would be saying: "10000% of Ericsson profits came from Apple", (2) R&D that led to those patents likely had staggering costs, which may or may not have been fully amortized. It's not just the engineer salaries of those who filed the patents either, likely the whole company structure, buildings and all, were instrumental in getting those technologies developed. So while the cashflow is mostly free, it is not pure profit.
Every company can negotiate the terms themselves, unlike H,.264 where there is a patent pool with MPEG, can a clear set prices.
So what is there to prevent company x paying for 1% of of the whole sale price, while another company only paying 0.1%?
Some speculated Apple is now paying a much smaller %. Which is fine by me because they are like the ONLY player on the market selling premium smartphone. And the total amount will likely still be much larger then other players.
I thought the system using % is kind of unfair, Anyone knows why the telecom industry is doing such practice?
I'm not sure what you're using to decide apple is the only one making 'primium' devices but everyone in my family is using a $700+ non-apple phone. So it can't be price.
The patent system would be a lot better if it didn't protect "obvious" technologies (which in general is pretty much all of the useful technology).
One of the largest problems with the patent system is large corporations try to position themselves as the go-between on some obvious and useful technology. It's not about protecting real innovation to them, it's about stifling competition.
None of the major corporations (technology or otherwise) are innocent here as far as I can tell.
I wonder how much Ericsson is paying Apple for _their_ portfolio, though. These patent deals usually imply reciprocity, including licensing fee reciprocity.
I'd guess not much, unless Apple has a bunch of cell-tower patents lying around. Ericsson divested from the handset business after pulling out of the SonyEricsson joint venture.
Apple isn't stupid... the only way to protect yourself from the patent minefield in cellular/mobile is to make sure you are involved deeply in the standards process and creating your own cellular radios, etc. Then you too can have a huge portfolio of patents to make sure none of the other large players can hassle you.
I hope you're also assuming Ericsson isn't stupid either. Ericsson have several (compounding) advantages: since it's their core-competence, they have more people working on RF tech, they also have been in the game for longer[1] which allowed them to get the low hanging fruits and time to get their tech into more standards. I'd guess Ericson has more cellular patents by at least an order of magnitude; likely more.
1. Ericsson has been in the telecoms business since 1876
Patents are usually pretty broad, so they may have things that cover cell tower stuff as well. And since pricing is more or less arbitrary, they could eke out some cash for the more fundamental ones.
Ericsson has a huge patent portfolio, several times larger than Apple's. The whole mobile phone revolution of the last 20 years is based on their work.
Also worth noting is the effect of recent sales volume, which tends to hurt the company with more revenue, i.e., Apple, in these negotiations. E.g., my 1,000 patents and 10 million in product sales leaves me less exposed in a patent fight than your 5,000 patents and 10 billion in product sales revenue, so the bigger company often pays the smaller company in that scenario.
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> Mr. Alfalahi described the agreement with Apple as “quite broad” and covering a number of patents that are necessary for 2G, 3G and 4G technologies to work, such as the LTE technology that enables fast video downloads on smartphones.
It was basically a licensing agreement that went poorly and delved into IP lawsuits. It wasn't about Apple copying anyone.
Gross. Standards should be open. One if the most expensive pieces of a mobile phone is the wireless chipset. That shouldn't cost more than the cpu/gpu. We live in a silly world.
Didn't say it should be most expensive. But that I'd expect it to be more expensive than wifi/cellular chips. My expectation may be wrong but that's what it is.
From the iphone5s it was $19 for the A7 but $32 for the wireless section. It may not be as bad anymore. But for quite a few releases the wireless parts seemed unnecessarily expensive.
The estimated price of the high performance chipset and the licensing costs of the IP are different things. Either way it's a small price to pay for international standards that just work. The iPhone would be pretty worthless if it only worked with wireless IP invented by Apple.
Patents affect both the digital and analog parts, but analog hardware is tricky to develop. I don't find it odd at all that the radio parts of a smartphone costs more than the cpu/gpu SoC.
Why is it gross that one of the most prolific inventors of wireless networking has a lot of patents about wireless networking. This isn't an Intellectual Ventures scam, Ericsson invents Real Stuff and sells lots of Real Equipment that use its standards. It's great that the license them too, it would be a shame if our phones didn't all work on the same networks.
37,000 is a bit more than lots of patents. Nikola Tesla had around 300, presumably all his own inventions, and Thomas Edison had just over 1000 (US) from his own work and his employee's work. Those set an upper limit on what geniuses can produce in a lifetime for pre-IT Industry patents. (eg: before patents got out of hand.)
Does Ericsson employ the equivalent of 1000 Teslas? That seems unlikely, so I'm guessing many of their patents are relatively trivial or vaguely generic. Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to produce so many of them.
On a practical note, how can Ericsson make use of a patent library that large? I don't mean licensing, I mean how do their engineers make use of the existing patents to create new inventions and products? It must be as bad as software developers trying to use a huge standard library (like .NET) which I guess I find surprising.
Well, for a 139 years old company, with today some 118k employees, working on products with technology as their primary added value (as opposed to Apple which can be expected to spend a lot of its energy on design, user design and industrial design etc etc while not really inventing that much new foundational technology, in comparison) ...
Ericsson has well over 100,000 employees, has been around for 139 years and has acquired many other firms and their patents. 37,000 patents doesn't sound excessive.
Machines are a lot more complicated these days and I'm sure if Tesla and Edison were around these days they would file for a lot more patents too.
The expectation at HN is that anything that's standardized is a cheap commodity. Normally that's sensible as standards standardize already existing methods of solving a common problem. However, this case is different as the standard is also the development. I don't know the details, but Ericsson is widely regarded as the technology leader in telecommunications. I'd guess that Ericsson has put a lot of work into all the mobile networking technologies that are standardized and that they expect to get paid for that work.
