Awesome? Patents wars are the "mutually assured destruction" of our time. Companies get cozy with each other, beg borrow and steal to get a product to market and then turn on each other for their slice of the pie once a product does well. It's a fat lot of horse hooey. All of it.
And the people who side with Apple, claiming they were hard done by? Apple is playing the game like everyone else, willfully infringing and then playing legal brinkmanship to negotiate a good deal to keep most of the money they've already made. Everybody is suing everybody right now. Big corporations make more money. Horray for them.
Steve's opinions on design are a red herring, Google is just trying to preserve their market share, and we as consumers never see a benefit from this back and forth. Less Androids on the market doesn't make the iPhone better, more Androids doesn't make it worse...
Man, I haven't read such hype, since the Dark Knight Rises movie hype. Someone is obviously excited about a Google vs Apple lawsuit.
If you ask me, Google's just looking at making money off of the Motorola investment. While it's true that Motorola has a lawsuit against Apple, Google and Motorola are also being investigated for FRAND patent abuse FTC investigating Google, Motorola over FRAND patent abuse
So in other words they've been trying to over-charge clients for patent licensing. Apple may use that against them.
Like cap10subtext said, everbody's playing the game! The Patent Lawsuit Game.
Apple products using the patent including the iPhone and iPad could be banned from U.S. shores.
This is going to go over really well with the US consumers.
Reading the background information, I think Google actually went to far this time.
The other issue is, and has been for years, that US patents are being issued for totally trivial things that shouldn't be patenable in the first place.
An invention needed to be non-obvious to those knowledgable and trained and working in the field - there is really no specific detail mentione in any of the articles, but what the heck could possibly be patenable about e-mail notification for instance???/
This is just driving up prices for consumers - all these lawyers need to get paid somehow and in the end it comes out of your and my pocket.
Most of these lawyers are in-house and already paid, at least in Apple's case. In Motorola's case, I think Google is paying the lawyers. I read the lawyers in the Motorola/Google case are the same as the Samsung lawyers. Seems a bit suspicious.
Again, we'll have to see the results of the itc investigation. It could be that Apple is not at fault here, it could be Apple will have to change something in their products, or a licensing deal will be worked out. Note that the investigation could take a year.
The other thing that may help Apple, is that they worked closely in the past with Motorola in the days of the PowerPC and 68K processors. There may be deals that they worked out with Motorola that covers them, or maybe not.
In the end, though, there likely won't be any affect on the consumer, unless there is some drastic change.
The lawyers certainly don't cost consumers anything as Apple, Google, Motorola, Samsung, Microsoft, are always dealing with lawsuits - patent lawsuits, lawsuits by individuals or multiple people, lawsuits by other companies, etc.
Linear Mode
