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Ericsson, Apple Settle Patent Dispute
- Hermel 11y agoIt would be interesting to know how much Apple knowingly copied and how much is just coincidence.
- jonknee 11y ago> 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.
- iDemonix 11y agoNon-paywall source?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- temuze 11y agoCopy and paste this bookmarlet into your toolbar: javascript:location.href='https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=' https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=' + encodeURIComponent(location.href) + '&btnI=I' Basically, it allows you to go to a site as if you came from Google. This avoids most paywalls.
- zinghaboi 11y agoFull unrestricted WSJ article: https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fericsson-apple-settle-patent-dispute-1450700464&btnI=I https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
- benmarks 11y agoAnd here's a non-paywall link! http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2015/12/21/ericsson-signs-patent-deal-with-apple/ http://www.foxbusiness.com/industries/2015/12/21/ericsson-si...
- vmarsy 11y agoIs 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. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10633084/apple-ericsson-patent-deal-iphone-ipad-revenue http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/21/10633084/apple-ericsson-p...
- biot 11y agoAs 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.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoGross. 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.
- jonknee 11y agoWhy should the CPU/GPU be the most expensive component?
- forrestthewoods 11y agoDidn'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. https://technology.ihs.com/451425/groundbreaking-iphone-5s-carries-199-bom-and-manufacturing-cost-ihs-teardown-reveals https://technology.ihs.com/451425/groundbreaking-iphone-5s-c...
- jonknee 11y agoThe 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.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoUpdate: I still think standards should be open.
- alkonaut 11y agoPatents 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.
- marknutter 11y agoTo get around the paywall just paste the link into google search and click the link to the article from there.
- erichurkman 11y agoIf you're logged in, just click the 'web' link under the headline on the comments page.
- joblessjunkie 11y agoIt would be nice if this link also appeared when you are not logged in.
- shmerl 11y agoWill it teach Apple to avoid patent trolling themselves, or they'll never learn?
- jonknee 11y agoWhat? Apple and Ericsson were having a disagreement over licensing fees. There was no trolling.
- shmerl 11y agoWas it a hardware patent? All software patents aggression is basically patent trolling.
- loceng 11y agoAlternatively they could just invest more into patents and then fight heavily against everyone else and earn more than 0.5%.
- FlyingLawnmower 11y agoHN 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.
- pcl 11y agoNice... I've always assumed that that's just the title link, in a different form. Feature suggestion: change the text to 'search' instead of 'web'.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoYeah 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.
- lvs 11y ago"google" might be more specific, since "search" can imply searching locally on HN.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoBut what if they move to bing!? :) 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.
- Aloha 11y agowow, I just noticed that, shows how carefully I've been paying attention!
- rory096 11y agoIt was only added in September[1], if that makes you feel any better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645
- marknutter 11y agoThe 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.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoUnder capitalism, faced with competition, people find the easiest and cheapest ways to protect profit. Delivering actual value is neither easy, nor cheap.
- jabgrabdthrow 11y ago> 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vehementi 11y agoParent's saying that absent the necessary-evil patent system, people will copy other people's stuff rather than innovating, because it's easier.
- 6d0debc071 11y agoThat 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.
- choward 11y ago> This agreement ends investigations before the U.S. International Trade Commission, lawsuits pending in the U.S. courts for the Eastern District of Texas ... Eastern District of Texas? Shocking!
- rdancer 11y agoConsidering 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.
- gjm11 11y agoJust to be clear: it's Apple's iPhone revenue that's on the order of $100-150B for 2015. So Ericsson would be getting something like $500M or so.
- Someone 11y agoGiven 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.
- rdancer 11y agoThat'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.
- Arjuna 11y ago"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] [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6445917B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6445917B1/en [2] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6985474B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US6985474B2/en [3] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7660417B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7660417B2/en [4] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8023990B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8023990B2/en [5] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8036150B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8036150B2/en [6] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8169992B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8169992B2/en [7] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8214710B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8214710B2/en
- gnarbarian 11y agoI'm not a big fan of patent trolling but I do like to see apple get a taste of their own medicine after what happened with samsung.
- IBM 11y agoThis 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.
- gnarbarian 11y agoI think some of these patents are pretty bogus. Take this patent for example: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7660417B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7660417B2/en Is this a patent for an encryption handshake? I'm pretty sure I can find very similar flowcharts in my security textbook from 2002. http://www.slashroot.in/understanding-ssl-handshake-protocol http://www.slashroot.in/understanding-ssl-handshake-protocol
- makecheck 11y agoIt'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.
- biot 11y agoWhile you may have a point for patent trolls fishing for royalties on obvious "inventions", this hardly applies to Ericsson: http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/products http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/products
- hyperliner 11y agoA "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.
- Ironchefpython 11y ago> 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.
- hlmencken 11y agoI 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.
- pavlov 11y agoEricsson actually made the world's first full touchscreen smartphone in 2000, seven years before the iPhone: http://www.gsmhistory.com/ericsson-r380/ http://www.gsmhistory.com/ericsson-r380/ 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. [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/04/sony_ericsson_p990i_review/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/04/sony_ericsson_p990i_...
- acveilleux 11y agoMy old boss absolutely loved his P800, right until he got his iPhone 3G (this being Canada, we didn't get the original iPhone.)
- crishoj 11y agoAll the patents in question seem to relate to cellular radio technology, and not to touch screens per se.
- r0m4n0 11y agoAnd 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.
- Anechoic 11y agoThere 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.
- mtgx 11y ago
- rayiner 11y agoBetter article without the paywall: http://www.rcrwireless.com/20151221/business/ericsson-and-apple-settle-patent-dispute-tag17 http://www.rcrwireless.com/20151221/business/ericsson-and-ap.... This is for Ericsson's LTE patents. The number is big because Apple rejected an FRAND license and so willful infringement was on the table.
- melted 11y agoI wonder how much Ericsson is paying Apple for _their_ portfolio, though. These patent deals usually imply reciprocity, including licensing fee reciprocity.
- sangnoir 11y agoI'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.
- melted 11y agoPatents 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.
- Oletros 11y ago> Patents are usually pretty broad mmm, no
- xenadu02 11y agoApple 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.
- sangnoir 11y agoI 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
- invaliddata 11y agoDoes anyone know if all (or a majority of) android device makers have licensing agreements in place with Ericsson for said patents?
- teh_klev 11y agoActual, actual article sitting behind the paywall for people like me who are paywall avoiding-inept: https://archive.is/wrIyX https://archive.is/wrIyX
- ksec 11y agoEvery 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?
- jethro_tell 11y agoI'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. And premium feature set is subjective at best.
- jethro_tell 11y agoI'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. And premium feature set is subjective at best.
- datashovel 11y agoThe 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.