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This is pretty gross: "Ericsson has more than 100 patent licensing agreements and holds about 37,000 patents for mobile communication."
by choward 11y ago
This is pretty gross:
"Ericsson has more than 100 patent licensing agreements and holds about 37,000 patents for mobile communication."
- tormeh 11y agoThe 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.
- forrestthewoods 11y agoI'd be more sympathetic if there weren't laws requiring adherence to standards.
- wolfgke 11y agoSo you just lobby that a meta-law is generated that disallows creating laws that requires adherence to a standards containing patents.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoAnd to prevent others from doing similar work.
- jonknee 11y agoWhy 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.
- DougWebb 11y ago37,000 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.
- jonknee 11y agoEricsson 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.
- forrestthewoods 11y ago37000 patents dedicated to "mobile communication" is pretty crazy. I wonder how many are software vs hardware.
- jonknee 11y agoAlso pretty crazy is that we have broadband level internet access almost everywhere thanks to those mobile communications inventions.
- samuell 11y agoWell, 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) ...