6 ms·

Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents

97 points by peterfication 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ulf-77723 3y ago
AVM recently announced that the business might be sold by the founders. This law suit somehow seems to me that the price for the company should be influenced artificially. On the other hand China just saw protectionism by the US happening and now they are shifting gears. How long will it take until sanctions by the US will be useless?
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  AVM isn't exactly a nice and friendly company. It behaves as shitty as you would expect any networking company to behave. I completely believe that they might have simply chosen not to pay for these patents to save a buck. Of course I oppose the whole business of shoving as many of your own patents into standard protocols that you see in WiFi and 4/5/6G (basically forcing the world to pay you a licensing fee) but that's not just a Chinese practice. AVM claims they're optimistic about their chances for appealing the ruling, so we'll have to wait and see what happens. So far, the deck seems to be stacked against AVM and their attempted scheme to avoid licensing fees.
- rob74 3y ago
  According to the Heise article (https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Patentklage-durch-Huawei-in-erster-Instanz-9575693.html https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat...), the lawsuit is from 2022, so before the intention of the founders to sell was announced, and was against several companies, including Amazon, Stellantis and Netgear. So, if there is any ulterior motive behind this, it's maybe tit-for-tat because of the US and EU efforts to exclude Huawei from government and network infrastructure projects, but not something directed specifically against AVM...
contravariant 3y ago
Today I learned SEPs, standard essential patents, are a thing. How on earth adhering to a public standard can be considered an invention is beyond me, nor is how we got to the point that it is common enough to require its own special treatment. Maybe someone can change my mind on why this is an invention worth monopolising, but I doubt it.
- doikor 3y ago
  It goes the other way around. First you make the tech (and the patents associated with it) and then push it through the standards body to make it part of a standard. That is the point when it becomes a standard essential patent.
  - helsinkiandrew 3y ago
    And usually the standards body require FRAND terms from the IPR 'donators' - they commit to license the tech using fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. They shouldn't deny a license or charge too much, with the idea being that they'll gain more from having interoperable products rather than maximise licensing royalties.
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  The idea is you have an invention and then try to have the standard require your invention. The parties that create the standard are supposed to declare the patents they have that cover the standard and then typically there is some licensing authority where manufacturers can pay a fee to have a license for all the patents involved. On one hand it’s reasonable because the inventors spent money on researching the new things that are in the new standard. On the other hand it can be rather unfortunate, especially if it’s software, because with open-source there is no way to pay and get a license.
- rocqua 3y ago
  Sadly it works the other way around, and this has a tendency to infect standardization proceedings. If you can put some technology that uses your patents in a standard like WiFi or 5G, that is a license to print money. There are plenty of good ideas that should be in a standard that are patented. Leaving aside the issue of whether it's good those patents exist, you do want that technology in the standards. So it's not like you can say 'all IEEE standards should be patent free'. As a result lots of standardization meetings involve most participants subtly (or not so subtly) advocating for technical decisions that would mean some patent is used.
orlp 3y ago
I looked at the patent EP3337077B1... It is utter rent-seeking nonsense. Patents are supposed to be for innovation, the patent literally just claims adding a field to a packet indicating if it's for a single user or multiple is a novel invention.
- ocean2 3y ago
  You may want to read claim 1 of the patent publication again. The claim indicates that a specific field is used for different purposes depending on a transmission mode. It is not an arbitrary or obvious choice to use the HE-SIG A field to indicate the number of scheduled users or the number of symbols in the HE-SIG B field. Do you have any examples where any packet field is used to indicate a number of users or symbols?
  - orlp 3y ago
    I had cause and effect backwards of the field contents. I typically refuse to read patents so the language is rather foreign and confusing to me. Either way, reinterpreting a field depending on the mode of communication is equally not novel.
- hcfman 3y ago
  Patents are never about innovation. Not in a sense that applies to everyone. I still think that all law suites should be paid for by the government. Both defence and offence. This would have a sort of balancing out effect and then make law actually be more applicable for everyone. Maybe sounds radical. But think about it. In a democracy law should be equally useful to all citizens. It clearly is not.
ibotty 3y ago
AVM is notorious for GPL violations. I cannot say anything about these patents (aside from stating the fact that all software patents are bogus, because math cannot be patented), but I would not be surprised if they intentionally violated them.
- radicalbyte 3y ago
  I wasn't aware of that, do you have sources? It's really odd seeing Chinese companies taking someone to court for IP infringement given that that is the modus operandi of Chinese companies and has been for decades.
  - sgift 3y ago
    Nothing weird about it, has also been part of their MO for a long time. If a Chinese company infringes it's okay in their mind cause they have to "catch up", but if they can use it to go against Non-Chinese companies: Bring it on.
  - lucubratory 3y ago
    The PRC started enforcing US/Berne copyrights quite seriously for big companies 5-10 years ago, after negotiations with the US under the Obama administration. They actually licence, buy, or invent huge amounts of IP today, straight rip-offs in China now are mostly just small time hustlers on Alibaba that everyone hates. For example, Huawei spends gigantic amounts of money on R&D, equivalent to Apple and more than Samsung. Part of those negotiations would have been that China is not unfairly excluded from being able to own IP and prosecute others for the same laws it was agreeing to be subject to.
  - ibotty 3y ago
    https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 is the first I could find re getting the sources. Note, that the GPL requires the sources in "the preferred form" and that includes a way to build them (if AVM has a way to build the sources, which they certainly have). Last time I got (or a customer had) a AVM box I requested the sources and got nothing that could even build (invalid C files, AFAIR).
sgift 3y ago
Decisions by regional courts are completely irrelevant. They often get reversed by the higher courts, especially in tech cases. Hamburg is more notorious for this, but it's the same for the one here in Munich. Until the higher regional court decides (and maybe the BGH after that) there's no chance that a sales ban will be enacted.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  Absolutely. „Landgericht Hamburg“ is a well known prefix for „<insert insane tech-related ruling>“.
marvion 3y ago
Weird choice of this site to mention their sources, but not linking them. - Heise reported this originally: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Patentklage-durch-Huawei-in-erster-Instanz-9575693.html https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat... - Golem basically summarized the Heise article: https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsverbot-fuer-fritzboxen-2312-180388.html https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsve...
- cubefox 3y ago
  And the article seems to be a stolen version of this German one: https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM-Fritzbox-Verbot-wegen-Verstoss-gegen-WLAN-Patente-1436400/ https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
  - mrks_hy 3y ago
    Yeah @dang maybe possible to replace the submission link with the original article passed through translate, e.g. https://www-pcgameshardware-de.translate.goog/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM-Fritzbox-Verbot-wegen-Verstoss-gegen-WLAN-Patente-1436400/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-pcgameshardware-de.translate.goog/Internet-Thema... ?
  - d-k-bo 3y ago
    The PCGH article references the golem article which references the heise article.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    That would explain the wonky headline: "AVM droht ..." means "AVM is threatened with ..." but could be misread as "AVM threatens ..." ("AVM droht mit ..." or "AVM droht: ..."), especially in a cheap/automated translation.
- bityard 3y ago
  Appreciate the links. Although one is in German and the other is also in German and seems to be behind a paywall. As an aside, it is common for news sites to only provide links back to their own earlier articles (even when the connection to the present story is tenuous at best), never to sources or extra information outside of their web property. Unfortunately it is not a weird choice, it's an industry-wide standard practice.
Aardwolf 3y ago
What is wrong with the titles in this article? "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers" No, AVM is the company producing them, they are not threatening themselves to ban selling their own product And then one title has "regional court" in small caps, another has "Regional Court" with caps
- ale42 3y ago
  Some AI translation from German?
cubefox 3y ago
This reads like a stolen and automatically translated German article. The end suddenly talks as if the current website is PCGH.de, and contains the German sounding phrase "your opinion is asked". The mentioning of the sources doesn't provide any links and inexplicably says "those" instead of "source".
- evilpie 3y ago
  https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM-Fritzbox-Verbot-wegen-Verstoss-gegen-WLAN-Patente-1436400/ https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM... Also one of the headings was mistranslated horribly. In linked the article: "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers". The original in German: "AVM droht Verkaufsverbot für Fritzbox-Router". Right translation is roughly: "AVM is threatened with a ban on the sale of Fritzbox routers".
  - wuiheerfoj 3y ago
    I think the linked article title sounds more natural in English Edit: Ahhh wait AVM is being threatened with a ban, my mistake
jWhick 3y ago
this site has 1 sentence than ad, and it contains like a 100 sentences which equals about 100 ads. wouldn't recommend visiting it.
asylteltine 3y ago
China complaining about patent infringement? That’s rich.
- jsiepkes 3y ago
  I heard stories from people working at Nokia about Huawei copying manuals verbatim, including mistakes. And Huawei is not alone in this. When I first saw a TP-Link user interface I was confused. It looked exactly like the Unifi interface. At first I thought maybe Unifi OEM their stuff from TP-Link. Didn't take long to figure out they had just copied it.
  - bannee 3y ago
    [dead]
hcfman 3y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong. But is it not the case that governments have been pressured to not be allowed to use Huawei technology in 6G and the like? Not being an expert but I think I remember things like that. If you then own patents relating to that or similar technology and someone says "No you may not participate" simply because we so say, nothing to do with law, we just don't want you to. That maybe this sort of response can be expected ? If you kick someone long enough it's not surprising to see retaliation once in a while.
__turbobrew__ 3y ago
Kind of rich Huawei is complaining about patent infringement after they syphoned off IP from Nortel and Nokia. Now that those companies are mostly dead they kick the ladder out to stop anyone from doing the same.

97 points by peterfication 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AVM recently announced that the business might be sold by the founders. This law suit somehow seems to me that the price for the company should be influenced artificially. On the other hand China just saw protectionism by the US happening and now they are shifting gears. How long will it take until sanctions by the US will be useless?

jeroenhd 3y ago
AVM isn't exactly a nice and friendly company. It behaves as shitty as you would expect any networking company to behave. I completely believe that they might have simply chosen not to pay for these patents to save a buck. Of course I oppose the whole business of shoving as many of your own patents into standard protocols that you see in WiFi and 4/5/6G (basically forcing the world to pay you a licensing fee) but that's not just a Chinese practice. AVM claims they're optimistic about their chances for appealing the ruling, so we'll have to wait and see what happens. So far, the deck seems to be stacked against AVM and their attempted scheme to avoid licensing fees.
rob74 3y ago
According to the Heise article (https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Patentklage-durch-Huawei-in-erster-Instanz-9575693.html https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat...), the lawsuit is from 2022, so before the intention of the founders to sell was announced, and was against several companies, including Amazon, Stellantis and Netgear. So, if there is any ulterior motive behind this, it's maybe tit-for-tat because of the US and EU efforts to exclude Huawei from government and network infrastructure projects, but not something directed specifically against AVM...

contravariant 3y ago

Today I learned SEPs, standard essential patents, are a thing. How on earth adhering to a public standard can be considered an invention is beyond me, nor is how we got to the point that it is common enough to require its own special treatment. Maybe someone can change my mind on why this is an invention worth monopolising, but I doubt it.

doikor 3y ago
It goes the other way around. First you make the tech (and the patents associated with it) and then push it through the standards body to make it part of a standard. That is the point when it becomes a standard essential patent.
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  And usually the standards body require FRAND terms from the IPR 'donators' - they commit to license the tech using fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. They shouldn't deny a license or charge too much, with the idea being that they'll gain more from having interoperable products rather than maximise licensing royalties.
tinus_hn 3y ago
The idea is you have an invention and then try to have the standard require your invention. The parties that create the standard are supposed to declare the patents they have that cover the standard and then typically there is some licensing authority where manufacturers can pay a fee to have a license for all the patents involved. On one hand it’s reasonable because the inventors spent money on researching the new things that are in the new standard. On the other hand it can be rather unfortunate, especially if it’s software, because with open-source there is no way to pay and get a license.
rocqua 3y ago
Sadly it works the other way around, and this has a tendency to infect standardization proceedings. If you can put some technology that uses your patents in a standard like WiFi or 5G, that is a license to print money. There are plenty of good ideas that should be in a standard that are patented. Leaving aside the issue of whether it's good those patents exist, you do want that technology in the standards. So it's not like you can say 'all IEEE standards should be patent free'. As a result lots of standardization meetings involve most participants subtly (or not so subtly) advocating for technical decisions that would mean some patent is used.

orlp 3y ago

I looked at the patent EP3337077B1... It is utter rent-seeking nonsense. Patents are supposed to be for innovation, the patent literally just claims adding a field to a packet indicating if it's for a single user or multiple is a novel invention.

ocean2 3y ago
You may want to read claim 1 of the patent publication again. The claim indicates that a specific field is used for different purposes depending on a transmission mode. It is not an arbitrary or obvious choice to use the HE-SIG A field to indicate the number of scheduled users or the number of symbols in the HE-SIG B field. Do you have any examples where any packet field is used to indicate a number of users or symbols?
- orlp 3y ago
  I had cause and effect backwards of the field contents. I typically refuse to read patents so the language is rather foreign and confusing to me. Either way, reinterpreting a field depending on the mode of communication is equally not novel.
hcfman 3y ago
Patents are never about innovation. Not in a sense that applies to everyone. I still think that all law suites should be paid for by the government. Both defence and offence. This would have a sort of balancing out effect and then make law actually be more applicable for everyone. Maybe sounds radical. But think about it. In a democracy law should be equally useful to all citizens. It clearly is not.

ibotty 3y ago

AVM is notorious for GPL violations. I cannot say anything about these patents (aside from stating the fact that all software patents are bogus, because math cannot be patented), but I would not be surprised if they intentionally violated them.

radicalbyte 3y ago
I wasn't aware of that, do you have sources? It's really odd seeing Chinese companies taking someone to court for IP infringement given that that is the modus operandi of Chinese companies and has been for decades.
- sgift 3y ago
  Nothing weird about it, has also been part of their MO for a long time. If a Chinese company infringes it's okay in their mind cause they have to "catch up", but if they can use it to go against Non-Chinese companies: Bring it on.
- lucubratory 3y ago
  The PRC started enforcing US/Berne copyrights quite seriously for big companies 5-10 years ago, after negotiations with the US under the Obama administration. They actually licence, buy, or invent huge amounts of IP today, straight rip-offs in China now are mostly just small time hustlers on Alibaba that everyone hates. For example, Huawei spends gigantic amounts of money on R&D, equivalent to Apple and more than Samsung. Part of those negotiations would have been that China is not unfairly excluded from being able to own IP and prosecute others for the same laws it was agreeing to be subject to.
- ibotty 3y ago
  https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 is the first I could find re getting the sources. Note, that the GPL requires the sources in "the preferred form" and that includes a way to build them (if AVM has a way to build the sources, which they certainly have). Last time I got (or a customer had) a AVM box I requested the sources and got nothing that could even build (invalid C files, AFAIR).

sgift 3y ago

Decisions by regional courts are completely irrelevant. They often get reversed by the higher courts, especially in tech cases. Hamburg is more notorious for this, but it's the same for the one here in Munich. Until the higher regional court decides (and maybe the BGH after that) there's no chance that a sales ban will be enacted.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
Absolutely. „Landgericht Hamburg“ is a well known prefix for „<insert insane tech-related ruling>“.

marvion 3y ago

Weird choice of this site to mention their sources, but not linking them. - Heise reported this originally: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Patentklage-durch-Huawei-in-erster-Instanz-9575693.html https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat... - Golem basically summarized the Heise article: https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsverbot-fuer-fritzboxen-2312-180388.html https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsve...

cubefox 3y ago
And the article seems to be a stolen version of this German one: https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM-Fritzbox-Verbot-wegen-Verstoss-gegen-WLAN-Patente-1436400/ https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
- mrks_hy 3y ago
  Yeah @dang maybe possible to replace the submission link with the original article passed through translate, e.g. https://www-pcgameshardware-de.translate.goog/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM-Fritzbox-Verbot-wegen-Verstoss-gegen-WLAN-Patente-1436400/?_x_tr_sl=de&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-pcgameshardware-de.translate.goog/Internet-Thema... ?
- d-k-bo 3y ago
  The PCGH article references the golem article which references the heise article.
- hnbad 3y ago
  That would explain the wonky headline: "AVM droht ..." means "AVM is threatened with ..." but could be misread as "AVM threatens ..." ("AVM droht mit ..." or "AVM droht: ..."), especially in a cheap/automated translation.
bityard 3y ago
Appreciate the links. Although one is in German and the other is also in German and seems to be behind a paywall. As an aside, it is common for news sites to only provide links back to their own earlier articles (even when the connection to the present story is tenuous at best), never to sources or extra information outside of their web property. Unfortunately it is not a weird choice, it's an industry-wide standard practice.

Aardwolf 3y ago

What is wrong with the titles in this article? "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers" No, AVM is the company producing them, they are not threatening themselves to ban selling their own product And then one title has "regional court" in small caps, another has "Regional Court" with caps

ale42 3y ago
Some AI translation from German?

cubefox 3y ago

This reads like a stolen and automatically translated German article. The end suddenly talks as if the current website is PCGH.de, and contains the German sounding phrase "your opinion is asked". The mentioning of the sources doesn't provide any links and inexplicably says "those" instead of "source".

evilpie 3y ago
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM-Fritzbox-Verbot-wegen-Verstoss-gegen-WLAN-Patente-1436400/ https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM... Also one of the headings was mistranslated horribly. In linked the article: "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers". The original in German: "AVM droht Verkaufsverbot für Fritzbox-Router". Right translation is roughly: "AVM is threatened with a ban on the sale of Fritzbox routers".
- wuiheerfoj 3y ago
  I think the linked article title sounds more natural in English Edit: Ahhh wait AVM is being threatened with a ban, my mistake

jWhick 3y ago

this site has 1 sentence than ad, and it contains like a 100 sentences which equals about 100 ads. wouldn't recommend visiting it.

asylteltine 3y ago

China complaining about patent infringement? That’s rich.

jsiepkes 3y ago
I heard stories from people working at Nokia about Huawei copying manuals verbatim, including mistakes. And Huawei is not alone in this. When I first saw a TP-Link user interface I was confused. It looked exactly like the Unifi interface. At first I thought maybe Unifi OEM their stuff from TP-Link. Didn't take long to figure out they had just copied it.
- bannee 3y ago
  [dead]

hcfman 3y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong. But is it not the case that governments have been pressured to not be allowed to use Huawei technology in 6G and the like? Not being an expert but I think I remember things like that. If you then own patents relating to that or similar technology and someone says "No you may not participate" simply because we so say, nothing to do with law, we just don't want you to. That maybe this sort of response can be expected ? If you kick someone long enough it's not surprising to see retaliation once in a while.

__turbobrew__ 3y ago

Kind of rich Huawei is complaining about patent infringement after they syphoned off IP from Nortel and Nokia. Now that those companies are mostly dead they kick the ladder out to stop anyone from doing the same.