Posts Tagged: "motorola"

This is likely a signal of more patent infringement lawsuits yet to come in the growing patent battle by proxy between Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Samsung, HTC (TPE: 2498) and the companies behind Rockstar, which is a group created by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), BlackBerry Ltd.(NASDAQ: BBRY), Ericsson AB and Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) to acquire patents from Nortel Networks Corp. in 2011.

The Federal Trade Commission will require Honeywell International Inc. to license patents critical to the manufacture of two-dimensional (2D) bar code scanners, under a settlement resolving FTC charges that Honeywell’s acquisition of rival scan engine manufacturer Intermec Inc. would be anticompetitive. The proposed FTC consent order preserves competition in the market for 2D scan engines by requiring Honeywell to license its and Intermec’s patents for 2D scan engines to Datalogic IPTECH s.r.l for the next 12 years.

Paul Ryan is a more common name than you might think. In the world of politics when one speaks of “Paul Ryan” they are talking about the Republican Congressman from Wisconsin who was Mitt Romney’s running-mate and would-have-been Vice President. But in the intellectual property world, particularly the patent litigation world, the name “Paul Ryan” refers to the CEO of Acacia Research Technologies. It is the later Paul Ryan that went on the record with me to discuss Acacia, patent enforcement, how large companies who are infringers disregard innovative independent inventors and more.

Under a settlement reached with the FTC, Google will meet its prior commitments to allow competitors access – on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms – to patents on critical standardized technologies needed to make popular devices such as smart phones, laptop and tablet computers, and gaming consoles. In a separate letter of commitment to the Commission, Google has agreed to give online advertisers more flexibility to simultaneously manage ad campaigns on Google’s AdWords platform and on rival ad platforms; and to refrain from misappropriating online content from so-called “vertical” websites that focus on specific categories such as shopping or travel for use in its own vertical offerings.

you might want to take this with a grain of salt, but Arris announced on November 1, 2012, that its Board of Directors authorized an additional $150 million in share repurchases of the company’s common stock. ARRIS currently has $19.6 million available under its prior authorization for share repurchase, and since 2008 the company has repurchased 34.2 million shares at an aggregate cost of $306.3 million. Thus, we have a big deal to acquire the Motorola Home business from Motorola Mobility and an ongoing stock repurchase plan with Google owning nearly 16% of the company? Call me crazy but I think this warrants serious investors taking a closer look at the fundamentals.

The brief addresses this issue in the context of patent infringement claims that Motorola, Inc. has filed against Apple, Inc. regarding technologies used in iPhones and iPads that allegedly are covered by Motorola’s SEPs. It concludes that a district court correctly applied the governing legal principles when it dismissed Motorola’s request for an injunction that could have blocked Apple from selling iPhones and iPads in the United States.

How anyone with even the most fundamental understand of property rights and economics could say that infringing a patent does not result in a tangible injury is beyond me. Is he unfamiliar with the concept and real world practice of licensing patents? With all due respect to Judge Posner, a right without the ability to obtain recourse for its trampling is no right at all. His analysis is wrong and frankly rather amateurish. It carries the stench of a anti-patent ideologue who doesn’t understand the most fundamental principles associated with legitimate, arms-length negotiations that result in a transfer of rights. Judge Posner’s damage analysis has to be a dream come true for those who use the bullying tactic of efficient infringement to make the business decision to trample rights rather than legitimately acquire them.

J. Posner also brought the value of the patents declared to be essential under standards bodies to bear on the damages question.  Essential patents must be evaluated for absolute value and relative value to the full-declared portfolio.  These values are needed where a non-linear function is proposed for a royalty determination based on infringement of a subset of the declared patents.  The difficulty presented by an assertion of a single essential patent from a much larger portfolio is “that if [the potential licensee] had wanted to license any of the patents in [the standard’s essential portfolio], the license fee would have exceeded the product of the percentage of the portfolio represented by the patent and the value of the entire portfolio.”  Objective data to present a non-linear function was needed, and even where presented, the notion of a FRAND royalty applied to “confine the patentee’s royalty demand to the value conferred by the patent itself as distinct from the additional value – the hold-up value – conferred by the patent’s being designated as standards essential.”

On Thursday, June 7, 2012, the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) announced that it had launched an investigation into whether certain RF Micro Devices, Inc. (RFMD) products infringe patents owned by Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation, a leading provider of high-performance radio-frequency (RF) integrated circuits (ICs). The action and investigation initiated by the ITC include Motorola Mobility, Inc. and HTC Corporation (HTC), whose products incorporate the alleged infringing RF ICs. Peregrine holds numerous U.S. and foreign patents based on its work in developing and manufacturing high-performance products that can be produced using standard CMOS-based semiconductor manufacturing processes. These patented innovations allow RF solutions to be produced with a combination of high levels of monolithic integration and performance, small size and low power consumption.

Commenting on the Yahoo! Inc. patent infringement lawsuit filed against Facebook in March of 2012, Mr. Cuban concludes his post by stating: “I hope Yahoo[!] is awarded $50 billion dollars. It is the only way that consumers will realize what is at stake with patent law as is. Then maybe we can get it right and further innovation and competition in this country.” These statements are from a very influential technology entrepreneur, investor and generally-recognized American business guru. Thus, it would seem that the continuous negative headlines from the smart phone patent wars are definitely giving patents a bad rap!

But how exactly do patents do all of these wonderful things for companies? Unlike trademarks and copyrights, patents are incredibly difficult to acquire. But a patent, once acquired, grants the holder a fairly long monopoly over their creation. No other individual or corporation can use the patent holder’s creation without negotiating a license (or some other arrangement). Thus, patent holders have a huge advantage over the competition via exclusive use or a profit from licensing. Because, the technology companies heavily market new and cutting-edge products, there is a constant need to acquire new patents to stay ahead of competitors.

In the last decade, a substantial market has begun to develop for contingent fee representation in patent litigation. Wiley Rein — a traditional general practice law firm with hundreds of attorneys practicing all areas of law — represented a small company, NTP, Inc., in its patent infringement lawsuit against Research in Motion, the manufacturer of the Blackberry line of devices. The lawsuit famously settled in 2006 for $612.5 million, and the press reported Wiley Rein received over $200 million because it handled the lawsuit on a contingent fee basis. And Wiley Rein is not alone in doing so. Many patent litigators around the country have migrated toward handling patent cases on a contingent fee basis.

The question of whether a term is defined adequately is really a legal question, so the views and opinions of those who are not well versed in the law are hardly probative. Inventors invent and patent attorneys describe those inventions to satisfy the legal requirements. If inventors could describe their inventions to meet the legal requirements they wouldn’t need patent attorneys, but we all know that inventors who represent themselves make numerous errors and always obtain far more narrow protection than they would have been entitled to receive. They just don’t understand the law well enough and are not qualified to offer opinions on matters of law.

So here we are, many years later and IV’s philosophy seems to have changed. No longer is litigation a poor way to monetize patents, but rather IV sees itself as having a responsibility to litigate. The self-righteousness of IV’s claims is why they engender such distrust, even bordering on hatred. For so long they came in peace and now that they have the leverage they seem to be playing a different tune, and using patent litigation with greater frequency. They accumulated patents over time, sometimes getting as much as $50 million from companies like Google, eBay, Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia and others, ostensibly for the purpose of obtaining a defensive patent position. Oh how the tables have turned.