“A prominent patent law blogger has again raised the argument that Apple’s patented features have very little value, while stopping short of saying that Samsung should just stop using the infringing technology,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “Repeating an opinion from early March, FOSS Patents blogger Florian Mueller has again railed against Apple’s demands for patent royalty claims against Samsung writing that he was ‘not just disappointed but even angry’ about the amount Apple was asking. Applying Apple’s proposed royalty rate to a Samsung device that infringed all five patents would amount to around $40, a figure Mueller contrasted with Samsung’s ‘SEP royalty demand of approximately $12 per device (for a whole portfolio of wireless SEPs).'”
“Mueller is now comparing Samsung’s ‘trivial’ SEP demand for one patent against Apple’s total demands for five patents covering features Samsung didn’t just accidentally run afoul of, but rather purposely pulled from its Copy Cat iPhone studies as features it needed in its own products in order to be competitive with Apple’s iPhone,” Dilger writes. “Apple is asking for less per patent (an average of $8) than Samsung was demanding for its FRAND licensed, standard essential baseband patent involving a chip that cost less to buy than Samsung’s $16 royalty demand.”
“There are other patent comparisons we can use to evaluate the relative merits of Apple’s damages claim. Last year, Apple was hit with a $368 million patent verdict related to a claim from VirnetX involving VPN connectivity. VirnetX does not practice its technology, it merely sues companies for money. VirnetX’s patent was filed in 2007 and actually granted just days before the company rushed it into court against Apple,” Dilger writes. “There has been no significant public scrutiny of VirnetX’s claims, no anonymous defense from the open source community seeking to invalidate its nebulous ownership claims related to VPN, no clownish liveblogging of the trial and, while Mueller tweeted the verdict, he didn’t appear to have blogged any outrage over the damages figure VirnetX was awarded.”
Read more in the full article here.
amazing.
Not amazing. He’s developing an app for Android. He needs to get on the good side of Android users, so Apple is suddenly his favorite whipping boy. The man has no ethics. He’s simply a whore for money.
wel, that’s what I meant.
Hypocrisy at its finest!
Screw ShameSung! Please don’t feed them any more sales
Florian Muller and his opinions are unimportant.
If Apple wins will I suddenly get a windfall of a $100 discount off every handset I buy? No. I hope Samsung wins. At least it keeps the rapacious Apple on their toes with new stuff.
Hmmm, so samsung is going to pay you a discount of Apple loses??? Or is this just a standard rate for samsung trolls??
PS, I thought they got caught, tried, convicted, etc. Guess that only applies to Asia. ??
Do you carry boxes of tissues around to clean up the brain matter dribbling out of your nose?
Typical zombie, no cognitive functions whatsoever.
If the Apple patented technologies have “very little value”, then it should be trivial to not use them or design around them.
Slide to unlock is classic example. Apple has already shown a touch to unlock, which is not in itself patentable as a basic new function since that has been done before.
Until some time ago, Florian Müller had vigorously argued in favour of Apple’s patent defense war against Samsung. Not long ago, he seems to have changed his mind. Unless there was some significant payola involved (from Samsung), it seems to me that the underlying sentiment may be disappointment. While the whole idea of global thermonuclear war against Google for ripping off iOS appealed to him (as it does to anyone with sense of decency) initially, at this point, it seems that from all that nuclear war, Apple ended up pursuing it by using a few semi-automatic guns (slide-to-unlock, rubber-band scroll…???). In other words, the entire look-and-feel of the OS has been reduced to a few marginally important functions which, in worst case scenario for Samsung, can be worked around, while keeping the overall look-and-feel.
My impression of Müller’s attitude towards this is that Apple had a chance to leverage the legal system and its patent portfolio to completely block anyone from building phones that look and work like the iPhone, and for whatever reason, they chose not to do it, letting Samsung obtain legal clearance in court to continue to sell devices that look and work like the iPhone.
At this point, Apple may even prevail on these small patents, but it will be completely irrelevant in the “thermonuclear war” that Jobs wanted. I am not sure who is at fault here: Apple’s legal team, or strategic decisions by Apple’s senior management, or current state of the patent law (in the various jurisdictions in which these were pursued), or the ability of Samsung to manipulate the public opinion, or refusal by Apple to manipulate the public opinion, or the combination of all of the above…
Exactly. It doesn’t matter who is at fault. While we cannot stop buying products based on what has Samsung components (we’d no longer be buying Apple stuff), but we can stop buying Samsung consumer products. It’s not that difficult, really.
There is a shiny new Electrolux refrigerator sitting in my kitchen. It sat next to two Samsung refrigerators at roughly the same price in the store. I didn’t even open the doors on the other two.
Honestly, given that Apple is selling only the upper end of the market and is raking in a huge more than super majority of the profits, it is clear … Apple has won!
We are going to have the low end market, no matter what Apple does and Apple doesn’t want to live there.
Apple may in effect like low end users to get used to things the way Apple does it, so when they decide to upgrade to quality, they already know how to use Apple’s product.
Mueller has recently announced that he is developing an Android app. Draw your own conclusions as to why his attitude has changed.
You had me until Florian Mueller…. Stops reading.
Since we now know that Strategy Analytics was no more than a paid mouthpiece, how much of a stretch is it to propose that this dork is also part of Samsung’s paola for peons program?
I’m not 100% sure this is coming from Samsung/Google, but it might make sense if this was MSFT paying him to bash Apple while at the same time appearing to support them with the release of Office for iPad.
If he can cause a loud discourse against Apple, it helps MSFT, since the damage to Samsung’s rep has already been done. MSFT looks like the good guy by staying out of this, but they might think any damage to Apple would help them.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate. The simplest reason is usually the correct one; this seems like a pay dump to him from Samsung/Google.
/removes tin foil cap
Microsoft already receives royalties for Android handsets based on their successful lawsuit against Android. The fact that this judgment took place a few years ago does not make it less relevant.
He recently announced that he’s developing an Android app.
Once again, it doesn’t matter how any of us feels. If you continue to buy Samsung products (TVs, toasters, microwaves, etc.), you are part of the problem. Stop buying.
As much as I do love my Samsung TV from 08 or 09, if it died today, I’d be looking at any other manufacturer. Samsung has lost my business.
All the lawsuits in the world will not have the same effect on a company as much as customers just no longer buying.
Begs the question: If Apple’s patented features have very little value, why did Samsung immediately set about copying them? You can see what happened to those phone manufacturers who didn’t copy them—quivering road kill.
The fact that an invention or innovation “seems really important” (in some commercial, design, or greater philosophical sense) to someone is not a requirement for a patent or its legal protection. Many, perhaps even most, patents may appear trivial to most people. Even the ones that turned out to be really important.
People might be surprised at the list of patented products that seem trivial, but which are considered huge successes and make a lot of money for their patent holders: the paper clip, the cardboard milk carton, zip-loc plastic bags, the zipper, velcro, staples, the ratchet wrench, windshield-wiper technology, the spring-loaded plow, countless technical patents of which consumers are unaware. Grad students in chemistry patent the new chemical molecules they create in their labs and, while most remain worthless, some end up generating huge royalties when they are found to be useful, even indispensable, for some particular purpose (perhaps in medicine).
The point is simply that judging patents by whether or not they “seem important” is not the criterion by which any patent should be legally assessed. The only criterion should be that patents represent innovation, as defined by the patent office and court precedents.
Otherwise, we would have no patents, because it is all too easy for someone to say that an invention is trivial. In fact, I believe a lot of valid patents would actually _look_ trivial to most people today. Come on, if we let people patent paper clips (there are actually quite a number of different patents for them!), we should certainly let Apple patent their “slide to unlock”. It is neither obvious nor trivial. (Particularly when you consider the technical aspects of how it is achieved.)
If what Samsung did was so not serious why did they so radically change their OS deployment, continuous improvement? No. Potential lawsuits.
This guy has been a hack and a paid shill for ages.
Glad to see MDN finally take the blinders off and see this dude for what he really is.
I hardly think the features of the iPhone which changed smart phones completely is trivial. Google’s dump of a button smartphone after the release of the original iPhone proves that the Apple iPhone features are hardly trivial. The only trivial one here is Samsung the copy machine making money off of Apple’s original patented ideas and R&D. They expect to be able to copy everyones products and call it there own and make profits from it. That is WRONG and hardly trivial and I think if you were a designer of a patented award winning, great selling product that you worked years on to develop. You to would want compensation or some kind of legal action to stop others from profiting off of your developed product that you worked really hard for.
Florian is a consultant for pay. He used to back Apple out of common sense. Now he is swimming in Samsung Slime.
P•A•Y•O•L•A