Bonum Certa Men Certa

Patents Roundup: Cisco and Arista, MP3 Liberated, and 'Phone (Patent) Tax' Estimated

Phone and USPTO



Summary: Some of the very latest reports about patents in the US and how these impact the market (costs, availability, and viability of Free/Libre Open Source software)

THE patent landscape in the US is changing. It's changing for the better (for inventors/creators, not for lawyers who prey on them). Today we'd like to share a few of the latest headlines, then go a little further back in time and document the improvements as noted so far this summer.



Cisco and Arista



CRN has just published this article about the latest twist in a case that was mentioned here the other day (we had been covering it for much longer than that [1, 2, 3, 4]).

When patents reduce the choice that exists for people to choose from in the supposedly free market, what does that tell us about those patents? We have long argued that this case demonstrates the pitfalls of the ITC and this article explains why:
The contentious legal battle between networking rivals Cisco and Arista Networks continues to rage on as the International Trade Commission (ITC) Thursday upheld its decision to ban the importation and sale of some of Arista's networking products into the United States.

Shares of Arista stock traded down more than 3 percent at $151.81 Friday afternoon after the ITC denied the vendor's request to lift the ban.

Cisco Senior Vice President, General Counsel Mark Chandler said the ITC send "a strong message to Arista that its corporate culture of copying" must stop.


So they exert financial control/pressure over smaller rivals. Using patents that still aren't fully tested (the ITC's scope of assessment is limited). See this financial report titled "Arista Sags: Q3 ‘Uncertainty’ Rises with ITC Setback, Says Wells Fargo" and think what would happen if Cisco's patents turn out to be invalid or inadequate for justifying such an embargo. Would there be compensation? No.

Consequences of giants like Cisco using patents to embargo their rivals' products may, in some people's mind, seem justified. But how about going through a proper process in a court, potentially with appeals, before applying such blanket bans? What is happening to due process in this age of ITC gun-jumping?

MPEG-LA Becoming More Obsolete as MP3 Gets Liberated



MPEG-LA is a subject we last tackled yesterday. Having run out of 'MP3 tax', MPEG-LA is currently trying to obtain rights to a tax on life (or genome). In the mean time, MP3's 'liberation' so to speak (from software patents) means that browsers add MP3 support as a matter of standard; even lesser-known browsers:

Chromium, the skeletal open-source browser at the core of Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave and a few other browsers will receive support for the automatic playback of MP3 files.

"We have approval from legal to go ahead and move mp3 into non-proprietary codecs list," said a project manager tasked with managing Chromium's multimedia components.

Until now, Chromium — and indirectly Chrome — has supported various audio formats such as OGG, FLAC, Opus, WAV, PCM, and others.



We previously criticised Mozilla for playing along with MPEG-LA; for video compression formats many of the same problems remain.

The 'Phone Tax'



According to ip.finance [found via Francisco Moreno/Keith Mallinson], "Apple is paying a total of between $12.50 and $25.00 per iPhone in fees for licensing from all cellular patent licensors. That is equal to between two percent and four percent of iPhone prices. Licensing fees as a percentage of consumers’ total cellular expenditures over a smartphone's approximate two-year service life, including operator service fees averaging around $40 per connection per month in the US, for example, are considerably lower."

No wonder such phones have become so grossly overpriced.

We rarely come across these numbers. Various figures from Qualcomm and BlackBerry (to be covered separately later today) shed light on how much patent tax is paid for the hardware alone; Another new report (published this morning) speaks of "when licensors come knocking" and there's a portion of it that deals with Motorola's Microsoft dispute as follows:

The issue of standard patent licensing has been litigated heavily in other sectors, with the most notorious case stemming from Microsoft's use of a Motorola-owned WiFi standard for use in the Xbox 360 gaming console. Motorola demanded Microsoft pay them 2.25 percent of the $399 retail price of the system, which translated to between $8 and $9 per console sold.

When the parties couldn't reach an agreement, Microsoft sued Motorola in 2010 for breach of contract tied to the patent under requirement that standard patent holders must negotiate with a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory pricing for the license. Three years later, a federal judge ruled that Motorola violated the pricing requirement and determined Microsoft pay Motorola 3.471 cents per unit sold. Microsoft sold 84 million Xbox 360s, paying Motorola roughly $2.9 million for the WiFi license, as opposed to the nearly $700 million they would have owed under Motorola's initial demand. However, the litigation became so nasty, and international, that Microsoft ended up paying $400 million to move a manufacturing facility out of Germany.


We wrote a lot about that at the time. The main concern was, the supposedly reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) pricing made Free software inadequate a choice. RAND (or FRAND), unlike with a Z (for zero cost) would be inherently not compatible with the endless, cost-free distribution of software among peers. This is especially a problem when it comes to software because software, unlike hardware (device/gadget), need not involve manufacturing and shipping costs. Thankfully, however, software patents are on the demise in the US -- a subject we'll deal with in our next post.

Recent Techrights' Posts

A Lot of Technological 'Progress' Has Been Nothing But Buzzwords
Free software does not try to excite people people over nothing
Proprietary Software: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Proprietary software has an entirely different mindset, revolving around business models rather than science
Web Hostnames Down to Lowest Number in More Than 7 Years!
the number of hostnames is falling rapidly (they hide this by choosing logarithmic scale)
Over at Tux Machines...
2 days' worth
Stop Begging Companies That Don't Value Your Freedom to Stop Pushing You Around
That's not freedom
The forbidden topics
There are forbidden topics in the hacker community
 
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 30, 2023
IRC logs for Saturday, September 30, 2023
Don't be Afraid of the Command Line, It Might Even be a Friend
There's a tendency to think that only graphical interfaces were made to simplify usage, and any declarative interface is by design raw, inherently unfit for usage
One Positive Note About GNU/Linux Coverage in 2023 (Less Microsoft)
GNU/Linux users do not want this, with very rare exceptions
Snaps Were Never Good at Security, But the Media Coverage is Just Appalling
The media should focus on culling Windows, not making a huge fuss over minor things wrongly attributed to "Linux"
Better Footage of Richard Stallman's Talk Last Week: “Freedom in computing, forty years after starting to really protect it”
Richard Stallman speaks about the cancer situation early in his speech
Links 30/09/2023: A Government Shutdown and More Blizzard Layoffs
Links for the day
Links 30/09/2023: Bing Almost Offloaded Due to Failure/Losses, Nvidia Raided
Links for the day
Community is the Lifeblood of Freedom in the GNU/Linux World
Removing or undoing the "cancerd" (systemd) is feasible but increasingly difficult
Richard Stallman Says He Will Probably Live Many More Years
"Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19."
Quitting 'Clown Computing' and GAFAM is Only the Start
The Web and the Net at large became far too centralised
They Say Free Software is Like Communism When They, the Proprietary Software Giants, Constantly Pursue Government Bailouts (Subsidies From Taxpayers)
At the moment Ukraine is at most risk due to its dependence on Microsoft (inside its infrastructure)
Social Control Media Has No Future, It Was Always Doomed to Fail (Also Promoted Based on Lies)
Recent events, including developments at Twitter, meant that they lost a lot of their audience and then, in turn, sponsors/advertisers
They're Been Trying to 'Kill' Richard Stallman for Years (by Mentally Tormenting Him)
Malicious tongue wanted to do him what had been done to Julian Assange
We Temporarily Have Two Gemini Capsules
They're both authentic and secure, but they're not the same
Consumerism is Lying and Revisionism
We need to reject these liars and charlatans
Links 30/09/2023: Open VFS Framework, CrossOver 23.5, Dianne Feinstein Dies
Links for the day
Security Leftovers
GNU/Linux, Microsoft, and more
Microsoft Down on the World Wide Web, Shows Survey
down by a lot in this category
IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 29, 2023
IRC logs for Friday, September 29, 2023
A Society That Fails Journalists Does Not Deserve Journalism
It's probably too later to save Julian Assange as a working publisher (he might never recover from the mental torture), but as a person and a father we can wish and work towards his release
Almost Nothing To Go With Your Morning's Cup Of Coffee
Newspaper? What newspaper?
Techrights Was Right About the Chaff Bots (They Failed to Live up to Their Promise)
Those who have been paying attention to news of substance rather than fashionable "tech trends" probably know that GNU/Linux grew a lot this year
Selling Out to Microsoft Makes You Dead Beef
If all goes as well as we've envisioned, Microsoft will get smaller and smaller
Curation and Preservation Work
The winter is coming soon and this means our anniversary is near
Mobile Phones Aren't Your Friend or a Gateway to Truly Social Life
Newer should not always seem more seductive, as novelty is by default questionable and debatable
Links 29/09/2023: Disinformation and Monopolies
Links for the day
iFixit Requests DMCA Exemption…To Figure Out How To Repair McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Jim Zemlin Thinks the World's Largest Software Company Has 200 Staff, Many of Whom Not Technical at All
biggest ego in the world
Microsoft GitHub Exposé — In the Alex Graveley Case, His Lawyer, Rick Cofer, Appears to Have Bribed the DA to Keep Graveley (and Others) Out of Prison
Is this how one gets out of prison? Hire the person who bribes the DA?
Richard Stallman's Public Talk in GNU's 40th Anniversary Ceremony
Out now
Links 29/09/2023: Linux Foundation Boasting, QLite FDW 2.4.0 Released
Links for the day
Red Hat Does Not Understand Community and It's Publicly Promoting Microsoft's Gartner
RedHat.com is basically lioning a firm that has long been attacking GNU/Linux in the private and public sectors at the behest of Microsoft
A 'Code of Conduct' Typically Promoted by Criminal Corporations to Protect Crimes From Scrutiny
We saw this in action last week
Objections to binutils CoC
LXO response to proposed Code of Conduct
Conde Nast (Reddit), Which Endlessly Defamed Richard Stallman and Had Paid Salaries to Microsoft-Connected Pedophiles, Says You Must Be Over 18 to See 'Stallman Was Right'
Does this get in the way of their Bill Gates-sponsored "Bill Gates says" programme/schedule?
Techrights Extends Wishes of Good Health to Richard M. Stallman
Richard Stallman has cancer
endsoftwarepatents.org Still Going, Some Good News From Canada
a blow to software patents in Canada
The Debian Project Leader said the main thing Debian lacked was more contributors
The Debian Project Leader said the main thing Debian lacked was more contributors
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 28, 2023
IRC logs for Thursday, September 28, 2023
Links 28/09/2023: Openwashing and Patent Spam as 'News'
Links for the day