Information Is Beautiful

Very good graphic!

So…we are destinated to choice into 4 companies in next ten years…

Thanks.

Jo

A very nice, graph. I have just a small nitpick.

It appears though both bubbles between Nokia and Apple describe the content of Nokia’s suit, not Apple’s. From the bubbles one could assume the speech coding and security patents are Apple’s, but AFAIK this is not the case.

First comment, love the blog. I saw this graphic this morning and love the presentation.

http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209

From a graphical point of view I like the following chart most: http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209 It has the same content and took the ugly chart from the Guardian as its source. Missing detailed information but a nice overview!

Awesome !

So what happens if you replace revenue with profit? Like Parallel Logic I think it might make for a more interesting chart.

strange color choice. red for decreasing and gray for increasing. I feel the opposite.

HP is missing. They are suing Oracle (or Hurd) because he changed company :)

I tried to wrap my head around why the patent system in its current form is so patently broken after it has served reasonably well for many decades.

With regards to patent legislation, what is the essence of changes compared to 20 or 50 years ago?

I say speed. Our problems are not because of the changes themselves, but because of the rate of change, the speed with which changes are happening.

With all the amazing technological developments of recent years, with all the game-changers, they are still all “evolutionary” compared the true revolution, which is the speed of development.

Patent law worked when the cost and timeframe of copying was negligible compared to inventing. That is not true anymore for high-tech.

Challenge any tech company to “build something like the iPhone or the iPad,” and they will lag behind those critical months or few years, where Apple has already moved on for the next big thing, leaving copycats in the dust.

Outside Apple: Allow GM to copy Mercedes technology, and (hopefully) after all disassembling and reverse engineering is done and by the time the finally got it right (or, well, sort of) Mercedes has already pushed the envelope. (Well, they better, given the markup they’re charging.)

Also, right now development occurs so fast, that patent research has become a major bottleneck (of finding if and which patents might apply to one’s own work) and a significant operational risk (of being sued). “Due diligence” has become an impossibility.

That statement is debatable (and l am looking forward to discussion). But assuming, that indeed speed is the key to cleaning up the current mess, then what would be a good way to fix things?

Before throwing in my suggestion, here’s another general statement to consider: Whatever the suggestion for target legislation might be, we need a migration path to get from here to there. The solution needs to deal with current patent treasure chests. Company with rich patent portfolios will lobby, ah, argue like crazy. Lacking any legal education I could imagine that e. g. invalidating existing and already granted portfolios resembles disowning patent holders.

So to fix the patent system for a quickly changing world and provide a way to get to that new patent system, I suggest
- for starter to leave existing patents as they are for now
- change validity period for new patents to something much shorter, e. g. one or two years

I expect the latter suggestion to provide these benefits:
- number of patents will go down, because it becomes more cost efficient to innovate rather than hedge yourself
- reduced patent numbers restore practicality of patent research
- number of law suits will go down
- legal risk for tech companies is significantly reduced, allowing them to focus on their core business: technology

There is plenty of room to fine-tune this suggestion:
- also reduce the validity of existing patents to ten or five years
- challenge the validity of existing law on the grounds of the practical impossibility to comply

Patents aside: I was amazed how Samsung and LG dwarf Oracle, Google, Apple and all in the above graphic.

David, another correction please. ALL actions between Nokia and Qualcomm were settled in 2008, per Nokia’s press release from July 24 that year (see http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/archive/archiveshowpressrelease?newsid=1238093). Please amend your diagram, thanks.

Mark Durrant, Nokia communications.

The problem is lawyers have figured out that they can make tons of money suing everyone regardless if the client gets anything out of it, either way they make tons on billable hours, and smaller companies often cave in and pay damages or royalties. Still other companies have figured out that they don’t have to make anything at all just keep suing everyone and base all revenues on that.

It is these situations that have created such a mess, one in which we the end consumer end up paying the high cost of the game these greedy people are playing.

The article was very informative and well written. While searching for this kind of articles, I found another well written article titled”never ending mess of telecom patents”. to read more please
check..http://www.sinapseblog.com/2010/12/never-ending-mess-of-telecom-patents.html

Thanks

Fix the patent system problem root caused the speed? It seems the problem with the IPR system in the US and indeed world runs much deeper and systemic than simply speed and quality. For instance, there are plenty of 2G base stations being shipped in 2010 for a network useful life likely to extend over 20 years. Analog Cellular was about the same as were even older public safety and commercial trunking system. Probably speeding up over the generations although it may be more of a generations or not as revolutionary. However, meanwhile, the handset business is a “all the profits” are in the first 6 months type of business. So, getting a quality patent process that works say in days would address one issue, but how do you assign a patent lifetime to accomplish the goal of promoting innovation? The rational values would seem to be months in some cases to more than a decade in others – is there a compromise value or does it need to be content?

A lot of the patents they’re squabbling over should never have been granted, IMHO. They are supposed to be non-obvious but things like one-click ordering etc., are very obvious. Any hack in the right circumstances would come up with it or something similar. That’s what bugs me about a lot of software patents, you can patent anything that you do in the normal course of your work and, of course, so can someone else. Then it begins with the suing and the counter-suing and the predatory litigation and the defensive litigation and so on…

Nokia is dying….

Post “Who’s Suing Whom In The Telecoms Trade?” saved to fav. Thankyou.

You really make it seem so easy along with your presentation but I to find this matter to be actually one thing that I believe I might by no means understand. It kind of feels too complicated and very vast for me. I’m having a look forward on your next put up, I will attempt to get the grasp of it!