Name-Calling is OK for schoolchildren who don't know better
?but it won't help you or your readers understand how these cases will work thru courts.
Yes, Microsoft has been aggressive in insisting that others license its patents. But you don't have to ignore the fact that the whole mobile industry has been rife with this behavior since long before Microsoft was a player.
Look to the citations that Motorola blocked Japanese rivals in the 1990's by refusing to license GSM patents. This appears to me the first realization that if a standard was going to be successful, the authors of its patents would have to declare them essential in the open, and guarantee that they would be fairly licensed. They have played hardball since their first involvement in standards, but the societal standards have changed.
Motorola knows the obligations it made to the UN's ITU and the NGO ISO/IEC's MPEG (which ?own? the h.264 standard) because a Moto rep at one time chaired the committee that brought the standard together. MPEG has a clear FRAND policy (?reasonable? was not explicitly defined, but NonDiscriminatory was clearly laid out as offering it on the same terms to all) and I can't imagine any tortured reasoning reading of history under which Moto has been charging the billions of other h.264 applications 2.X% . Nor can Motorola's targeting of a single rival for this ridiculous fee be seen any other way than a tit-for-tat discrimination that is explicitly what the h.264's non-discriminitation pledge was meant to preclude.
Maybe there's some way that Moto will be actually able to defend this claim, but US courts have found industry FRAND pledges to be legally binding on all patent holders? look at the RAMBUS story for a famous error by a company illegally asserting standard-essential patents, or read the Western Wisconsin order in Apple v Moto for explicit citations. This looks like Moto heading into a PR disaster and possibly some serious damages (courts have stripped patent-holders of rights when they abuse FRAND), all for some short-term messing with Microsoft's legal team.
So another read is that Moto has been aggressive with FRAND patents for a couple of decades, and while it should have no trouble asserting its non-standards-essential patents such as push email, this one looks like a big loser for a firm that knows it won't win.
Despite Microsoft being a big bully that supposedly started it first. Waaaaah!
> If discharging a firearm isn't illegal, then this really serves no purpose.
Nonsense. Since the purpose of shooting is to injure or kill (or threaten same), law enforcement has proper concern about discharge, whether legal (unlikely) or not. Immediate notification of a weapon being fired at a give place allows quick response to injuries, rapid alertness about cars speeding from the scene, etc.
This technology has detected and caught murderers in other cities (e.g., East Palo Alto, CA) and it's insane to think the cops want it just because they're bored. Unlike security cams everywhere that just smell like Big Brother, there's very little risk of non-firearm activity triggering them, and therefore, they help protect people in high-crime areas.
PS: Smoke detectors are designed to be cheap (for maximum usage) and therefore don't have much logic to distinguish between false and real alarms. Manufacturers design for zero false negatives at the risk of many false positives (e.g., roasting a chicken in a greasy oven can set it off). In contrast, the microphone systems have some ability to distinguish between noises before alerting the cops.
×
Email This Story
This feature is only available to registered users. You can register here or sign in to use it.
Name-Calling is OK for schoolchildren who don't know better
?but it won't help you or your readers understand how these cases will work thru courts.
Yes, Microsoft has been aggressive in insisting that others license its patents. But you don't have to ignore the fact that the whole mobile industry has been rife with this behavior since long before Microsoft was a player.
Look to the citations that Motorola blocked Japanese rivals in the 1990's by refusing to license GSM patents. This appears to me the first realization that if a standard was going to be successful, the authors of its patents would have to declare them essential in the open, and guarantee that they would be fairly licensed. They have played hardball since their first involvement in standards, but the societal standards have changed.
Motorola knows the obligations it made to the UN's ITU and the NGO ISO/IEC's MPEG (which ?own? the h.264 standard) because a Moto rep at one time chaired the committee that brought the standard together. MPEG has a clear FRAND policy (?reasonable? was not explicitly defined, but NonDiscriminatory was clearly laid out as offering it on the same terms to all) and I can't imagine any tortured reasoning reading of history under which Moto has been charging the billions of other h.264 applications 2.X% . Nor can Motorola's targeting of a single rival for this ridiculous fee be seen any other way than a tit-for-tat discrimination that is explicitly what the h.264's non-discriminitation pledge was meant to preclude.
Maybe there's some way that Moto will be actually able to defend this claim, but US courts have found industry FRAND pledges to be legally binding on all patent holders? look at the RAMBUS story for a famous error by a company illegally asserting standard-essential patents, or read the Western Wisconsin order in Apple v Moto for explicit citations. This looks like Moto heading into a PR disaster and possibly some serious damages (courts have stripped patent-holders of rights when they abuse FRAND), all for some short-term messing with Microsoft's legal team.
So another read is that Moto has been aggressive with FRAND patents for a couple of decades, and while it should have no trouble asserting its non-standards-essential patents such as push email, this one looks like a big loser for a firm that knows it won't win.
Despite Microsoft being a big bully that supposedly started it first. Waaaaah!