Why do the manufacturers using an operating system have to pay patent royalties based on the operating system? https://rcpmag.com/articles/2014/08/04/microsoft-sues-samsung.aspx In 2011, Samsung signed a contract agreeing to pay Microsoft royalties for using the Linux-based Android mobile operating system in Samsung tablets and mobile phones. As part of the deal, Samsung also agreed to market Windows Phone devices and the two companies shared some patented technologies. Now Microsoft is complaining that Samsung has &quot;stopped complying with its agreement,&quot; according to a Friday announcement attributed to David Howard, Microsoft corporate vice president and deputy general counsel. The announcement of the lawsuit heavily implied that Samsung stopped complying with the 2011 contract after Microsoft announced the acquisition of rival device maker Nokia last September. Moreover, Howard contended that Samsung is resisting now because it currently makes more money from its Android-based devices than it did when it inked the deal back in 2011. Why do the manufacturers using an operating system have to pay patent royalties based on the operating system? Shouldn't Google be the one to pay, also why isn't Microsoft also suing Google? I thought it really strange and that it didn't make sense for a manufacturing company to pay for a generic operating system patent. Also, isn't there a 15 year expiry, meaning the patent should be invalid right now? It was from some years ago, so I was wondering what happened and if the patent still applies and the patent is also valid in other regions. Even if they agreed to pay, if the patent is invalid, should Samsung really have to pay Microsoft?
First, just to be clear, this is an old story from 2014. Second, Microsoft wasn't seeking payments for patents on the OS per se, but on the drivers for the chips that connect the cell phone to the cellular networks. In 2014 Microsoft bought Nokia. Part of Nokia's value was that it held a whole bunch of fundamental patents for cellular communications. Microsoft was suing Samsung on the basis of those patents. Samsung in turn claimed that Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia, and their attempt to charge for the Nokia patents violated the terms of a 2011 agreement between Samsung and Microsoft. Samsung and Microsoft settled the dispute in 2015. The terms of the settlement were confidential. Microsoft and Google did wage a separate patent battle in the courts of the US and Germany. This was also settled in 2015. This is all water under the bridge now. In 2018 Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium of companies that agreed to license their patent portfolios to Linux royalty-free, and agree not to assert their patents against Linux systems.
Yes, once law is passed and Facebook is designated under it as a &quot;designated digital platform corporation&quot; then it will be obligated either pay remuneration to all &quot;registered news business corporations&quot; in Australia for content they voluntarily post on Facebook, or not allow any Australian news on their site at all. The same applies to Google and in theory any other digital platform corporation designated by the Australian government. The law makes no distinction according to where the content is shown, but only Australian news businesses can benefit from it. The purpose of the law is to &quot;address a bargaining power imbalance that exists between digital platforms and Australian news businesses&quot; and amends the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 to create a &quot;News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code&quot;. Currently Australian news companies, like any other Facebook user voluntarily posting content on the site, are paid nothing by Facebook. Similarly, Google doesn't pay anyone for the content the indexed on their site, essentially also voluntarily, since it's trivial to opt out of this. The Australian government sees this as the result of unfair competition. According to them, Facebook and Google have abused their power to force Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and other Australian news companies to agree to put their content on their sites for free. This new bargaining code seeks to solve this problem by forcing designated digital platform corporations and registered news business corporations into final offer arbitration over remuneration if they can't come to a negotiated agreement. Any arbitration determination would require that Facebook or Google to pay some amount of remuneration, and the determination would be based in part on &quot;the benefit (whether monetary or otherwise) of the registered news business’ covered news content to the designated digital platform service&quot;. This would include the benefit they receive by showing the content outside of Australia. A key part of the law is it's &quot;non-differentiation&quot; requirements. This would prohibit Facebook and Google from showing or indexing Australian news corporations' content differently depending on whether they're forced to pay them money or not, or even whether they're an officially registered news business or not. This means Facebook and Google aren't allowed to choose to show some Australian news businesses' content and not others. If they show any of their content then they must show content from them all. If they show content from a registered Australian news business anywhere in the world then they must pay for it. This leaves Facebook and Google with three options if the law passes: Pay for news content from all registered Australian news business. Don't show or index any Australian news business content. Remove their presence completely from Australia to prevent Australia from enforcing their law on them.
To me it appears that your agreement includes 30GB at high speed, and unlimited data at 2G or better. The phone company may have valid internal reasons to offer those 10GB at better-than-2G speeds, for instance the lack of a 2G network in your area. Since they are the only party that can reasonably throttle the network data speed (it's their network), you can't be held responsible for the fact that they delivered data faster than they promised.
If you are producing and selling it, that is an absolute bar to patentability by anyone else (this is known as prior art). So if you are using it very publicly before they file, they can't get the patent.
It's not legal The terms that you agree when you enter a contract can only be changed if: the contract provides for variation of its terms and then, only in accordance with that procedure. This may allow unilateral changes - these are common in ongoing relationships like telephone and ISP contracts but it appears from the Kickstarter page that this was not the case here. the parties agree to vary the contract either by deed or by another contract. If by deed then the law of making deeds must be followed, if by contract then the laws of contract must be followed. You mention &quot;around $70AUD&quot; which leads me to guess that you are in Australia. If you were there when you entered the contract then the Australian Consumer Law will apply to the transaction and, more generally, to William Painter since they explicitly &quot;do business in&quot; Australia because they ship there. It is illegal to make misleading and deceptive claims under the ACL and the fines can be huge. Perhaps a note pointing this out to them and letting them know that if they waive their fees in you case(s), you wont feel the need to report them to the ACCC.
Amazon and most similar vendors (e.g. Wal-Mart) requires vendors to warrant to them that the products sold do not violate intellectual property laws and indemnifying Amazon for any harm it suffers if the representation is inaccurate. (I came to learn this in intellectual property litigation involving a Wal-Mart supplier and in separate patent infringement attorney malpractice litigation involving other vendors of different firms.) But it doesn't generally do any independent due diligence to confirm that these representations are true. As a practical matter, determining if something infringes any existing patent is a non-trivial matter, and even in cases where patent infringement lawsuits are brought by lawyers in court who have done due diligence, the validity of the patent is upheld in only about 50% of the cases that go to trial. The basic problem is that there is no definitive way to index patents that isn't vulnerable to an invention which is infringed being described in a different way than you are conceptualizing it for your search. Generally speaking, simply buying a patent infringing good as an end user in the good faith belief that it is not infringing is not a violation of patent law or actionable, and the knowledge that large firms require representations with legal consequences from their vendors probably suffices to show good faith. But if you plan to use the purchased good in some product that will be resold to others that incorporates it, that might be an infringement. If you are a prospective vendor, there are firms that specifically do patent searchers to determine if there is an infringement, but they aren't cheap. Typically the fee would start at $5,000-$10,000 and go up from there, and typically that is for a non-guaranteed search. An opinion letter from a patent practitioner would be necessary to be really sure (assuming that the patent practitioner or non-patent practitioner search doesn't find a clear infringement which could happen quickly and be cheap by comparison) and that would be much more expensive, maybe $25,000-$100,000, if it wasn't a particularly close case. On the other hand, if what you are primarily concerned about is the design of the bit that plugs into the Apple product, rather than all aspects of the product, it is a relatively trivial matter to determine if the connector involves an industry standard which is either in the public domain or widely available for license at a modest price for manufacturers, in which Apple does not itself claim a patent, or a proprietary design, in which Apple claims rights. USB-C connections, for example, are an industry standard connector, discussed here, which would give you some further leads. In contrast, earlier Apple-promoted (and developed) Lightning and MagSafe connectors, are proprietary connectors, which would potentially be infringing and would require more analysis.
Software doesn't infringe any patents. Creating a product that includes the software may infringe the patent, and may infringe that patent because the software is included, but the software itself doesn't. Software on its own doesn't have any effect that could be patented, only as part of some machine. On the other hand, if you want to distribute software that is under the GPL v3.0 license, then a requirement is that you give everyone a patent license for all patents that would be infringed by using the software (as part of some machine), and if you are not the patent holder, then in practice that means you are not allowed to distribute the software. With your grand plan that you write software and then let the end users do the patent infringement, that will backfire in two ways: First, you'd be likely sued for contributory patent infringment, because it is you who enables the patent infringemnt. Second, you can be sued for copyright infringement because you have no license that allows you distribution of the software, depending on the Open Source license used.
This is unlikely to be a problem. There are many companies that have already registered software-related trademarks prominently involving an X or the name Xcom. That Twitter has changed to X branding does not substantially change this general situation. With trademarks, the general question is whether similar branding causes confusion. It is unlikely that someone would confuse the X display server / X.Org project / X.Org Foundation with the social media service now being branded as X or x.com. Of course, anyone can sue anyone, the real question is whether that's possible successfully. Here, I have my doubts that x.com could successfully demonstrate confusion in its favour. It is worth noting that the X.Org Foundation does not seem to hold any relevant trademark registrations at all. This is not unusual for Open Source software projects and doesn't mean that X.Org has no rights, but does make a defense a bit more difficult. However, there also doesn't seem to be a relevant registration by the ex-Twitter company or by the X Corp. The x.org domain name is unlikely to be threatened. If the x.org domain name was being used in bad faith it could maybe be seized, but the X.Org Foundation has a pretty strong claim on this name. For historical context, both x.com and x.org were among the six single-letter .org/.net/.com domain names when such registrations were stopped in 1993. But while x.com has been pretty much dormant since that company was renamed to PayPal, x.org has (I think) always been associated with the display server software, and has been used continuously by the X.Org Foundation since its establishment in 2004.