Apple moves to halt Lodsys lawsuits

Apple moved to stop patent troll Lodsys' legal shakedown of iOS developers, filing a motion to intervene in the proceedings, writes Florian Mueller: "While I don't have any confirmation from anyone that Apple has agreed to cover those defendants' costs and potential risks, it's hard to imagine how else this could work."

• [pjcamp]

  Then Apple squatted on someone else’s trademark and stole software from a kid.

  All in a day’s work for the second worst polluter in the tech biz.

  Think different.

• [Tagishsimon]

  Hmm. But long reading of Groklaw suggests to me that Florian does little more than run interference for microsoft. Why on earth would we believe anything at all he has to say about anything; not least about MS competitors.

  As an example: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110605163439627 dealing with another tranche of his very very very premature and mainly stupid Android FUD.

  I kinda think it’s a pity that BB has given him a platform without at least qualifying his apparant position.

  There more at the top of this search:
  http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=florian+muller+%2Bmicrosoft&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

• [millie fink]

  That Florian is one helluva witer!

• [Anonymous]

  http://www.applepatent.com/2011/06/lodsys-anatomy-of-bullshit-claim-chart.html

• [Todd Knarr]

  Apple could easily intervene without having to indemnify the other developers. There’s the doctrine of patent exhaustion, most likely. Apple can intervene by simply claiming that they already have a license from Lodsys to make and sell systems based on the Lodsys patents, and if those systems were legal under the license the Lodsys has no further recourse against the people who merely use those systems.

  The initial case would be Jazz Photo Corp. v. United States International Trade Commission, 264 F. 3d 1094 (Fed. Cir. 2001). The most recent to address the issue would be Quanta Computer, Inc., et al., Petitioners v. LG Electronics, Inc. where the Supreme Court ruled against LGE and held that since Intel had a license to LGE’s patents, LGE had no recourse against customers who’d bought Intel’s chips and used them in computers (even though LGE had tried by contract with Intel to prevent that particular use).

  • [retchdog]

    still wouldn’t cover the case when a developer “rolls their own,” instead of using an apple api.

    it’s a scary thought really, that a coder could effectively not be allowed to write their own, say, regular expression parser, and be forced to lean on a Big Corporate Brother who has the $ to play the silly patent game. digital share-cropping.