Samsung and Apple to Discuss Settling Patent Infringement Lawsuits Discussion

[Ryan Punzalan]

The CEOs of Apple, Samsung, and their legal teams will meet in San Francisco next month to discuss patent disputes that are pending in 10 countries.

Read the full content of this Article: Samsung and Apple to Discuss Settling Patent Infringement Lawsuits

Related Articles:

• Apple and Samsung Are the Only Profitable Smartphone Makers
• Apple Nearly Doubles iPhone Sales, Profits

[Ed Hardy]

Complicating the process tremendously will be the fact that the patents in question often defy logic. For example, can you believe that Apple has a patent on the ability for the user of a smartphone to access other tasks on the device while on a call? This is an example of something that no patent ever should have been granted on. And in any case, it certainly shouldn't have been granted to Apple -- companies had been making phones that did this for close to a decade before Apple even filed the patent in 2008.

Apple and Samsung have been fighting patent wars not really to protect their intellectual property, but as a way to attack each other. They are using as weapons patents that (for the most part) should never have been granted. In the end, they will come to a settlement in which money might not even change hands, as each company could agree to license the other's patents.

Basically, it's a contest to see who has the better lawyers. It really has nothing to do with smartphones, which is why Brighthand doesn't cover the minutia of their wrangling.
-

[Mitlov]

There are so many patents in the technology world that don't make sense. My favorite image summing up the problem:



This isn't meant to pick on Apple specifically; Microsoft's patent lawsuits over Android are equally non-sensible. It's an industry-wide problem right now.

[Drillbit]

Apple needs to settle, not just with Samsung but with Motorola. And work with patent deals with LG and Qualcomm. The reason for this is that they lack LTE patents. They have been using Qualcomm as an indemnifying cover, claiming that if they use a Qualcomm modem chipset on their phones, it indemnifies them from Samsung and Motorola patents since many of these patents were cross licensed to Qualcomm which used them on the chip.

The problem is that as you know the optimal solution for LTE is to integrate the modem into the main SoC. That reduces power consumption, real estate, bus noise, removes things like bus buffering and all that. If Apple elects to use an external LTE modem on their LTE devices, they are in a fundamental architectural disadvantage vs. their Android competition that do feature integrated LTE into their main SoCs, e.g. new generation phones that use the Qualcomm S4 like the One S and One XL.

If Apple is to integrate LTE into their main SoC, you cannot use an external modem chip to indemnify as a patent umbrella, Apple will need to license all the necessary patents, as the patent responsibility now shifts to the main SoC's parent. Unfortunately for Apple, that happens to be a big group, which includes LG, Samsung, Qualcomm, Motorola, Nokia, Alcatel, Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson, and so on.