Patents have become nothing more than a legal pretense for extortion. The system should absolutely be abolished as it currently stands.
Would be nice if the article had a link to the patent. Seems like a little journalistic effort would be worth it.
Every single feature is being patented, it’s ridiculous.
For perspective, the watch division makes between $35 to $40 billion annually.
Holy cow…
Crazy, I dont think it is all because of the haptics though. This seems like a noteworthy amount for them
By the time Apple pays this, assuming they do. They will have made at least that much in extra profits from the original $5.7 billion by investing it.
Sure, but they also have to pay interest on the balance starting at the moment the judgement was entered.
Only having to pay the interest of 5.7 billion sounds like a better deal, no?
On one hand, you could almost certainly earn a higher return than the court requires you to pay in interest… but, if you had 5.7 billion dollars to invest in that kind of play then a plaintiff would likely succeed in getting a court order to force you to pay.
It would be cheaper to just assasinate the lawyers and the other party.
Its always nice to find good news in my feed
How is this good news? Haptic feedback has existed since the 1970s. This patent should be invalid.The patent is not on haptic feedback. The patent is on a very specific means of implementing haptic feedback using ferrofluids and electromagnetic actuators that it is claimed (and Apple deemed it good enough to copy, so presumably truly) allows for both a smaller implementation than typical mechanical haptic feedback (i.e. the off-balance-flywheel approach of phones of old), while also allowing for low- or zero- noise compared to “speaker or piezo” based haptic feedback.
There are a lot of shit patents in the world, but on a surface reading at least this seems sufficiently novel that I don’t see why it should be invalid. One also presumes that if Apple had any grounds to invalidate it on prior-art they would have done so.
So I looked into this and you are right and I am wrong. Deleting my previous posts since there’s more to this case than just haptics.
Well, all credit to you!
Sometimes Lemmy can be surprising in a good way :^).
Even if it’s like catching Al capone on tax fraud, it’s still good to get the baddie.
Rewarding a patent troll is never a good thing. It just means no one will be able to use haptic feedback without paying a toll.Are they really a patent troll though? It’s apparently a headphone company.
They have one headphone license for one model from crossair, that is worth less money that what they spent on lawyers for this trial. They are a patent troll.
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