Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime Lawsuit

Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by mythz on Thursday February 04, 2016 @10:21AM (#11034450)

Now this Patent Troll has even more ammunition to shakedown companies in future whilst encouraging creation of even more low-life leeching NPE's.

Clearly Patent Trolls adds negative value, harms progress and increases cost of business - how long will this legal racketeering be allowed to continue?

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by JackFr on Thursday February 04, 2016 @10:24AM (#11034474)

> low-life leeching NPE's

NullPointerExceptions?

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by mythz on Thursday February 04, 2016 @10:25AM (#11034491)

Non Practicing Entities - i.e. trolls.

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by JackFr on Thursday February 04, 2016 @11:00AM (#11034798)

Damn. Cause if someone patented NullPointerExceptions they'd sure be rich.

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by jkyle on Thursday February 04, 2016 @11:29AM (#11035055)

Done. [1]

1. http://www.google.co.ug/patents/EP0881577A2?cl=fi

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by ScottBurson on Thursday February 04, 2016 @01:29PM (#11036061)

This is an extremely narrow patent that doesn't do anything like claiming all uses of null pointer exceptions. It just claims what strikes me as a rather minor optimization on how attempts to dereference a null pointer can be detected. It surprises me a little that it was considered worth patenting, but I guess it is fairly general in that it could be used in a lot of language implementations. The benefit is hardly worth writing home about, though.

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by jkyle on Friday February 05, 2016 @12:35PM (#11043027)

My tongue was firmly in cheek.

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by ScottBurson on Saturday February 06, 2016 @01:54AM (#11046850)

Oops! Sorry, I missed it :-)

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by bobwaycott on Thursday February 04, 2016 @01:31PM (#11036075)

What the fuck.

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by replies_to_all on Thursday February 04, 2016 @10:23AM (#11034465)

Or maybe they act to keep the big players honest?

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by mythz on Thursday February 04, 2016 @10:28AM (#11034505)

The big players can afford it, their existence just adds a barrier to entry and causes more harm to young/unestablished companies.

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Re:Apple Ordered to Pay $625M to Patent Troll in FaceTime La... by st3v3r on Thursday February 04, 2016 @01:05PM (#11035842)

If these were companies that actually did something, instead of waste everyone's time and resources, you'd have a point.

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