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Samsung agrees to pay Apple $548M

The jury in the case was unable to understand that the "pinch to zoom" patent was meaningless because of prior art. Our patent system is so broken that it cannot even understand how much prior art invalidates so many new patent applications.
 
This is the statement I like:

"In the filing Apple said it disputes Samsung's asserted rights to reimbursement. Apple also wants Samsung to pay $1.8 million in court costs, something Samsung said it has no intention of doing."

Wow...... Add Samsung's court costs and you have to wonder what is going on in our legal system. Just wow.
 
All these patent messes demonstrate a real need for an international patent process that everyone agrees to, if that's ever possible. There is so much patenting of prior art or what's painfully obvious to experts in the field that the number of patents should be sharply limited in the future. Just as patents should be limited, when granted, there should be an enforcement mechanism in place that's fast, efficient and economic and be based on a law enforcement model that treats intellectual property just like any other. This would benefit everyone. Also I feel patent duration should vary depending on the innovation and originality of the patent. It's time for everyone to sit down and really define what intellectual property really is, just like physical property has legal titles.
 
I agree with Arthur that we need a single international patent system, and also a pre-established FRAND system as we have in some European industries so that if you identify during development you are likely to violate that patent there is a clear cost to be paid and then you can choose to either pay it or design around it. The current system where companies such as Qualcomm won't accept industry agreed FRAND agreements and US courts award arbitary amounts is totally broken and only benefits lawyers.
 
Arthur Hanson said:
... there should be an enforcement mechanism in place that's fast, efficient and economic and be based on a law enforcement model that treats intellectual property just like any other...
Click to expand...

Given that it mainly is a bureacratic system I unfortunately don't see that ever happening. Also intellectual property is more than patents: trade secrets, trademarks, copyright, ... and for EDA specifically it also means some bunch of RTL code or a mixed-signal block. I also don't get what you mean with 'like any other' in your sentence; to me patents are something fundamentally different than the rest.
One big improvement would be to not allow patents on things where other intellectial property rights are available; e.g. no software patents because of copyright; no design patents because of trademarks, etc.
 
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