Apple Steps Up in Lodsys Lawsuits, Files Motion to Intervene
FOSS Patents reports that Apple has filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuits Lodsys has filed against seven iOS developers.
Apple Inc. ("Apple") hereby respectfully moves to intervene as a defendant and counterclaim plaintiff in the above-captioned action brought by plaintiff Lodsys, LLC ("Lodsys") against seven software application developers (collectively, "Developers"), forallegedly infringing U.S. Patent Nos. 7,222,078 (the "078 patent") and 7,620,565 (the "565 patent" and, collectively, the "patents in suit"). Apple seeks to intervene because it is expresslyl icensed to provide to the Developers products and services that embody the patents in suit, free from claims of infringement of those patents.
With the move, Apple is trying to interject itself in the lawsuits that it has otherwise not been a participant in. FOSS Patents believes its likely that Apple will be allowed in, though Lodsys can oppose the motion.
Also, while there's been no public confirmation, the site believes its likely that Apple has agreed to cover the defendant's costs and potential risks as "it's hard to imagine how else this could work."
Apple states explicitly that the sued app developers are "are individuals or small entities with far fewer resources than Apple and [...] lack the technical information, ability, and incentive to adequately protect Apple's rights under its license agreement."
Overall, it's good news for the developers affected by the lawsuit, but is still just the beginning of the process.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Top Rated Comments
That case is completely different. If you followed i4i vs Microsoft, you'd know i4i is not a patent troll. They had been partners with Microsoft when building the technology and they were mostly responsible for it hence why they hold the patent on it. Before the project ended, Microsoft cut all ties, dumped i4i and implemented the technology themselves into Office without giving i4i any credit or compensation.
Microsoft got what they deserved in that case. Not to mention the whole hypocrisy of "patents are bad! See what i4i did to us ?" and then turning around and suing tons of other players for patents and threatening Linux with veiled "Linux might infringe some of our patents you know!" comments.
Please don't compare i4i to a simple patent troll.
Not that the company had real choice here. Not doing so would have tarnished its reputation and viability of the platform. But still, it's cool, or smart, from their part.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20070465-248/apple-tries-to-intervene-in-lodsys-lawsuit/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Interesting quote from there
now we know part of the reason for the 30% cut ...