Apple partners with patent troll Digitude Innovations — and wow, what a deal

Venture Beat ^ | 12/10/11 | Matt Marshall

[TigerLikesRooster]

Apple partners with patent troll Digitude Innovations — and wow, what a deal

December 10, 2011 | Matt Marshall

Apple has partnered with a patent troll company called Digitude Innovations, VentureBeat has confirmed, allowing that company to attack the world’s largest phone manufacturers of smartphones.

In a clever deal that effectively gives Apple immunity from attack by the troll, Apple agreed to some cross-licensing deals that gave Digitude the ammunition for a heavy attack against Apple’s rivals. Digitude recently filed suit against RIM, HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Amazon, and Nokia. It did so at the International Trade Commission, a body that can quickly block the import of products deemed to infringe on patents. Moreover, it included four patents in its claim, two of which were owned by Apple earlier this year, before they were transferred to Digitude.

VentureBeat has confirmed the deal with a well-placed source. News that Apple had forged some sort of partnership with Digitude was first reported by TechCrunch.

[Myrddin]

It's behavior like this that guarantees I will never be an Apple customer and will steer people away from Apple as a vendor. When you can't innovate, litigate.

[wildandcrazyrussian]

This sounds very similar to the strategic partnership about 5 years ago between Microsoft and SCO (a scam company that was relying upon the original good reputation of "real SCO"). What new-SCO did was to sue a bunch of companies such as Autozone for infringing its (pretended) patents by daring to use Linux. This of course was all to MS's benefit, to cause turmoil in the non-MS market. It was absolutely provable that Linux was NOT based on the Unix that SCO claimed it owned (and provable that it didn't own Unix, since Bell Labs certainly never handed over rights to its own open-source project to a small private company).

SCO sued for billions of dollars in invented damages and hoped to cash in by using fear, but last I heard nothing came of it. Microsoft is still in business, too.

[Myrddin]

I was sorely tempted to say Apple is the new SCO. I was an SCO customer when they still produced a good product. When they morphed into a shell full of lawyers, I had no further interest in doing business with them. Linux gets the job done. Many of my colleagues in the UNIX/UseNIX community took time to mentor Linus Torvalds in the right direction to make Linux a quality implementation. Linus and the legions of other folks who ported and improved the old suite of UNIX programs have made a very usable environment. Stallman's GNU gcc was an important element of that success. Many companies quietly contributed to the success of Linux via the assistance that their programming staff fed back into the open software community efforts. It takes some immense hubris to claim ownership of all of that donated labor.

[Revolting cat!]

It’s a defensive move. Everybody is suing everybody, and the trend was started NOT by the tech companies but by the troll lawyers.