Nokia Tells Reddit It Infringes Some Patents in Lead-Up to IPO

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-19/nokia-tells-reddit-it-infringes-some-patents-in-lead-up-to-ipo

by thm • 2 years ago

77 54 2 years ago

skilled• 2 years ago

Also, from The Verge:

In an amended SEC filing ahead of its IPO, Reddit warned potential investors that "...on March 18, 2024, Nokia Technologies sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims."

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/19/24105658/nokia-tells-redd...

DannyBee2• 2 years ago

I mean you can replace "reddit" with anyone and it's still true.

Nokia has sued Apple, Amazon, Google, HP, ...

It has certainly threatened many more.

It's probably easier at this point to list the companies they aren't doing this to.

hello_kitty2• 2 years ago

Apple, Amazon, Google, HP

I can understand why Nokia might have sued these companies because all of them make phones/hardware and there could even be legitimate patent infringements.

I am confused why they sued Reddit though. They don't make any hardware.

Kye• 2 years ago

Why would that matter? You don't need to make anything to get a patent.

coldpie• 2 years ago

Patents don't have to relate to hardware or even any product. With software patents, you can get a patent for an idea, and now anyone else who comes up with that idea has to pay you money, despite never having seen or heard of your patent. Software patents are purely an extortion racket, they do not create new ideas or encourage innovation, they only place artificial restrictions. Nokia probably has some garbage patent like "put text on a screen," but dressed up in fancy language, so now they're suing whoever looks like they might have money.

Honestly, anyone who holds a software patent should be shunned from the industry.

DannyBee2• 2 years ago

Nokia sued Amazon (and HP) over video streaming. There are plenty of non-phone/non-hardware ones i didn't list.

justin66• 2 years ago

make phones/hardware and there could even be legitimate patent infringements

It might add some clarity here to point out that Nokia owns Bell Labs. Sadly, they can sue people over patent infringements that do not involve phones or hardware all day long.

tzs• 2 years ago

Here's a diagram [1] I made several years ago (the date on the file is 2010 but it may be from even earlier) showing who was suing whom. The arrows are from plaintiffs to defendants. Nokia was the biggest source of outgoing arrows.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/0nn7e1e

pavlov• 2 years ago

Nokia has so many patents from the early 2000s, maybe they own the patent for shitposting-but-on-mobile and just found it in the archives.

”Method and Mechanism for Asynchronously Pushing People’s Buttons on a Packet-Switched Mobile Network”

dougSF70• 2 years ago

*System* or Method and Mechanism for Asynchronously Pushing People’s Buttons on a Packet-Switched Mobile Network

davidw2• 2 years ago

"A method for shaking down companies about to IPO by surprising them with some claim in the hopes that the company will pay to make the problem go away without fighting the claim"

soneil• 2 years ago

Sure does feel like that, doesn't it. "That's a nice IPO you have there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it."

nickburns2• 2 years ago

colorable claims of law are colorable claims of law. let's not be dramatic. both parties will expend to work it out, and if either does so beyond their ultimate legal obligation, they'll be entitled to pursue a remedy for it under that colorable claim.

davidw2• 2 years ago

And it just happened that they found this thing right before the IPO.

I don't buy it.

suddenclarity• 2 years ago

Not much details in the original source:

Additionally, companies in the technology industry own large numbers of patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets and frequently enter into litigation based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. For example, on March 18, 2024, Nokia Technologies sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims. As we face increasing competition and become increasingly high profile, the possibility of receiving more intellectual property claims against us grows.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...

lifestyleguru• 2 years ago

What a beautiful dumpster fire.

bovermyer• 2 years ago

Can someone explain to me why patents are more helpful than harmful to society?

With stuff like this, it seems the reverse is true, but I might just be ignorant of how things work.

inanutshellus• 2 years ago

They're supposed to help small innovators get protection from the big guys when they invent something new, and then they're supposed to expire expediently so that they don't stifle innovation.

... but ...

Seems like that isn't their main use anymore.

master-lincoln• 2 years ago

Is it correct to assume most patents that are still in use and not expired are owned or licensed by big players?

gentleman11• 2 years ago

Imagine that you graduate university with some cool tech ideas. You develop a prototype and want to start building a business around it. You file a patent, hoping it will protect you long enough to get your company off the ground -- often a 7 year mission. Does it? Not necessarily, but it is nice, in theory anyway, to think that big tech can't just rip off your idea at scale the first time somebody sees it

In practice, my understanding is that you can't really afford to enforce your patent without a big legal team, and even then, the cost can sink your fledgling company

I think the real problem is the cost of accessing and navigating the legal system (including: the cost of invalidating bogus patents)

Retric• 2 years ago

There’s many ways of enforcing a patent, selling the claim to a patent troll is one way to cost your opponent quite a lot of money.

Getting reasonable licensing terms doesn’t require you to be able to win a case just cost them significantly more money if they don’t.

Scarblac• 2 years ago

That's an advantage for that student, sure. For society I'm not so certain.

throwawayk7h• 2 years ago

patents have a pretty short lifespan compared to copyright, so patent trolls can't leverage them for very long.

The alternative would be a gold rush every time a good idea is had. It would be chaos.

Patents could be shorter though. Ten years?

dghlsakjg• 2 years ago

Patents, especially computing patents, need to be less general as well.

If you can accidentally stumble into multiple patent violations without even trying, they aren't really novel ideas by definition.

For example "slide to unlock" is a digital patent, but I would argue that any number of physical implementations predate it, and the motion itself isn't novel or unique enough to merit a patent.

xhkkffbf• 2 years ago

I think everyone has a list of inventions that are so great that a patent is a fair way for society to reward the inventor. Alas, the personal lists are often much shorter than the patent offices' lists.

For me, the Polio vaccine is an easy one. Of course, Salk chose not to patent it, but I would have been happy to make him and his lab very rich.

i_k_k2• 2 years ago

One goal is to encourage inventors to publish their work, rather than hold them as trade secrets, so that others can learn from them -- and get eventually copy and extend them.

I've read a fair number of patents, both in and outside of software, and my biggest problem with software patents is that most of them are absolute crap: they are generally neither innovative nor insightful.

kelseyfrog• 2 years ago

Serious question: is it a testable hypothesis?

If it's not possible to verify that the system is fulfilling its purpose, and if the general consensus is that it doesn't fulfill its purpose, then what do we get out of saying that "encouraging inventors to publish their work" is it's purpose? It feels like it's mass self-delusion at that point, and for who?

yvdriess• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, in my field, the actual interesting ideas are kept a company secret. The ideas that are not being deployed for competitive advantage are shoveled into salami-sliced patents to be deployed as ammunition in the big-corpo patent warfare battlefield. But here I am talking about a field where implementation trumps ideas. In some fields, e.g. pharma, most of the work and expense lies in finding a needle in a haystack. Once the product hits the market, the secret is out.

In both cases, I feel that the patent system fails its goal to make trade secrets public.

aaa_aaa4• 2 years ago

Both patents and copyright laws are monopoly rights given by state. They are evil and should be abolished without exception. IP is not property, and empirical evindence shows they do more harm then good for humanity.

There are some avid supporters of this strain of thought. Here is an example: albeit old, this may give some background:

https://mises.org/library/book/against-intellectual-property

wahnfrieden• 2 years ago

Same goes for means of production property

Gormo2• 2 years ago

IP is not property, and empirical evindence shows they do more harm then good for humanity.

Although I agree with your position re IP not legitimately being property, I want to nitpick a bit here, and point out that empirical evidence can only substantiate empirical claims. Construing outcomes as "harm" or "good" is a normative evaluation, so this argument is an attempt to leap across the is-ought gap.

dwallin• 2 years ago

There's very little actual evidence for modern day patents being a value-add to society. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873339....

Particular industries, eg drug patenting, could be far better addressed with targeted legislation but at this point it's mostly just momentum and vested interests. It provides huge benefits for a small group and diffused costs. It's hard to imagine it being possible to get enough momentum to change things.

interestica2• 2 years ago

But then we wouldn't have the popcicle patent war of the 1920s

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2005/spring/p....

whelchel• 2 years ago

This is an amalgamation of ideas I’ve read and may be totally from elsewhere, but I think a good approach here would be to handle this more dynamically.

Every patent is taxed at some arbitrary rate - say 3% a year. The catch is the patent holder decides how much it’s worth. Low value means low tax. However, whatever value you pick is an open price for licensing by anyone else.

Ultimately, use it or lose it. If you don’t think it’s valuable and someone else does, the world still benefits.

Tune the tax percentage based on how much you want to hurt patent trolls vs impact on actual long term R&D

danaris• 2 years ago

The problem is not patents, as such. The problem is the recent spate of patents of ideas, rather than inventions.

How patents are supposed to work:

You come up with an idea for a novel device. You spend time, money, and effort figuring out how to create your novel device. Once you actually have it working—or at least a detailed schematic, if building a prototype might be cost-prohibitive—you file a patent. That patent does two things: First, it ensures that, for the duration of patent protection, you have sole rights to produce the novel device. Second, it ensures that once that duration expires, anyone with the resources to obtain the raw materials and manpower can create as many of your novel devices as they want.

Then in comes the information revolution. There's much less demand for novel devices that do specific things; now people just want software that can run on general-purpose computers. Software is already protected under copyright law, so there's no logical reason for it to be patentable—but some people still want it to be patentable too...with a twist. They don't want to just be able to patent a specific implementation of an idea in software. They want to be able to patent the idea itself, so all they need to do is come up with a thought of a kind of software you could write, translate that thought into patent language, and submit it to the patent office.

This is how you end up with idiocy like saying you own the sole rights to "selling people stuff by adding it to a digital shopping cart—over the internet!"

TL;DR: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Get rid of software patents, and the whole concept of "patents on ideas", but keep patents on novel devices.

fulafel• 2 years ago

It's regulatory capture. There's a network of big corps that make cross patenting agreements, and keep others out of the market, benefiting from the patent system. This kind of court case is the rare spillover that normally stays below the surface.

ksec• 2 years ago

One can argue there many be legitimate patents with Networks, both wired and wireless. As well as with Video Codec and ( possibly ) Video Streaming. Something at least Nokia contributed a little very long time ago. And many others things from Audio to even Power management.

But Reddit doesn't do any of that. Reddit does nothing novel, both Technological or as a business. Nokia might as well sue every single web site on planet earth.

I am generally more tolerant of patents than most of HN. It is not an all evil system. But I think this definitely crosses the line that may require a full on, all out war against Nokia.

sonicanatidae• 2 years ago

I think this is the very first time that I've ever cheered for a patent troll.

meepmorp• 2 years ago

Maybe not cheer for them, but I’m having trouble getting mad about it tbh

IronWolve• 2 years ago

A engineer at my work tweaked a web irc client to work on the nokia candybar for fun during the cdpd (pre 2g) days. My first 3G test phone was a nokia brick that could also act as a heater. Fun times.

Nokia Tells Reddit It Infringes Some Patents in Lead-Up to IPO

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