A tool who at least is brave enough to log in.

Although, I guess that insult cancels out because you didn't log in.

Victory again!

They did - they made a shitload, in fact - statins have made a fortune, but they're also used to bankroll more expensive programs or drug development lines that may not see fruition for a decade or more, or ones that simply go nowhere. The regulatory nature of the industry and the complexity of drug design make it hilariously expensive to develop new drugs.

The billions coming in from statins were certainly providing rich payments to the top brass and shareholders, but they were also keeping a lot a organic chemists in jobs lower down the totem pole.

They can also dispute the "fair" cost offered to them - which is what they did.

The several hundred other FRAND patents they seem to have paid up for just fine. Odd that the only ones that are in doubt are very specific obscure ones dug out of a FRAND pool belonging to companies they recently were in a design patent suit with, eh?

There aren't that many FRAND suits being thrown at them, relative to the number of patents they licence, and it seems to be specifically with companies they have got into a beef with. If Apple really weren't playing by the rules (and negotiating the fair rate is part of those rules, as much as Samsung wants to class that as "refusing to pay") then there would be a hell of a lot more suits.

Nokia's suit against Apple was for a patent included in a radio chip that Nokia did not make, but was a third party part that Apple bought as an off-the-shelf GSM system for the iPhone. This included the licence cost for all the patents that went into it, except it seems for that one very specific one somehow. Funny that, eh?

The patent in question that Samsung is suing over is probably the same - I doubt it's in a chip or component that Samsung itself sells. It's more likely to be in one of the off-the-shelf radio chips that dozens of phone manufacturers use - Qualcomm makes those, for example, for GSM phones. You can buy a standard part from them and put it in your phone design. The licencing for the hundreds of patents is part of the cost (or so you would think).

I'm not arguing that Apple doesn't make some ridiculous moves in litigation (something that I hope they'll stop doing with a change in leadership once all of the current nonsense is tied up), but I'm not buying that they don't want to play fair on FRAND patent costs - there are just so many, and they are so fundamental to the operation of any mobile device they are just not going to take that chance. These single-patent-out-of-many suits that they are facing just don't seem like the usual state of affairs. If apple was commonly ducking out of playing fair and paying the right rates then they would be seeing *a lot* more lawsuits of this type.

In your opinion. This is the point I'm making, and the point that Apple realised. Better in what way?

- Sound quality? At first yes - the amp in the early iPods wasn't as good as some of the others out there, but this is no longer the case (everyone pretty much uses the same chips for standard parts like this now)
- Storage space? Depends what you're looking for. The first iPod didn't have as much space as a Nomad (so lame!) but it was physically smaller.
- Price? It cost more, but if it's still value for money for the people that buy it, what's the issue? You are not obligated to buy one.
- UI? Hands down this is where the iPod beat everything else and the reason it became so popular. It was easy to use, and people loved it.

I can see that you're not going to be swayed from your rock solid opinion that Apple's success is anything other than some sort of black magic marketing and convincing people to buy something over many generations by somehow making them ignore "how shit" it is, over and over and over again, but such is life. If you're unwilling to look at the reasons for the success of a product then there;s not much debate.

But that's not what you're doing. You are saying that people are being fooled by the marketing and are not buying products that would be better for them. You are free to hate Apple as much as you like. Froth, wail, scrunch up your eyes and wish really, really hard that all their success has nothing to do with making products that people actually want to buy all you like, but don't be surprised if people call you on it.

There's a difference between not liking a product (even call it shit if you like - it's an opinion), and stating that the success of that product and its successors/derivatives in the marketplace over a decade are solely down to clueless sheep falling for a marketing trick.

Marketing will only take you so far before the shit starts to stink. No matter how hard you try to wish it wasn't so, but consumers actually *like* Apple's products. You don;t have to - that's fine - but you can't dismiss people who buy them as somehow being "fooled" because they didn't make the same choices as you did.

That's exactly the point - Apple contended that the fees Samsung was asking were not Fair and Non-discriminatory. It's not easy to determine exactly what the value is, due to the way many companies simply cross licence, but I think it's 'reasonable' to assume that 2.4% per device is not it as a cash sum. Apple absolutely wants to pay a fair rate, as they do for every other frand patent they licence.

Remember, this is for a single patent in a large pool of standards-essential patents. If a single, relatively insignificant one, is worth that much, then how is anyone able to afford to compete with Samsung? Unless the amount charged to everyone else who uses it (and that list is essentially everyone who ever made a wireless device that worked on a CDMA network) was different to the amount Samsung was asking of Apple.

Apple is simply not going to contest it in court if they believe it's legitimate - like I mentioned, it's one of hundreds of patents in FRAND pools that they licence as part of the cost of making iOS devices compatible with wireless standards (3G/GSM/CDMA/WiFi/BT/etc).

You wouldn't use this as a standard method of operation (not pay and wait for lawsuits) because then no one would submit patents into FRAND pools in the first place, and you'd be stuck with a total mess when it came to things that needed interoperable standards.

The only companies that have raised a stink about it are companies that have been involved in expensive design patent lawsuits with Apple... against Apple. Under every day situations, the FRAND system works well. We didn't start seeing FRAND abuse until Moto/Nokia/Samsung started to hunt around for a way to 'strike back' at Apple for suing them. It's all very convenient, and very bizarre. If Apple really aren't playing by the rules, why is it only with very specific single patents cherry picked out of a FRAND pool that happen to belong to people they're "at war" with? Surely if they're this off the mark on their obligations to licence the common pool patents than there should be hundreds of lawsuits aimed at them from everyone who put into the pool (let's not even get into the fact that you often don't licence the patents individually and instead pay for them collectively when you purchase an off the shelf part for your device, with the various royalties being handled by the cost of the component as is the case with many of Qualcomm's and Broadcom's parts, yet somehow Apple needs a special extra licence to use one of Nokia's patents rolled into a Qualcomm chip over and above the licencing cost Apple already paid...).

The big problem with statins (from a pharma standpoint) is that they hit on the perfect one right away and the patent is soon going to expire, opening the door to generics. This is great for the patients, but it stops the money train.

All of the work on alternate statins that can be patented (throwing new function groups on there, changing the core structure but keeping the interaction with the target receptors etc the same) has resulting in a less effective drug.

With atorvastatin, and others like simvastatin going generic before a new patented, more effective (or as effective) analogue could be developed, the pharma industry has gone into panic. They were some of the must lucrative drugs of all time.

This was a FRAND lawsuit - I'm amazed it got as far as it did (Samsung's litigation is... well, if not illegal, it's certainly wide of the gentlemanly thing to do), so it's not like the damages suit that Apple won over the design patents it held. There's no financial losses to Samsung from Apple using this patent, other than the licencing fees, since it's in the pool. Samsung's got no claim to loss of earnings or brand confusion, or any of that angle of attack (whether you believe it's bullshit or not), just the angle that Apple doesn't want to pay up for a patent that they literally must use (since it's in a FRAND pool attached to a component that is essential to make the radio hardware work). The argument boils down to "They're asking too much money for this" on one side and "They don't want to pay, we believe x is a fair price" on the other. The solution is either "Apple pays what Samsung asks", "Apple pays what a judge thinks is fair" or "Apple stops selling devices affected by this".

I'm willing to bet Apple's lawyers selected the latter, given the choice, given how long this has been drawn out.

They'll still appeal it, of course, but even if they lose it's not the end of the world for them.

It's interesting that in both the Motorola case and the Samsung case, a single FRAND patent out of the whole slew of patents involved in the radio hardware that just so happen to belong to the respective litigant are miraculously found to be non-compliant after Apple files lawsuits over design patents. Given how sure Samsung and Motorola were, I assumed everyone else who had a patent in that pool would also sue Apple, since it seems very odd that Apple would pay for a hundred or so patents and then just "refuse to pay" for a couple. Were I a cynic, I'd suspect shenanigans. Fortunately I'm not a cynic.

I'm sure it feels amusing. Losing a patent lawsuit on a FRAND patent opens up a whole new can of worms. Do you know how many Apple holds? They're free to go out in force, guns blazing, with that sort of precedent behind them. You thought they were litigious before now?!

Goodness me, that is the most chafed neckbeard I have ever seen! How do you cope?!

"iPods were popular but shit" is just a weak argument. It works better with hipster glasses, but then, I thought it was all the Apple users who were the hipsters. I get so confused!

The amount of butthurt from nerds on slashdot over the success of the iPod and subsequent iOS devices is hilarious. The tangible sense of "not getting it" swirls around like a dark cloud, just because something became popular that wasn't exactly what you wanted from a product, thus it is impossible to believe that the success is down to anything other than marketing to braindead consumers.

Given this involves the 4 and the older iPads, I'm not sure how that follows.

The bulk of Apple's orders from Samsung are for the iPhone 5 and retina iPad (Samsung makes the CPU and other components).

Winning an abuse-the-frand-process lawsuit on a selection of products that Apple barely sells any more (the 4 is still available as an entry level, but it is not long for this world) is hardly beneficial for Samsung.

There's certainly an element of biting the hand that feeds you, but Samsung also knows it is in a relatively strong position - the parts it has available are better than Apple can get from its competitors. This is especially true for displays, so it's not entirely without a bargaining position. It's also in partnership with Apple in some cases - the cash injection into Samsung's Texas plant came from Apple, for example. As with any two giants, they are intertwined and often fight among themselves.

Nice spin. You can say that the rate was "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" but that doesn't make it so. Apple certainly didn't believe so, hence the lawsuit. If they felt it was fair they would have paid up right away, like they did for the many, many hundreds of other FRAND patents that are essential to the iPhone's function.

What does Chinese culture have to do with it? Samsung are a Korean company.

Yes, but without the data pins the iPhone is going to follow the USB spec, which will limit it to 500 mA (or even less - I forget what the protocol specifies if the data pins are absent. There's a bunch of things you can do to show it's a charger, like shorting the pins at a particular resistance). If you want the full charging spectrum, the two devices need to communicate, but clearly this introduces a security issue.

You're going to need to provide some proof of that.

Also, you'll have to explain the many hundreds of entries in Apple's own kb entries going back many years for security updates where they specifically mention third parties who have identified security holes that are fixed in that particular update. I assume they thanked them for finding the hole and *then* sued them out of existence? Or do they sue first, then personally thank them? Not sure how it works, but since you seem to be an expert on this, I'll bow to your knowledge.