Independent artists would love to make skins and animations for Fortnite, but can't, because Epic holds a monopoly on those through the Epic Store and V-Bucks. Should Epic be forced to open up the Fortnite in-game store?

So you don't have ABS brakes on your car, right, since those have computer control and could fail?

Or Snaptacles.

Heh... Do you have some case law to support the conclusion that reporting one's income is an illegal search, counselor, and does it involve "gold fringe" and "admiralty" and "FIRSTNAME:LASTNAME is a corporation"?

Yes, though technically, NFTs don't require crypto. You just give each asset a unique identifier and have a database of ownership. I.e. rather than saying "Bob owns 'a gun'", you say "Bob owns gun #58261". Or conversely, "Gun #58261 is owned by Bob", depending on how you orient your database. In practice, you wouldn't even want that database on a blockchain, because you have to pay enormous transaction fees every time Bob and Dick trade the gun back and forth.

There's nothing inherently wrong with treating an item as unique from a technical perspective.

But that said, this is a way to extract more money from stupid people, and is absolutely scummy.

It's the other way around, actually - since you performed some of the steps and the TSA performed some of the steps, no individual infringed the patent, and you can only infringe through joint infringement... but that requires an agency relationship between the parties, like employer-employee, or company-contractor. It's unlikely that travelers could be considered an agent of the TSA, so joint infringement shouldn't apply.

According to the opinion, the government stipulated to infringing the patent, waiving any arguments regarding joint infringement or the lack thereof. It almost sounds like there was some sweetheart deal behind the scenes between the government and the patent owner, and I'd think the GAO would want to look into it... except that they're also a government organization. :/

... except that then they have to pay for the value of that seized property, which the court has established is worth over $100 million.

No - approximately 95% of utility patent applications are initially rejected. If the patent office is blindly rubber stamping anything, they're using a stamp that says "rejected".

Trolls, or non-practicing entities, can't infringe patents, by definition

The patent system helps innovation by encouraging companies to publish functional specs, schematics, and white papers. Without patents, your only protection is trade secrets and contractual limitations like NDAs, so kiss those public documents goodbye.

Note that point 4 isn't in the independent claim, so wouldn't apply there. I'd also argue that it's obvious over basket systems in place at supermarkets for decades: position baskets at the front of the store, customers take one and fill it and proceed through the checkout line, where they're collected and eventually repositioned as a stack to the front of the store. Stacking baskets are interchangeable with stacking trays, so I would think a combination of supermarket and scanner art would render these claims invalid as obvious.

It's true. There are a lot of India-based vendors in my industry, and I get three to four calls a week from them trying to sell me services, but they almost universally are using spoofed caller ID numbers to appear as if they're in the US because they don't want to appear to be scammers... but that itself a huge red flag that causes me to blacklist them.

Maybe that's a route that may result in the Indian authorities finally doing something about this - if their legitimate businesses take a hit because of the loss of credibility of the country, they may step up enforcement efforts.

I'm not sure about that. It only has 4 pins for data, like USB2. USB3 uses twice that.

It shouldn't. Lightning has a max speed of 480Mbps, while USB 3 was 5Gbps for 3.2 gen1, and all the way up to 20 Gbps for 3.2 Gen 2x2.

Thanks, Slashdot...

That "Well, according to the ruling" paragraph was in response to your last paragraph about why the consumer is in Best Buy in the first place.

Slight change there, given that this applies to freemiums.

Well, according to the ruling, it's because Apple's App Store provides significant benefits such that the vast majority of consumers surveyed prefer it. But those benefits all go away if everything goes freemium and Apple's trying to provide that service for just $99 per app per year. Hence my latter point:

While I agree with the vast majority of what you wrote, I don't think this is quite accurate. Specifically, the analogy wouldn't be to a card in the product package to "buy replacement cartridges directly from us" since those cartridges would be provided directly by the manufacturer... This would be more akin to picking out a Sony television at Best Buy, bringing it to the register, and then having Epic's representative lean in through the front door and shout "hey, you can just walk out with that television without paying. Instead, pay me, and I'll make sure Sony gets their cut."

Regardless, I worry that the end result of this may be that every app goes freemium, and that with no paid apps to subsidize the rest, the App Store becomes unprofitable and dies... and we then revert to the wild west of uncurated shovelware from questionable sites.