- Heise reported this originally: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat...
- Golem basically summarized the Heise article: https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsve...
> AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers
So AVM is threatening to ban the sale of their own product?
This looks like some SEO spam site with AI generated crap sprinkled on top.
I assume they have a huge captive domestic market that such threats are effective. Imagine VW threatening to ban the sale of the Golf
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
As an aside, it is common for news sites to only provide links back to their own earlier articles (even when the connection to the present story is tenuous at best), never to sources or extra information outside of their web property. Unfortunately it is not a weird choice, it's an industry-wide standard practice.
Maybe someone can change my mind on why this is an invention worth monopolising, but I doubt it.
Also one of the headings was mistranslated horribly.
In linked the article: "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers". The original in German: "AVM droht Verkaufsverbot für Fritzbox-Router". Right translation is roughly: "AVM is threatened with a ban on the sale of Fritzbox routers".
Edit: Ahhh wait AVM is being threatened with a ban, my mistake
On the other hand China just saw protectionism by the US happening and now they are shifting gears. How long will it take until sanctions by the US will be useless?
Of course I oppose the whole business of shoving as many of your own patents into standard protocols that you see in WiFi and 4/5/6G (basically forcing the world to pay you a licensing fee) but that's not just a Chinese practice.
AVM claims they're optimistic about their chances for appealing the ruling, so we'll have to wait and see what happens. So far, the deck seems to be stacked against AVM and their attempted scheme to avoid licensing fees.
"AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers"
No, AVM is the company producing them, they are not threatening themselves to ban selling their own product
And then one title has "regional court" in small caps, another has "Regional Court" with caps
If you then own patents relating to that or similar technology and someone says "No you may not participate" simply because we so say, nothing to do with law, we just don't want you to. That maybe this sort of response can be expected ? If you kick someone long enough it's not surprising to see retaliation once in a while.
Patents are supposed to be for innovation, the patent literally just claims adding a field to a packet indicating if it's for a single user or multiple is a novel invention.
Do you have any examples where any packet field is used to indicate a number of users or symbols?
Either way, reinterpreting a field depending on the mode of communication is equally not novel.
I still think that all law suites should be paid for by the government. Both defence and offence. This would have a sort of balancing out effect and then make law actually be more applicable for everyone.
Maybe sounds radical. But think about it. In a democracy law should be equally useful to all citizens. It clearly is not.
And Huawei is not alone in this. When I first saw a TP-Link user interface I was confused. It looked exactly like the Unifi interface. At first I thought maybe Unifi OEM their stuff from TP-Link. Didn't take long to figure out they had just copied it.
If you can put some technology that uses your patents in a standard like WiFi or 5G, that is a license to print money. There are plenty of good ideas that should be in a standard that are patented. Leaving aside the issue of whether it's good those patents exist, you do want that technology in the standards. So it's not like you can say 'all IEEE standards should be patent free'.
As a result lots of standardization meetings involve most participants subtly (or not so subtly) advocating for technical decisions that would mean some patent is used.
The alternative - again, in the same real world where patents exist - is to craft a very fragile standard around the patents that you know of, without the participation of the industry, only to be whacked with a submarine patent as soon as the standard becomes dominant and can't - in the legal opinion of the "inventor" - be implemented without their innovative brainberry. That can still happen within the previous workflow, but at least you involve early on most holders of IP related to that field.
Of course, none of this precludes the notion that a better world is possible, say one where any inventor has to prove substantial investment before patentability (say, medical studies and drug approval), and can only recoup those investments up to a limited multiplier.
What? Sure you can. See the W3C patent policy, as one example: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20200915/
That other organizations do not do that is a choice.
First you make the tech (and the patents associated with it) and then push it through the standards body to make it part of a standard. That is the point when it becomes a standard essential patent.
On one hand it’s reasonable because the inventors spent money on researching the new things that are in the new standard. On the other hand it can be rather unfortunate, especially if it’s software, because with open-source there is no way to pay and get a license.
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0581867...
That seems more to me like a mere protocol convention, exactly the kind of stuff that should be in a standard communication protocol just so everyone agrees on the same fields.
How is that a new "invention"?
There's a lot of things you can say about that, but it's arguably not really a "GPL violation" as commonly understood, and a single incident in almost 40 years of history doesn't make a company "notorious".
The freedom to take a device and modify it to run your own changes is what the GPL is all about. Let's not forget the modern open source movement was the result of someone not being able to load a custom font into a printer. Do you think Stallman would've been satisfied if Xerox had given him the source code he asked for, but then indicated they'd sue him if he tried to load any modified software onto the printer?
AVM's interpretation of the license ("you can modify the GPL software but you're not allowed to flash it onto the device") was shot down by the court, and rightly so.
I think a company actively going after another to prevent exercising the software freedoms granted by the GPL makes them deserving of being called "notorious". It's a shitty practice in general, but it's especially shitty when you do it for GPL firmware.
It's really odd seeing Chinese companies taking someone to court for IP infringement given that that is the modus operandi of Chinese companies and has been for decades.
Part of those negotiations would have been that China is not unfairly excluded from being able to own IP and prosecute others for the same laws it was agreeing to be subject to.
Last time I got (or a customer had) a AVM box I requested the sources and got nothing that could even build (invalid C files, AFAIR).
For things like WiFi, or 5G, there is a lot more room for 'real' patents. Because there is a lot more hardware/electronics design in there. Aswell as there being a culture that is much more accepting of patents which means a lot more of the design space is covered by patents.
It is.
I can't find anything on that.
(and it's not that I disbelieve you, but details do matter, so very high-level descriptions isn't something I can really do anything with).
I just read up on the details, as best as I could with machine translation and my terrible German anyway.
Basically, a couple of thousand modems made for ISPs that got sold off after replacement ended up getting bought by Woog, which then flashed the latest official firmware for the hardware (which wasn't distinct from the carrier hardware in any way) into them. AVM didn't want them to sell carrier modems with unlocked firmware.
When I read about this stuff first, it was all labeled "custom firmware", but it looks like the firmware wasn't so custom after all.
Either way, AVM sued a company selling second hand hardware and now a tens thousands of perfectly functional modems seemingly ended up in a landfill somewhere.
I kind of understand AVM's viewpoints on that one because they probably had a special deal with the ISP to sell these modems at a cheap price and now they're basically competing against themselves, but scrapping thousands of perfectly functional devices is of course just silly. My fritzbox had a "eco mode" or some such and I'm pretty sure that the scrapping completely obliterated the savings of eco mode of all fritzboxes combined.
I'm not hugely impressed by either case, but I also don't really think it backs up the "AVM is notorious for GPL violations" and "they intentionally violated the patents" (with an implied "they just ignore any IP law they don't like").
Unfortunately, the DECT spec as implemented by many manufacturers isn't as broad as people seem to think it is. Most interoperability was done through DECT GAP last time I checked, and GAP lacks common features like "rich caller ID" and "address books".
I've seen other brands do address book support just fine, I think AVM tries to be compatible enough but just can't get the full feature set for every brand and model.
I've even seen Gigaset phones failing to support address books on more modern Gigaset basestations, DECT hardware is kind of a mess in that way.
See https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 (and possibly translate it).