Eastman Kodak, which is planning to auction 1,100 digital patents, received two bids from investor groups including Apple Inc and Google Inc of between $150 million and $250 million, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Patents
This is why Apple needs to stop Samsung and Google from copying them
Fender did not pursue the Strat-clone manufacturers in court; and then after attempting to trademark the iconic Statocaster contours decades later, a court ruled in 2009 that “the body shapes were generic and that consumers do not solely associate these shapes with Fender Musical Instruments Corporation”. The ruling went so far as to say “in the case of the [Stratocaster] body outline, this configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary.”
Protect your property from thieves or lose the rights to it.
∞ Bogus
Florian Mueller:
I’m starting to see a pattern. For any intellectual property issues facing Linux (or at least the most popular Linux derivative, Android), Linus Torvalds has a standard answer at hand: after admitting that he doesn’t know the facts, he claims that “this [whatever it may be] seems completely bogus.” Or, interchangeably, “totally bogus”.
Great article from Florian.
∞ Google will support Android partners in legal disputes
Reuters: The support takes the form of information sharing, industry expertise and access to Google’s patents for licensing and legal purposes, Schmidt said. Google trying to comfort its partners, but it’s a significant olive branch.
∞ Balls
John Gruber on Dan Lyons’ crap story: Another way to look at this story, then, is that maybe Google really did want those Nortel patents, and when they didn’t get them, they knew they were in a worse position than … Continued