May 16
Over the weekend the patent troll that made headlines on Friday created a blog to defend themselves.
Here are some of the more interesting revelations:
- Apple has already licensed the patent in question from Lodsys. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that means Apple cannot participate in any efforts to declare the overly broad patent to be invalid. So for us independent iOS developers, we should not expect Apple to be the knight in shining armor that rides to the rescue.
- The standard licensing fee requested by Lodsys is 0.575% of US revenue. It’s not clear if that wonderfully exact percentage is calculated on the gross sales or the net that we receive from Apple.
- They would like to be treated in a human matter and for us all to live by the golden rule.
Fair enough. Let’s apply some golden rule reciprocity to them. I suggest that every iOS developer with an app that uses In App Purchase, and which has revenues of less than say $1,000, contacts Lodsys to “engage in a licensing discussion”. It will be interesting to see how much time they will want to spend on each case to collect $5.75.
May 16th, 2011 at 22:56
Hi Nick,
The problem with this licensing debacle is not the fees involved, but the risk of other patent trolls trying to do the same to make a few buck. It is also make us developers uncertain what other claims we can expect when using the Apple’s APIs.
Cheers,
Diederik
May 17th, 2011 at 09:05
@Diederik: I absolutely agree. My suggestion above was not intended to imply that this is ok just because the fee in this case may be low. It was a way that we smaller developers, without departments of lawyers, can fight back. The goal is to give patent trolls a strong economic disincentive to pursue app developers.