John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Patent Trolls Love Apple

An unfortunate byproduct of being an iconic consumer electronics company sitting on a vast pile of cash: You’re an obvious target for patent-holding companies looking to make a quick buck.

Which is precisely the position Apple finds itself in these days. According to PatentFreedom, which tracks some 710 intellectual-property profiteers, Apple has been on the receiving end of 171-patent troll lawsuits in the past five years: 27 in 2009, 34 in 2010, 42 in 2011, 44 in 2012, and 24 in 2013 — which isn’t even over yet.

One hundred and seventy-one suits. That’s more than any other company in tech, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

That’s a significant amount of nuisance litigation for Apple, a company whose legal team is busy waging far more important wars. Little wonder that CEO Tim Cook takes such a dim view of patent-infringement suits, dismissing them as “a pain in the ass” at our D10 conference.

“It’s maddening. It’s a waste. It’s a time suck,” Cook said of patent litigation. “Does it stop innovation? Well, it’s not going to stop us, but it’s overhead. I wish we could settle this stuff.”

Video of his remarks in full, below:

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald