Florian Müller on life at the smartphone frontline
17 July 2012
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Emma Barraclough, London
Smartphone makers are slugging it out in patent courts around the world. But what are the implications of their fights for other IP owners, antitrust regulators and the organisations that oversee standards setting? Managing IP asked Foss Patents author Florian Müller to explain
Florian Müller – programmer, anti-software patent activist and consultant to banks and big business – writes a blog called Foss Patents . He launched it in 2010 to chart the patent issues affecting open source software and its developers and to encourage debate about the ways they could operate under the existing IP system. Now it has become the go-to source of information and analysis about multi-party, multi-jurisdictional and multi-million dollar litigation in the smartphone and tablet computer industries.
Müller says he operates the blog on a so-called freemium model: posting plenty of material without charge and providing more in-depth and personalised analysis on a consultancy basis to financial services businesses that hold shares in the parties or have taken a position on the outcome of the litigation, and to companies such as Microsoft and Oracle.
What lessons do the smartphone wars have for would-be patent litigants and policy makers?
The primary lesson...
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