**The Complex World of Patents in Mobile Technology**

As we continue to see advancements in mobile technology, the importance of patents cannot be overstated. Almost every phone purchased today, including 4G phones, typically has a 3G radio inside so they can communicate with older networks. Samsung holds a significant number of patents in this area, but the main issue is that they aren't really licensing them fairly or at least they are supposedly not licensing them fairly.

For those who may be unfamiliar with patent licensing, let me explain. When someone designs something, such as I designing a multi-touch screen, it's theirs and can be patented. If Apple were to use my design without permission, I could license it to them for a fee, such as 50 cents per iPhone, among other terms.

Patent licensing is very common in the tech industry. However, there are gray areas where some patents may be overly broad or even silly. For example, Samsung's patent on multi-touch technology was granted in 2012, which doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.

The Android operating system, being open-source, allows manufacturers to use it freely for any device. However, many Android manufacturers pay royalties to Microsoft for the sale of every single Android phone sold. This is due to licensing agreements between Microsoft and these manufacturers, as there are some patents owned by Microsoft that are in Android.

Whenever someone designs a phone or tablet, they have to work out what's going to cost what and so on. Manufacturers will dedicate money to various components such as the screen, processor, memory, etc. On top of this, they also have to pay for patent licensing fees, which can affect their pricing. For instance, Samsung might decide to cut features like storage or display quality to offset these costs.

The situation with patents and mobile technology is really complicated. While I support patent laws and copyright, there are some patents that are overly broad or silly, which hurts consumers in the long run. These unnecessary patents can lead to reduced quality phones, which isn't ideal for anyone.

What do you think about this whole mess? Do share your thoughts in the comments section below! If you found this video informational or helpful, be sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel for more technology-related content!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys this is Austin and Dean here with a little bit of a rant video going over something that I think has gotten way ridiculous and that is patents and lawsuits and all kinds of just craziness as far as phones and tablet manufacturers go now to start off with I wanted to start with a little bit of a story so bear with me here so earlier this month I was at CES with my friend Phil you guys probably know him as I cryptic and so what we were doing is we were together and we were walking around hitting all the different booths and you know one was filming and one was like doing a little demo and some of the stuff was interesting like some phones and tablets were interesting some of it wasn't but for the most part we were getting footage of pretty much as much as we could so if we thought hey this is great or you know whatever we could just you know edit the footage later it would all be good so at one point we were in a booth and we were looking at a tablet so Phil he pulls out his camcorder and I start giving a demo so I start swiping through the home screen I think it's like an Android 3.0 honeycomb tablet so swiping through it looking at the apps and you know just kind of just giving a general overview of it and about halfway through I'm like wait a minute What's this called so one kind of weird thing was there was no plaque or anything about it so usually for the most part for example you know if it was like a Samsung Galaxy nexace or whatever would have like a plaque saying the name give some kind of information it's got like 4G and this and that you just kind of give you a little bit of background information but with this one there was nothing it was just the tablet and it didn't look all that bad but it wasn't really anything that spectacular so about after a couple minutes of you know messing around with a little bit of rep walked up go hi can I help you I'm like yeah well what's the name of this tablet and the the guy looks at me goes oh it's the hpad so I just wanted to tell that story just kind of say there are two sides of this I think that that's kind of ridiculous I think that there's a pretty good chance that some people may confuse the iPad with the hiad you know but on the other hand I do think overall that a lot of this stuff has gotten ridiculous one example of this is what's going on between Apple and Samsung so a little while back Apple Sued Samsung they sued back over all kind kind of things but one of the biggest things that came out of all this was Apple's lawsuit against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as you guys can see here it does look fairly similar to the iPad however I wouldn't say it's perhaps a blatant ripoff but overall Apple was definitely not very happy with it so they sued there's a big bunch of talking and this and that but the end result was that they actually got it banned in Germany so you know as far as the Samsung Galaxy Tab nope you can't buy the 10.1 in Germany at all it's banned now of course this really is not acceptable at all the Samsung when you design a tablet or phone it cost you millions and millions of dollars and you expect to be able to you know sell it here and here and here and you know etc etc so what they did was they created a different version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab called the 10.1 in now this is pretty much for all intents and purposes the same as the 10.1 who however they tweaked the design some of the complaints that apple had as far as you know like the look of it and whatnot they tweaked the design perfectly fine now it's on sale in Germany the thing is with this kind of stuff though is that that costs a lot of money to retool now what you might think yes the same tablets just got a little bit of a different design that costs millions and millions of dollars n do they have to make new advertising and all that kind of stuff but they have to retool so you got to keep in mind that you know all the cases and you know the designs and whatnot all that kind of stuff has to be retooled which is just astronomically expensive so that was really really a major expense for Samsung they had to redesign even if it was fairly minor they had to redesign their tablet just to be able to have it on sale of course it goes the other way too just this morning the European Union launched an Anti-Trust investigation against Samsung for them suing all kinds of other manufacturers over 3G patents now of course there is 3G technology and pretty much every single phone that you buy today even 4G phones typically will have some kind of 3G radio inside so they can communicate with older networks now Samsung definitely does hold a lot of patents in this area however the main issue there is that they aren't really licensing them fairly or at least they are supposedly not licensing them fairly and if you guys don't know what licensing patents is all about for the most part they can design something so let's say I design a multi-touch screen and that's mine I designed it and let's say apple says Hey I want to use your design well I can go sure you can use it you can use my technology however I designed it the only thing is you need to pay me like 50 cents for every iPhone and of course you know the terms and all that kind of stuff can vary wildly but licensing patents is very very common as far as this goes there's a lot of gray areas some patents that are out are a little bit Broad and we have invented a new technology called multi touch and boy have we patented it so oh you know this just multi-touch on the Samsung Focus flash in the year 2012 no big deal so just take for example Android I'm sure as most of you guys know it's a free and open source operating system so today if I decide that I want to make a phone I can go to the Android website I can download Android and I can use it freely on any phone tablet or pretty much whatever else I want however it's not quite that simple many Android manufacturers to they actually pay royalties to Microsoft for the sale of every single Android phone so the way this works is there's some kind of Licensing agreement that there's some patents that Microsoft owns that are in Android and so to do it they pay for anything from $5 to $15 for every Android phone sold now this is kind of where it comes back to you guys now whenever someone designs a phone or a tablet they pretty much got to work out what's going to cost what and etc etc so for example they'll dedicate so much money to the screen and they'll dedicate to the processor to the memory to you know someone designing the phone so usually there's gonna be some kind of design studio involved there's a lot of different things that are involved now on top of all this just the hardware and the software and whatnot now you've got things like okay well now we have to pay also Microsoft $10 per phone for this or maybe we have to pay $3 or4 for our legal fees for these lawsuits here and here and here and while they're probably not going to make a $200 phone turn into a $212 phone what they may do is actually cut some kind of features so for example a phone they might decide okay this going to have 32 GB of storage oh wait now we have to pay this much for legal fees and this much for licensing fees okay well you know what let's just go ahead and give it 16 GB of storage same thing goes it may be a Super AMOLED display they're like o that's too expensive we need to go down to an LCD display now overall it's really really complicated now don't get me wrong I definitely support patents and copyright and all that kind of stuff for example if I decide that I'm going to design a phone right now and then someone else copies it entirely I should be able to sue them I mean that's just right they stole it on the other hand there are definitely some patents and some definitely some things that are kind of overly Broad and kind of a little bit silly that I think all that does is really just hurt you as a consumer that you're going to get maybe a little bit of a less quality phone this and that so I want to know what do you guys think about this whole mess definitely be sure to leave your thoughts in the comment section below I'm very curious to know I think there's a lot to be said on this issue and of course if you found this video informational helpful whatnot definitely be sure to leave it a thumbs up I really appreciate that and if you're interested in more videos on all kinds of Technology rants you know you name it definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel up therehey guys this is Austin and Dean here with a little bit of a rant video going over something that I think has gotten way ridiculous and that is patents and lawsuits and all kinds of just craziness as far as phones and tablet manufacturers go now to start off with I wanted to start with a little bit of a story so bear with me here so earlier this month I was at CES with my friend Phil you guys probably know him as I cryptic and so what we were doing is we were together and we were walking around hitting all the different booths and you know one was filming and one was like doing a little demo and some of the stuff was interesting like some phones and tablets were interesting some of it wasn't but for the most part we were getting footage of pretty much as much as we could so if we thought hey this is great or you know whatever we could just you know edit the footage later it would all be good so at one point we were in a booth and we were looking at a tablet so Phil he pulls out his camcorder and I start giving a demo so I start swiping through the home screen I think it's like an Android 3.0 honeycomb tablet so swiping through it looking at the apps and you know just kind of just giving a general overview of it and about halfway through I'm like wait a minute What's this called so one kind of weird thing was there was no plaque or anything about it so usually for the most part for example you know if it was like a Samsung Galaxy nexace or whatever would have like a plaque saying the name give some kind of information it's got like 4G and this and that you just kind of give you a little bit of background information but with this one there was nothing it was just the tablet and it didn't look all that bad but it wasn't really anything that spectacular so about after a couple minutes of you know messing around with a little bit of rep walked up go hi can I help you I'm like yeah well what's the name of this tablet and the the guy looks at me goes oh it's the hpad so I just wanted to tell that story just kind of say there are two sides of this I think that that's kind of ridiculous I think that there's a pretty good chance that some people may confuse the iPad with the hiad you know but on the other hand I do think overall that a lot of this stuff has gotten ridiculous one example of this is what's going on between Apple and Samsung so a little while back Apple Sued Samsung they sued back over all kind kind of things but one of the biggest things that came out of all this was Apple's lawsuit against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as you guys can see here it does look fairly similar to the iPad however I wouldn't say it's perhaps a blatant ripoff but overall Apple was definitely not very happy with it so they sued there's a big bunch of talking and this and that but the end result was that they actually got it banned in Germany so you know as far as the Samsung Galaxy Tab nope you can't buy the 10.1 in Germany at all it's banned now of course this really is not acceptable at all the Samsung when you design a tablet or phone it cost you millions and millions of dollars and you expect to be able to you know sell it here and here and here and you know etc etc so what they did was they created a different version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab called the 10.1 in now this is pretty much for all intents and purposes the same as the 10.1 who however they tweaked the design some of the complaints that apple had as far as you know like the look of it and whatnot they tweaked the design perfectly fine now it's on sale in Germany the thing is with this kind of stuff though is that that costs a lot of money to retool now what you might think yes the same tablets just got a little bit of a different design that costs millions and millions of dollars n do they have to make new advertising and all that kind of stuff but they have to retool so you got to keep in mind that you know all the cases and you know the designs and whatnot all that kind of stuff has to be retooled which is just astronomically expensive so that was really really a major expense for Samsung they had to redesign even if it was fairly minor they had to redesign their tablet just to be able to have it on sale of course it goes the other way too just this morning the European Union launched an Anti-Trust investigation against Samsung for them suing all kinds of other manufacturers over 3G patents now of course there is 3G technology and pretty much every single phone that you buy today even 4G phones typically will have some kind of 3G radio inside so they can communicate with older networks now Samsung definitely does hold a lot of patents in this area however the main issue there is that they aren't really licensing them fairly or at least they are supposedly not licensing them fairly and if you guys don't know what licensing patents is all about for the most part they can design something so let's say I design a multi-touch screen and that's mine I designed it and let's say apple says Hey I want to use your design well I can go sure you can use it you can use my technology however I designed it the only thing is you need to pay me like 50 cents for every iPhone and of course you know the terms and all that kind of stuff can vary wildly but licensing patents is very very common as far as this goes there's a lot of gray areas some patents that are out are a little bit Broad and we have invented a new technology called multi touch and boy have we patented it so oh you know this just multi-touch on the Samsung Focus flash in the year 2012 no big deal so just take for example Android I'm sure as most of you guys know it's a free and open source operating system so today if I decide that I want to make a phone I can go to the Android website I can download Android and I can use it freely on any phone tablet or pretty much whatever else I want however it's not quite that simple many Android manufacturers to they actually pay royalties to Microsoft for the sale of every single Android phone so the way this works is there's some kind of Licensing agreement that there's some patents that Microsoft owns that are in Android and so to do it they pay for anything from $5 to $15 for every Android phone sold now this is kind of where it comes back to you guys now whenever someone designs a phone or a tablet they pretty much got to work out what's going to cost what and etc etc so for example they'll dedicate so much money to the screen and they'll dedicate to the processor to the memory to you know someone designing the phone so usually there's gonna be some kind of design studio involved there's a lot of different things that are involved now on top of all this just the hardware and the software and whatnot now you've got things like okay well now we have to pay also Microsoft $10 per phone for this or maybe we have to pay $3 or4 for our legal fees for these lawsuits here and here and here and while they're probably not going to make a $200 phone turn into a $212 phone what they may do is actually cut some kind of features so for example a phone they might decide okay this going to have 32 GB of storage oh wait now we have to pay this much for legal fees and this much for licensing fees okay well you know what let's just go ahead and give it 16 GB of storage same thing goes it may be a Super AMOLED display they're like o that's too expensive we need to go down to an LCD display now overall it's really really complicated now don't get me wrong I definitely support patents and copyright and all that kind of stuff for example if I decide that I'm going to design a phone right now and then someone else copies it entirely I should be able to sue them I mean that's just right they stole it on the other hand there are definitely some patents and some definitely some things that are kind of overly Broad and kind of a little bit silly that I think all that does is really just hurt you as a consumer that you're going to get maybe a little bit of a less quality phone this and that so I want to know what do you guys think about this whole mess definitely be sure to leave your thoughts in the comment section below I'm very curious to know I think there's a lot to be said on this issue and of course if you found this video informational helpful whatnot definitely be sure to leave it a thumbs up I really appreciate that and if you're interested in more videos on all kinds of Technology rants you know you name it definitely be sure to subscribe to the channel up there