- cross-posted to:
- hardware
- cross-posted to:
- hardware
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A long-time successful company “A” sued upstart company “B” after B was found to be using an algorithm A had patented 23 years before. In those 23 years, dozens of other companies had violated the patent in the exact same way as B, well prior to B’s existence. Because they did not threaten the success of A (as it took many more novel innovations and techniques to outdo A), A did not sue them. B was beating A, so A sued B. B showed the 23 years’ of violations in patent court to judge, but the judge still found for A.
B had to come up with a new algorithm for two years, til the patent expired. B paid A many dollars in damages to settle the suit. A and B had mutual customers, who read the filings and understood A had chosen to retaliate rather than innovate further. A has since fallen further behind, still profitable, but a relative dinosaur, while B has flourished.
That’s crazy that both companies names were just one letter long
Didn’t read the article so I’m just gonna give a hot take:
Call it a LegTop, job done
Lenovo…the Chinese company that bought IBM PC to pose their way into laptop mediocrity, that Lenovo?
Time for patent and trademark law to be thrown out and redesigned. Seems that now it’s mainly used to create moats for entrenched businesses to keep profits high and competitors out.
It’s not. Just because a patent holder accuses someone of infringement doesn’t make it so. Plenty of cases where a patent holder even had their patent invalidated due to the other party successfully arguing the patent was invalid in a lawsuit started by the patent holder.
keep […] competitors out.
That’s the whole point of a patent, the exclusive right to prevent others from commercially exploiting the invention claimed in the patent for a limited time.
Yeah man. You’re right. What did it used to be for before it became a way to protect profits?
Protect the little guy from some big company stealing his invention and cutting him out
I’m oddly okay with the current trademark law, but fuck the copyright system
What’s wrong with trademark law?
Agreed on patent law. It was just never designed for rapid technology evolution we’ve seen for the last 50+ years.
Nothing wrong until you get sued by a megacorp because they think you are infringing. Plus a host of other reasons
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/29/trademarks-good-bad-ugly
patent, trademark, copywrite, all of it
the actual patent/trademark/whatever is less important than the ability to pay for a good lawyer to defend it - or the ability to argue yourself
everything takes “inspiration” from something else and an original idea is incredibly rare - or more realistically, nonexistent
déjà vu, déjà entendu, déjà dit, déjà pensé, déjà ressenti
theres a lot more than patent/trademark law that needs redesigned
Interesting. It seems like ASUS took them to court first:
In its Tuesday press release, Lenovo said it decided to make its complaint to the ITC in response to the August 2023 filings Asus made with The Regional Court of Munich patent tribunal. Lenovo claimed that Asus’ filings were related to cellular tech for which Lenovo had offered Asus “a cross-licensing deal as a solution.”
Considering I’ve had duds from each brand (had a Lenovo with hinges so bad they had to settle a class action over it, and I had an Asus with soldered down ram that was bad and the bios was so trash I couldn’t disable the bad ram and run of of the one swap-able slot instead,) it’s a bit of an Alien vs. Predator situation in my view. Both brands are a shadow of their peak (the classic Asus Netbooks were tanks - mine still boot to this day, and Lenovo Thinkpads until about the mid 2010s were immaculate - I have a 2012 model that still runs,) and neither of them have any reason to get better about it.
Lenovo’s ThinkPads are still great. Their Ideapads are rubbish
The old Sony Vaios were the real bulletproof laptops imo. I have one from 2008. Yeah the battery is kinda shot but it works perfectly fine. I’ve gone through a few Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus Laptops in the same span.
I miss the Sony and Toshiba laptops :((
Solid brands through and through
Yeah my wife had a refurb Vaio that was already couple years old when we picked it up, and it easily put another 5 on the board before just getting too old to daily drive. It was otherwise fine.
Isn’t it partially your fault on the hinges for buying a non-Thinkpad? Asus doesn’t even have a business line of laptops, as far as I’m aware, so shouldn’t even be an option.
Little bit like buying an HP Pavilion and complaining about build quality.
How is that my fault
I think the reasoning is that if you buy a mid-quality machine, it will not have top quality manufacturing?
Thinkpads are pretty solid business class machines.
Even when buying a mid-grade device I kinda expect it to not be complete dogfight garbage and break in stupid ways two days after the warranty ends.
Mid-grade is pretty vague. Laptops in general are designed to be disposable while ‘checking off the boxes’ for marketing feature lists - with few exceptions.
But one should realistically be able to expect a €500 laptop to last more than two years, right?
I work in a school and we purchase a whole heap of laptops every year. For that price we’d be looking at a student device, defenitely one of the cheaper ones. But yes, we’d expect more than 2 years out of them. Again, we don’t buy consumer devices because they have horrible build quality and get an education + bulk discount.
There were Thinkpads in the same class action IIRC. Just a bad design and a bad part used across their line up with some of their 2 in 1s for a while.
I don’t see any evidence to support that. I see Ideapad Flex and Yoga: https://flexscreensettlement.com/Portals/0/1d. Second Amended Complaint (1.26.23).pdf?ver=P6CZLg1AWkrmW1U11Lrd9w%3D%3D
Same as the Lenovo pre-installed malware incident which affected their consumer laptop lines. I think it was called superfish?
there is different lines of thinkpads. the consumer ones are produced in china, anything T series and up meant for busness is not and has noticably better qa
It’s a laptop - nobody cross shops on anything other than price.
It’s always wild when Chinese companies care about IP enforcement
shhh… before the lenovo fanboys at r/gaminglaptops get to you
btw, i also would never trust a lenovo laptop, asus/gigabyte etc. all the way
Throwing out my Lenovo and am in the market for a new PC. What is a good alternative to Lenovo that is not Chinese-made and wont break the bank?
personally I only stick with Taiwanese brands (MSI/ASUS/Gigabyte) as from experience they’ve been very reliable.
Are you talking about a desktop or laptop? For laptops, MSI’s cheap laptops have horrible hinge issues, and ASUS’ TUF/strix lineups are their cheapest options priced cheaply. For desktop parts, I’ve never ran into issues with MSI gpu’s, gigabyte mobos. I don’t remember which PSU I got but don’t cheap out on them is my recommendation. As for storage, I only buy Western Digital.
gigabye bainboards have terrible bios and just recently pplfound an exploit to gain access to any pc with one of their boards because of their badly implemented bios update over internet function.
and western digital sure isnt bad but samsung is still smacking them hard in the solid state market at pretty much the same price so ye.
also the whole thread here is weird because the only lenovo laptops made in china are the cheap consumer ones. the business T line and up are still designed and made by the same team as they have been for decades.
Lenovo laptops suck. Mine died like 2 years
Well, considering Asus is basically Lenovo but shitty, they are not doing a great job at infringing those patents.
Remember when Asus shipped pre-installed malware called Superfish? Of course you don’t, because that was Lenovo.
Seeing that every Lenovo laptop I owned had major issues, I think it’s the opposite
Were you on the cheap side of the lineup? Thinkpads are fucking tanks, only brand that matches MacBooks.
The newer thinkpads aren’t terrible. But they’re a shadow of what they used to be when IBM owned that line. Lenovo is just coasting off of that reputation.
Lol. What? Asus is a far superior brand.
I know right? Lenovo has some pain in the ass restrictions on hardware settings and proprietary bloat ware. I mean, my x100 was/is amazing. It’s still running strong… granted with Linux and not windows. All the other lenovo hardware I’ve used has been iffy. All the laptops since that one have been underwhelming in terms of being able to adjust hardware settings. I can’t comment on their workstations or servers… but either HP for servers or Dell for SANs and why bother with anyone else? For gaming I’ve used ASUS for a bit now and I have very little complaints. My Ally is amazing for what I use it for and my TUF gaming laptop out preforms anything I could have built for the same price.
The only thing lenovo us better in is keyboards. I like their keyboards better. Other than that they’re terrible now.
Really. My 15 inch zenbook is one of the nicest computers I’ve owned in a while. Almost got the dual screen Lenovo, but it made more sense to get the Asus and an external monitor
On a side note I have used the dual-screen Lenovo, you did the right choice.
Of course. You have time for this bullshit – but you can’t disable the access-protection that prevents me from downloading an early bios before my battery life was sliced in half. Or sort out the problem in a future update.