Fritzbox: AVM is threatened with a sales ban due to violations of Huawei patents
aroged.comWeird choice of this site to mention their sources, but not linking them.
- Heise reported this originally: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat...
- Golem basically summarized the Heise article: https://www.golem.de/news/patentklagen-avm-droht-vertriebsve...
Also the first title in the body is nonsense:
> AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers
So AVM is threatening to ban the sale of their own product?
This looks like some SEO spam site with AI generated crap sprinkled on top.
>So AVM is threatening to ban the sale of their own product?
I assume they have a huge captive domestic market that such threats are effective. Imagine VW threatening to ban the sale of the Golf
In this case, the Heise article is pretty clear that AVM is threatened with a sales ban, not that AVM itself is threatening one.
And the article seems to be a stolen version of this German one:
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
Yeah @dang maybe possible to replace the submission link with the original article passed through translate, e.g. https://www-pcgameshardware-de.translate.goog/Internet-Thema... ?
That would explain the wonky headline: "AVM droht ..." means "AVM is threatened with ..." but could be misread as "AVM threatens ..." ("AVM droht mit ..." or "AVM droht: ..."), especially in a cheap/automated translation.
The PCGH article references the golem article which references the heise article.
Appreciate the links. Although one is in German and the other is also in German and seems to be behind a paywall.
As an aside, it is common for news sites to only provide links back to their own earlier articles (even when the connection to the present story is tenuous at best), never to sources or extra information outside of their web property. Unfortunately it is not a weird choice, it's an industry-wide standard practice.
See my sibling comment - you can also click the left button ("Akzeptieren und weiter"), which just is your consent to see advertisement, it's a soft paywall (paying makes ads go away).
You have to consent to invasive tracking cookies or pay (isn't that against the GDPR?)
> isn't that against the GDPR?
It is.
Today I learned SEPs, standard essential patents, are a thing. How on earth adhering to a public standard can be considered an invention is beyond me, nor is how we got to the point that it is common enough to require its own special treatment.
Maybe someone can change my mind on why this is an invention worth monopolising, but I doubt it.
Sadly it works the other way around, and this has a tendency to infect standardization proceedings.
If you can put some technology that uses your patents in a standard like WiFi or 5G, that is a license to print money. There are plenty of good ideas that should be in a standard that are patented. Leaving aside the issue of whether it's good those patents exist, you do want that technology in the standards. So it's not like you can say 'all IEEE standards should be patent free'.
As a result lots of standardization meetings involve most participants subtly (or not so subtly) advocating for technical decisions that would mean some patent is used.
The typical standards process is an adaptation to a world where patents exist. It tries to clearly determine what patents are required to build a technology, and will typically lump them up into a patent pool available for a nominal licensing fee. Participants are strongly incentivized to disclose any essential patents they hold and include them in the pool, so as a standards implementer you know that once you pay the fee, nobody will sue you.
The alternative - again, in the same real world where patents exist - is to craft a very fragile standard around the patents that you know of, without the participation of the industry, only to be whacked with a submarine patent as soon as the standard becomes dominant and can't - in the legal opinion of the "inventor" - be implemented without their innovative brainberry. That can still happen within the previous workflow, but at least you involve early on most holders of IP related to that field.
Of course, none of this precludes the notion that a better world is possible, say one where any inventor has to prove substantial investment before patentability (say, medical studies and drug approval), and can only recoup those investments up to a limited multiplier.
That is a part of the process I hadn't considered. I was looking at the incentive of participants to have their patents in the standard. But it makes total sense that everyone who will implement the standard (which tends to involve the participants) wants no surprises around patents.
Participants in ISO standardization meetings are required to disclose any patents that they hold that may apply to whatever is being discussed.
> So it's not like you can say 'all IEEE standards should be patent free'.
What? Sure you can. See the W3C patent policy, as one example: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20200915/
That other organizations do not do that is a choice.
W3C is almost pure software. That is an area where patents shouldn't exist, and luckily an area where patents are not ubiquitous.
For things like WiFi, or 5G, there is a lot more room for 'real' patents. Because there is a lot more hardware/electronics design in there. Aswell as there being a culture that is much more accepting of patents which means a lot more of the design space is covered by patents.
It goes the other way around.
First you make the tech (and the patents associated with it) and then push it through the standards body to make it part of a standard. That is the point when it becomes a standard essential patent.
And usually the standards body require FRAND terms from the IPR 'donators' - they commit to license the tech using fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. They shouldn't deny a license or charge too much, with the idea being that they'll gain more from having interoperable products rather than maximise licensing royalties.
The idea is you have an invention and then try to have the standard require your invention. The parties that create the standard are supposed to declare the patents they have that cover the standard and then typically there is some licensing authority where manufacturers can pay a fee to have a license for all the patents involved.
On one hand it’s reasonable because the inventors spent money on researching the new things that are in the new standard. On the other hand it can be rather unfortunate, especially if it’s software, because with open-source there is no way to pay and get a license.
This reads like a stolen and automatically translated German article. The end suddenly talks as if the current website is PCGH.de, and contains the German sounding phrase "your opinion is asked". The mentioning of the sources doesn't provide any links and inexplicably says "those" instead of "source".
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/AVM...
Also one of the headings was mistranslated horribly.
In linked the article: "AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers". The original in German: "AVM droht Verkaufsverbot für Fritzbox-Router". Right translation is roughly: "AVM is threatened with a ban on the sale of Fritzbox routers".
I think the linked article title sounds more natural in English
Edit: Ahhh wait AVM is being threatened with a ban, my mistake
Decisions by regional courts are completely irrelevant. They often get reversed by the higher courts, especially in tech cases. Hamburg is more notorious for this, but it's the same for the one here in Munich. Until the higher regional court decides (and maybe the BGH after that) there's no chance that a sales ban will be enacted.
Absolutely. „Landgericht Hamburg“ is a well known prefix for „<insert insane tech-related ruling>“.
AVM recently announced that the business might be sold by the founders. This law suit somehow seems to me that the price for the company should be influenced artificially.
On the other hand China just saw protectionism by the US happening and now they are shifting gears. How long will it take until sanctions by the US will be useless?
AVM isn't exactly a nice and friendly company. It behaves as shitty as you would expect any networking company to behave. I completely believe that they might have simply chosen not to pay for these patents to save a buck.
Of course I oppose the whole business of shoving as many of your own patents into standard protocols that you see in WiFi and 4/5/6G (basically forcing the world to pay you a licensing fee) but that's not just a Chinese practice.
AVM claims they're optimistic about their chances for appealing the ruling, so we'll have to wait and see what happens. So far, the deck seems to be stacked against AVM and their attempted scheme to avoid licensing fees.
According to the Heise article (https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Fritzboxen-AVM-verliert-Pat...), the lawsuit is from 2022, so before the intention of the founders to sell was announced, and was against several companies, including Amazon, Stellantis and Netgear. So, if there is any ulterior motive behind this, it's maybe tit-for-tat because of the US and EU efforts to exclude Huawei from government and network infrastructure projects, but not something directed specifically against AVM...
AVM is notorious for GPL violations. I cannot say anything about these patents (aside from stating the fact that all software patents are bogus, because math cannot be patented), but I would not be surprised if they intentionally violated them.
The patent is about how packets could be structured and sent on a wireless network, so not necessarily a "software patent".
https://worldwide.espacenet.com/patent/search/family/0581867...
It seems to be about the "structure" of a packet, meaning bit fields that indicate if the packet is for a single user or multicast?
That seems more to me like a mere protocol convention, exactly the kind of stuff that should be in a standard communication protocol just so everyone agrees on the same fields.
How is that a new "invention"?
What GPL violations? I can't really find anything on than a single case from 2011 where AVM tried to prevent another company from distributing modified firmware for their routers.
There's a lot of things you can say about that, but it's arguably not really a "GPL violation" as commonly understood, and a single incident in almost 40 years of history doesn't make a company "notorious".
Back in 2020 they also attempted to stop the sale of modified AVM second hand products running custom firmware based on the code they had to publish because of the GPL restrictions. They're still trying very hard to prevent people from modifying their hardware after purchase.
The freedom to take a device and modify it to run your own changes is what the GPL is all about. Let's not forget the modern open source movement was the result of someone not being able to load a custom font into a printer. Do you think Stallman would've been satisfied if Xerox had given him the source code he asked for, but then indicated they'd sue him if he tried to load any modified software onto the printer?
AVM's interpretation of the license ("you can modify the GPL software but you're not allowed to flash it onto the device") was shot down by the court, and rightly so.
I think a company actively going after another to prevent exercising the software freedoms granted by the GPL makes them deserving of being called "notorious". It's a shitty practice in general, but it's especially shitty when you do it for GPL firmware.
> Back in 2020 they also attempted to stop the sale of modified AVM second hand products running custom firmware
I can't find anything on that.
(and it's not that I disbelieve you, but details do matter, so very high-level descriptions isn't something I can really do anything with).
All I knew was what was reported in Dutch tech news. It looks like AVM won: https://www.heise.de/news/Rechtsstreit-um-gebrauchte-Fritzbo...
I just read up on the details, as best as I could with machine translation and my terrible German anyway.
Basically, a couple of thousand modems made for ISPs that got sold off after replacement ended up getting bought by Woog, which then flashed the latest official firmware for the hardware (which wasn't distinct from the carrier hardware in any way) into them. AVM didn't want them to sell carrier modems with unlocked firmware.
When I read about this stuff first, it was all labeled "custom firmware", but it looks like the firmware wasn't so custom after all.
Either way, AVM sued a company selling second hand hardware and now a tens thousands of perfectly functional modems seemingly ended up in a landfill somewhere.
As I understand it, it's more of a trademark thing than GPL thing, but I'm also just relying on my German lessons where my favourite word was "schlaffen", and trademark law mostly just seems to be the "most convenient law" rather than an actual trademark dispute.
I kind of understand AVM's viewpoints on that one because they probably had a special deal with the ISP to sell these modems at a cheap price and now they're basically competing against themselves, but scrapping thousands of perfectly functional devices is of course just silly. My fritzbox had a "eco mode" or some such and I'm pretty sure that the scrapping completely obliterated the savings of eco mode of all fritzboxes combined.
I'm not hugely impressed by either case, but I also don't really think it backs up the "AVM is notorious for GPL violations" and "they intentionally violated the patents" (with an implied "they just ignore any IP law they don't like").
You might have missed my comment. It's not easy to get the sources which you as customer have the right to get. They are notorious, because they never comply voluntarily and for some models never comply. Just because people are not suing them all the time does not make it less of an issue.
See https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 (and possibly translate it).
They also do not support 3rd party DECTs. I had to use a cable to my Fritzbox to be able to use a DECT with addressbook. When connected as a DECT, The Fritzbox will not transmit the addressbook to the phone.
It's been a few years, but they definitely do support third party DECT phones. If I recall correctly, they even had to remove the "missed call" indicator on some brand of DECT phone (Siemens?) because they reverse engineered it and the manufacturer was (threatening? taking?) legal action.
Unfortunately, the DECT spec as implemented by many manufacturers isn't as broad as people seem to think it is. Most interoperability was done through DECT GAP last time I checked, and GAP lacks common features like "rich caller ID" and "address books".
I've seen other brands do address book support just fine, I think AVM tries to be compatible enough but just can't get the full feature set for every brand and model.
I've even seen Gigaset phones failing to support address books on more modern Gigaset basestations, DECT hardware is kind of a mess in that way.
I'm using a Gigaset DECT phone with a FRITZ!Box 7530 AX, the address book works fine.
I wasn't aware of that, do you have sources?
It's really odd seeing Chinese companies taking someone to court for IP infringement given that that is the modus operandi of Chinese companies and has been for decades.
The PRC started enforcing US/Berne copyrights quite seriously for big companies 5-10 years ago, after negotiations with the US under the Obama administration. They actually licence, buy, or invent huge amounts of IP today, straight rip-offs in China now are mostly just small time hustlers on Alibaba that everyone hates. For example, Huawei spends gigantic amounts of money on R&D, equivalent to Apple and more than Samsung.
Part of those negotiations would have been that China is not unfairly excluded from being able to own IP and prosecute others for the same laws it was agreeing to be subject to.
Nothing weird about it, has also been part of their MO for a long time. If a Chinese company infringes it's okay in their mind cause they have to "catch up", but if they can use it to go against Non-Chinese companies: Bring it on.
https://github.com/Freetz-NG/freetz-ng/discussions/134 is the first I could find re getting the sources. Note, that the GPL requires the sources in "the preferred form" and that includes a way to build them (if AVM has a way to build the sources, which they certainly have).
Last time I got (or a customer had) a AVM box I requested the sources and got nothing that could even build (invalid C files, AFAIR).
What is wrong with the titles in this article?
"AVM threatens to ban the sale of Fritzbox routers"
No, AVM is the company producing them, they are not threatening themselves to ban selling their own product
And then one title has "regional court" in small caps, another has "Regional Court" with caps
Some AI translation from German?
Kind of rich Huawei is complaining about patent infringement after they syphoned off IP from Nortel and Nokia. Now that those companies are mostly dead they kick the ladder out to stop anyone from doing the same.
Correct me if I'm wrong. But is it not the case that governments have been pressured to not be allowed to use Huawei technology in 6G and the like? Not being an expert but I think I remember things like that.
If you then own patents relating to that or similar technology and someone says "No you may not participate" simply because we so say, nothing to do with law, we just don't want you to. That maybe this sort of response can be expected ? If you kick someone long enough it's not surprising to see retaliation once in a while.
I looked at the patent EP3337077B1... It is utter rent-seeking nonsense.
Patents are supposed to be for innovation, the patent literally just claims adding a field to a packet indicating if it's for a single user or multiple is a novel invention.
You may want to read claim 1 of the patent publication again. The claim indicates that a specific field is used for different purposes depending on a transmission mode. It is not an arbitrary or obvious choice to use the HE-SIG A field to indicate the number of scheduled users or the number of symbols in the HE-SIG B field.
Do you have any examples where any packet field is used to indicate a number of users or symbols?
I had cause and effect backwards of the field contents. I typically refuse to read patents so the language is rather foreign and confusing to me.
Either way, reinterpreting a field depending on the mode of communication is equally not novel.
Patents are never about innovation. Not in a sense that applies to everyone.
I still think that all law suites should be paid for by the government. Both defence and offence. This would have a sort of balancing out effect and then make law actually be more applicable for everyone.
Maybe sounds radical. But think about it. In a democracy law should be equally useful to all citizens. It clearly is not.
China complaining about patent infringement? That’s rich.
I heard stories from people working at Nokia about Huawei copying manuals verbatim, including mistakes.
And Huawei is not alone in this. When I first saw a TP-Link user interface I was confused. It looked exactly like the Unifi interface. At first I thought maybe Unifi OEM their stuff from TP-Link. Didn't take long to figure out they had just copied it.
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