Even if it’s like catching Al capone on tax fraud, it’s still good to get the baddie.

Rewarding a patent troll is never a good thing. It just means no one will be able to use haptic feedback without paying a toll.

Are they really a patent troll though? It’s apparently a headphone company.

They have one headphone license for one model from crossair, that is worth less money that what they spent on lawyers for this trial. They are a patent troll.

The patent is not on haptic feedback. The patent is on a very specific means of implementing haptic feedback using ferrofluids and electromagnetic actuators that it is claimed (and Apple deemed it good enough to copy, so presumably truly) allows for both a smaller implementation than typical mechanical haptic feedback (i.e. the off-balance-flywheel approach of phones of old), while also allowing for low- or zero- noise compared to “speaker or piezo” based haptic feedback.

There are a lot of shit patents in the world, but on a surface reading at least this seems sufficiently novel that I don’t see why it should be invalid. One also presumes that if Apple had any grounds to invalidate it on prior-art they would have done so.

So I looked into this and you are right and I am wrong. Deleting my previous posts since there’s more to this case than just haptics.

Well, all credit to you!

Sometimes Lemmy can be surprising in a good way :^).