雅思阅读-练习六
(总分40,考试时间90分钟)
Reading passage 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14, which are bad on Reading Passage 1 below.
The Great Patent Battle车世界报价
两个百念什么 Nasty legal spats between tech giants may be here to stay王安石诗句
天荒地老无人识
HISTORY buffs still wax poetic about the brutal patent battles a century ago between the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss, another aviation pioneer. The current smart-phone patent war does not quite have the same romance, but it could be as important.
孔子的名言名句
拈朵微笑的花 Hardly a week pass without a new ca. Motorola sued Apple this month, having itlf been sued by Microsoft a few days earlier. Since 2006 the number of mobile-phone-related
**plaints has incread by 20% annually, according to Lex Machina, a firm that keeps a databa of intellectual-property spats in America.
Most suits were filed by patent owners who hail from another industry, such as Kodak (a firm from a bygone era that now makes printers), or by patent trolls (firms that buy patents not in order to make products, but to sue others for allegedly infringing them). But in recent months the makers of handts and related software themlves have become much more litigious, reports Joshua Walker, the boss of Lex Machina.
This orgy for lawyers is partly a result of the explosion of the market for smart-phones. IDC, a market-rearch firm, expects that 270m smart-phones will be sold this year: 55% more than in 2009. "It has become worthwhile to defend one's intellectual property," says Richard Windsor of Nomura, an investment bank.
Yet there is more than this going on. Smart-phones are not just another type of handt, but fully-**puters, **e loaded with software and double as digital cameras and portable entertainment centres. **bine technologies from different .industries, most of the
m patented. Given **plexity, sorting out who owns what requires time and a phalanx of lawyers.
The convergence of different industries has also led to a culture clash. When it comes to intellectual property, mobile-phone firms have mostly operated like a club. They jointly develop new technical standards, for example, for a new generation of wireless networks. They then licen or swap the patents "esntial" to this standard under "fair and reasonable" conditions.
Not being ud to such a collectivist t-up, Apple refud to pay up, which triggered the first big legal skirmish over smart-phones. A year ago Nokia lobbed a lawsuit at Apple, alleging that its American rival's iPhone infringes on a number of its "esntial patents". A couple of months later, Apple returned the favour, alleging that Nokia had copied some iPhone features. Since then both sides have upped the ante by filing **plaints.
Lending ferocity to this legal firefight is the fact **petition in the smart-phone market is not merely about individual products, but entire platforms and operating systems (e cha
rt). The are the infrastructures that allow other firms to develop applications, or "apps", for the devices. Should any one firm gain an important lead, it might dominate the industry for decades—just as Microsoft has dominated the market for **puter (PC) software.
Yet there is a difference between the smart-phone war and the earlier one over PCs. There is a new type of player, firms with open-source platforms. Google, for instance, which makes its money from advertiments, does not charge for Android (its operating system for smart-phones) and lets others modify the software. This makes life hard for vendors of proprietary platforms, such as Apple and Microsoft.
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This explains another t of cloly watched lawsuits. In March Apple sued HTC, a Taiwane maker of smart-phones, which responded in kind a couple of months later. Earlier this month it was Microsoft's turn to file a lawsuit against Motorola, which is likely to retaliate soon. And Oracle, a maker of business software, has sued Google directly, albeit over a different issue, concerning how Android us Java, a programming language.
Some expect Apple and Microsoft to sue Google. Yet this is unlikely, becau the online giant will be hard to pin down. Google does not earn any money with Android, which makes it difficult to calculate any potential damage awards and patent royalties. The frenzy of smart-phone litigation could last for years. **batants have deep pockets and much to lo. Google is bounding ahead; Android now runs 32% of smart-phones sold in
