Google backs HTC in what could be 'long and bloody battle' with Apple - Page 7

Whether Apple is "threatened" or not is irrelevant. Apple is contending they are profiting by stealing their intellectual property. Why should they be allowed to do that while they are in litigation? If Apple can make a strong enough case for the injunction and the can get it, why shouldn't they?

It's business! I love how stuff like this get's romanticized into emotional arguments about "threatened" but really it's just Apple protecting interests they believe they are entitled to. It's up to the court to either agree or not.

There selling every phone they can produce right now! Why would they want to constrain supply further while loosing negotiating leverage needlessly?

Your right, Apple amassed $40B in the bank by being stupid

The detractors are just people who do not believe in patents. Their whole idea of progress is to wait for Apple, or someone, to come up with a great idea so that the rest of the industry can copy it and catch up, thus pressuring the innovator to come up with another great idea to continue the cycle. People have as much as admitted this by saying things like Apple should fight the competition by innovating, not by defending patents. That is just another way of saying that the industry is out of ideas to steel and it is time for Apple to supply them with more.

Agreed. Let HTC (and Google) pay for their own innovation. In my view, if HTC can be shown to have violated Apple patents, they deserve to be bitch slapped.

Do not believe in patents or do not believe in software patents?

I'm glad I live in a place where software patents are not allowed.


HTC had flip smartphones, qwerty slide smartphones, t9 slide smartphones, smartphones without keyboard.

G1 is almost like an HTC Hermes with a bigger screen.

I don't know how mobile market was in USA, but the iPhone form factor, iPhone screen size and iPhone screen resolution had been seen in a number of smartphones out there.

Were these capacitive touch screen devices loaded with a finger friendly OS?

LG Prada was the first phone with a finger only capacitive screen.

It's an excessive waste of resources with a huge amount of risk, even for Google. If Google buys Palm, the potential damage is Google's, not Palm's. Apple could successfully defend against or workaround any Palm patents.

None of the patents are for anything involving the "first finger friendly touchscreen phone" or "the first slate form factor phone" or "the first phone with a 3.5" screen". You have to look for prior art on the patents themselves.

There's a reason the phones of today look like and try to recreate the experience of an iPhone and not an LG Prada or a Windows Mobile phone or a Symbian phone of yesteryear or a QWERTY candybar. Apple's reason for living is to make fun-to-use, elegant-to-use stuff. That's the iPhone's primary reason for existence (because phones sucked at it at the time), and Apple knew they'd make a lot of money on it because they understood people would pay a premium for it. With the release of the iPhone, everyone is trying to follow the formula laid out by the iPhone. Even the smiling keyboard makers themselves developed an iPhone clone.

There's a reason why there aren't any LG Prada "killers" or clones or copies. All it was was a Symbian phone with a finger UI design to mimic the Symbian-style phone interface. The only similarity was the idea of finger-based touchscreen phone. They are not even close to the same implementation. They are as far apart as finger-based touchscreen phones can be.

Now, I'm ambivalent on Apple's path here, but I knew something like this could come, as the whole intent of Google/HTC's action was to mimic the iPhone experience as much as possible. Maybe there were gentlemanly agreements between Schmidt and Jobs, and the Nexus One + Multi-Touch broke it. Who knows.

I haven't said anything about the patents, I was responding a claim that all HTC smartphones before the iPhone were QWERTY phones and, after that, someone has asked about capacitive screens.

And I repeat again, I'm glad for living in a place where software patents doesn't exist.

Apple generates an enormous amount of revenue selling gadgets, and the company has never previously shown an interest in developing a real licensing program. So it's unlikely that the purpose of this lawsuit is to create a new, ongoing royalty stream from a hot product. It's almost definitely based on a genuine desire to shut a competitor out of the market, or to at least throw enough obstacles in HTC's path so that Apple keeps its edge in the marketplace.

Well and accurately said from : Patent Litigation Weekly: Digging Beneath the Surface of Apple v. HTC

Apple behaving like $M. The Android OS is expected to overtake the iPhone as early as next year and clearly Apple is going to do something about that by whatever means necessary - be they fair or foul.

If software patents don't exist where you live, what's to stop you making as many copies of Windows as you want?

My apologies if I interpolated too much.

I'm not a subscriber that Apple feels so aggrieved that they are suing. Well not insofar as the sole reason. Like I said before, you don't sue if you don't feel aggrieved and cheated and whathaveyou. No, I don't think there were any phones like the iPhone prior to its introduction. Any kind of likeness was superficial. The HTC Touch (Elf, Love, whatever) was your typical Windows Mobile Pro phone. To me, they glommed a "finger friendly" launcher on top to take advantage of iPhone hysteria. At it's heart, it was still a Windows Mobile phone. The LG Prada was capacitive touchscreen yes, but its Flash-based UI was mostly a virtual rendition of Symbian S40/S60, not a not UI. Most everything else was a variation of thumb-board be it candybar or slider with WinMob, PalmOS, Symbian, Blackberry, etc.

It's pretty unique. Apple also new iPhone clones were coming. But I think part of what set them off is the Apple-Google relationship and the Jobs-Schmidt relationship. There was a lot of trust and mutual respect. Once Google started Android and ChromeOS, it was over. Android and ChromeOS are both strategic directions in competition with Apple, and Schmidt was sitting on Apple's board all that time.

Moreover, Android started life looking like this:



Yes. Google is tasteless. That's what I think Jobs thinks. They couldn't even be original. Android started out life as a Treo/Blackberry QWERTY candybar copy. They were working on this type of design and form factor in 2007. By Fall of 2008, lo and behind, they completely changed direction and made an iPhone clone as best as they could. By Spring of 2009, the slate form factor Magic came out. By January 2010, Google/HTC achieved the closest iPhone clone yet, the Nexus One.


I don't think you will be happy at all. Think deeper than that. There is really no difference between a software based patent and a hardware one. They are both a form of invention. What hurts is the definition of invention is too broad, be it hardware or software. What we're really asking the patent office to do is determine what is a real invention and what is not; that is, an actual innovative, life changing invention. That's not an easy task and is rife with vagaries. They are in a no-win situation really.

Property, licensing and patents are different things. What "no patents" would do is make everything cheap and crappy. Race to the bottom. The small guy would never have a chance.

Some impressions by some prominent Mac developers:

Shane Crawford:

I am not particularly proud of Apple right now.

I will switch, immediately, to any mobile phone produced by a company that announces and follows this policy:

They make a searchable catalogue of all their own patents, including information on where they believe the patented concepts are pertinent.
They declare the techniques in the patents free for the taking, royalty free, in exchange for a line in the product acknowledgements.
They declare the previous agreement void as soon as any legal action regarding alleged patent infringement is brought against the company.
They truly only use the patents to protect themselves against other patent suits.
I was under the impression that Apple was more interested in continuing to think up new interfaces, new approaches and new implementations that might better serve us in the age of multi-touch and ubiquitous high-speed Internet access. That the value in Apples products is a cohesive and speedy experience that is easy to navigate, learn and use, and not the various isolated nuts and bolts or building blocks that mindlessly ported in isolation mean nothing but carefully assembled in aggregate mean everything. That the best way for Apple to counter, say, Chinese iPhone ripoffs was to move full speed ahead.

Youre established in a country with really fucked up patent laws, and I can understand that. You get hounded by a company that abuses those laws, and I can sympathize with defending yourself, even with unsavory attitude. But what I cant forgive is using these same laws as a completely unwarranted bludgeon against someone who isnt the worst offender while you sit on a 40 billion dollar war chest.

You cant write your own laws, but being an asshole by abusing them is clearly your choice. I guess I wish youd have thought differently.



Will Shipley:

An Open Letter to Steve Jobs Concerning the HTC Lawsuits.

Enforcing patents is wrong. Youve famously taken and built on ideas from your competitors, as have I, as we should, as great artists do. Why is what HTC has done worse? Whether an idea was patented doesnt change the morality of copying it, it only changes the ability to sue.

But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple's headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?

And the iPhone needs competition to stay awesome. HTC wont hurt your sales much, anyway you know the iPhones success is because of the art in each of its million details, not because of a handful of tech patents. Who will want a pale imitation when they could have the original?

I always thought of you as a guy whod say, Well, copy me if you can, because youre copying what I did years ago, and what Im working on now is EVEN cooler! I like it when competitors copy me because it means they arent about to leapfrog me: theyll always be playing catch-up.

If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it's going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft. Enforcing patents isn't a good long-term play: it's the beginning of the end of the creative Apple we both love.

Stealing ideas and stealing work are two different things. Steve said himself that geniuses stand on the shoulders of others. Apple proudly flew the pirate flag at their office, so now they are just being hypocritical... I hope this doesn't become standard practice...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Stealing code, firmware, chemical formulas, etc. is wrong. Stealing ideas is different. That shouldn't be illegal in my opinion. It is not a race to the bottom. There is a huge difference between a product created by an innovative company and one that just blindly copies everything. The quality and experience is definitely not the same. The companies who implement those ideas the best and stay ahead of everyone else will come out ahead. This is actually the first time I know of that Apple has sued another company in a cast-the-first-stone situation. I hope they return to the defensive stance they have always taken in the past on these matters.

So what is the difference between an idea and an implementation? In my opinion, an implementation is something that physically exists. As far as I can tell the patent system only deals in ideas. I think there is something wrong with what the patent system says they do and what they actually do. I have no idea how you would patent an implementation. Submit the entire source code for your implementation?

There is a vague line between an idea and a formula or a recipe or an implementation. Very vague and nonobvious. Thought cases:

1. RIM, the smiling thumb board company, believes they own the keyboard layout of the Blackberry keyboard and the fact that it has a curve to it. They also have a patent on a keyboard that has a "V" shape as well as the smile shape. They sued Handspring for it and Handspring had to settle and license. If you haven't noticed, RIM is the only company sells a thumb board with a curve to it. The Treos used to have them since Palm hand a license through Handspring, but now with the Treo retired, no other phone has the feature.

Is the curved thumb board an invention or an idea? Is it patentable?

If you say yes, you have no choice but to grant Apple its unlock screen implementation patent even though it's a GUI design, software, not hardware. Really what's the difference? The design is unique, not obvious, and there are a gazillion other ways to unlock a screen.

If you say no, well I'll try to think of another thought case to see where your boundary is.

2. Xerox successfully sued Palm in the unistroke versus Graffiti case. Xerox says they invented single stroke block character recognition for entering character input on a touchscreen. Palm implemented unistroke style block character recognition with Graffiti 1. They lost the case and implemented multiple stroke block character recognition with Graffiti 2. Some say Palm jumped the shark after this as people had to switch and it wasn't comfortable.

Is it patentable? The idea is character recognition. It was implementable in multiple ways. It just so happens unistroke was just a little bit easier.

If you say yes, you have to allow for Apple's rubber banding scroll and fixed axis scroll patents. Both are just implementations for scrolling.

If you say no, I'll think up another test case to see where your boundary is.

3. In the above, which is the idea and which is the implementation? Thumb board is the idea. Thumb board layout is also an idea. So is a layout (key location and board geometry) of a keyboard patentable since it is just an idea? Extend it to software. Would different touchscreen keyboards be patentable? Is Apple's iPhone word correction patentable? What about the popup keys? They are just ideas too. They also happen to be implementations.

I live in the EU and I don't see the problem you are saying

So who was Jobs working for at the time of that interview?

The original quote is attributed to Picasso but there is no evidence of that, it was likely derived from an earlier quote by T. S. Elliott:-

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Eliot, T.S., Philip Massinger, The Sacred Wood, New York: Bartleby.com, 2000.

The patents Apple are using deal with specific implementations of software and hardware, which act as described in the patent.

An iPhone is a real thing, it does what the patents describe.

An iPhone is not an idea, if I dropped one on your head from a tree in a demonstration of Newtonian physics i.e. gravity then you would probably feel the impact.

Apple's patent portfolio is very, very deep.

Where might that be and how much software innovation happens in your place?

Edit: I see you live in the "EU"... meaning where exactly?

Ideas are out there, free for the taking. Implementing those ideas, giving them physical form or process is a different matter entirely.

The one issue with this is that the patent Apple has just says "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image". The picture on the patent shows the left-to-right, but the wording is extremely broad.

Lets say HTC (or any other developer) uses the other Android lock screen where you trace dots on a 3x3 grid to unlock it. That's drastically different than the simple left-to-right swipe, but yet the way the patent is worded, Apple can still sue for that. As the patent is worded, as long as it involves a touchscreen and some type of gesture on that touchscreen, it would be a violation of the patent. Drastically limits that "gazillion other ways", doesn't it?

I have no issue with Apple having a patent for the left-to-right swipe, but the patent as-worded, it's way to broad to have been issued.

Unlocking like older Android phones used to have or like the Droid has which didn't prompt any reaction from Apple.

Along comes Android 2.1 on the Nexus 1 and Desire they crossed the line by being almost an exact replica.

Bang, Apple reacts in the best interests of it's shareholders.

I was using a magic today it was doing smartphone things differently to an iPhone, the nexus one and desire overstepped the mark.

Here is an image from HTC's site, it says it all really.



Source

Is the whole EU which doesn't allow software patents

Can you tell me the qualitative difference bewtween unlocking sliding top bottom as the Hero can unlock and sliding in an arc as the Nexus can unlock?

The DROID has been on the market for a few months with the arc slide, which Apple didn't seem to have any issue with. Then it got the 2.0.1 update which turned it from the arc to a flat left-to-right motion, which Apple still has not reacted to. It also has the 3x3 "code grid" method, which essentially is still "gestures on a image", to which Apple also has not reacted to.

It's my opinion (shared by numerous articles out there), that this is Apple's proxy battle with Android by going after the easiest member of the Android family, HTC. Pretty much all Android phones use some method of finger sliding to unlock it. Why hasn't Apple gone after any of the other members of the Open Handset Alliance in the same suit? Or even Google itself, since it's the one that created the base software that all the other are using?


Here's Wikipedia's page for HP's iPaq line of PDAs:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ

And Dell's Axim page:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Axim

Those devices were released as early as 2001 and have the same general look as the HTC smartphones of today. So by your logic, Apple has copied the "look" of the iPaqs and Axims.

I would argue that HTC's N1 and Desire are completely different from the iPhone from a technological view. They have 4 buttons and a trackpad/ball, not a single button like the iPhone has. The iPhone's Home button is something you press to get to the main screen, not a navigation device like on the HTC smartphones.

I think it's more logical that all of these designs came about because of ergonomic design for the user. What if all the buttons were arranged at the top face of the phone, just for the sake of keeping it from looking like the iPhone (as you seem to want)? The user would have to cover up the screen every time they want to use a button. This configuration of having the main user interaction buttons below the screen has been around for years.

Suing over just the layout would be the same as Ford suing Nissan for having a car with four wheels and has the driver on the front left of the body. Or Boeing suing Airbus because their planes have 2 wings and a tail and has the cockpit at the front of the fuselage.

Really?

Really?

Really!

When you don't have arguments you joke? Interesting.

So the question I have to ask of you then:

Since the Newton never took off and you claim everyone else is copying Apple, then why did Apple not sue HP or Dell for its iPAQ and Axim lines then? Or Palm for that matter, since the PalmPilots look more like the Newton than any PocketPC. They could have used some of the same patents they are suing HTC over, since the patents have been around since the 90s.

HP and Dell (with Microsoft's software) clearly advanced what the Newton was, to sell well during the days of the PocketPC. Just as HTC, Samsung, Motrola, etc (with Google's software) has advanced what the iPhone was, to sell well during this age of the smartphones.

Why has Apple suddenly decided that now is the time to sue a rival?



Clearly!

But your image interests me. What is that old behemoth of a PDA? I'm assuming since you posted it after the image of the Newton, that it pre-dates it?

Obviously because at those points in time they weren't violating the patents as Apple alleges now.

btw the term PDA was originally coined to describe the Newton at it's introduction in 1992.

It's a GridPad 1910, one of the first Tablet PC's, released in 1.989, made by Samsung for Grid

Mmm, undervoltiing CPU's was used by Pocket PC's and it's one of the alleged patent violations.

Yet some of the patents Apple is suing for go back to before when some of those devices were sold. I would assume that the software built upon those in one way or another (as broadly worded as Apple's patents are).

My whole point is that you're alleging that HTC just now is getting sued because the Desire and N1 "look" like the iPhone. I've pointed out (and you too), that all these devices have looked like each other for the past 2 decades (roughly).

And some of the patents Apple are suing for were just granted in February of this year (a bit suspect for my taste). If a patent isn't officially granted and a company does work on something similar and releases it before the patent is granted, how does the patent get applied? It's not like a company can sit there and wait until a decision is made.

And yes, I know that the term "PDA" was coined by John Sculley at CES in 1997. I don't think you pointing out random facts (especially ones that obviously point to "Apple did it first!") to me makes your argument any better.