Netbook maker Acer accuses Apple of starting 'patent war' - Page 2

Fair?

Apple invested time and money to revolutionize the industry; is it fair that Google simply copied (read stole) Apples design in order to make a quick buck?

Even with all its capacity to be abused, the patent system does exist for a legitimate reason, and I for one can't think of a better example of that reason than this "patent war."

Sturm und Drang... Donner und Blitzen...

... or maybe just Frick and Frack

Wang, Boehner, Weiner.

Look at Lenovo go! They could be the top PC seller in short order if those trends continue.

And what would Apple gain by licensing all of their IP? How would that benefit the iOS platform?

No matter how many times it's repeated that Google stole Apple's idea for a smartphone doesn't make it true. It's not even clear which one first decided to pursue a mobile OS. It's absolutely possible that Android pre-dates iOS, and even that Apple (Steve Jobs?) used Google and or Andy Rubin for some ideas for the iPhone.

I call BS... Why did it take 18 months after the debut of the iPhone to bring an Android phone to the market then? And where were these other models and form factors?

And then, wait for it... over a year after the debut of the iPad, they release a tablet based OS to market.

Sorry, but it all adds up to one thing... "Hey look at that! That's what we should do too!"

I'll grant you that they may have had a phone with a touch screen, but not a multi-touch interface. It was probably like everything other touch screen at the time, single touch with a stylus.

I think I'll let the courts decide who's right and who's wrong... whatever Steve's motives may be. As mentioned before... we mere mortals may never know who knew what and when. For all I know it was a private conversation between Steve and Woz and then one day Woz was having a beer with Rubin... or vice versa (... and does Eric S. look like a guy that would hang with the boys at the corner pub...)

The questions that seem to be up for debate... "is Apple wrong in suing to protect its IP?' and "is it Apple's lack of being able to innovate that has left it with only one alternative... litigation?".

I'm sure you know how I feel about both of those questions.

Again sorry... this has nothing to do with who was first to pursue a mobile OS ... First of all, Newton OS was around LONG before Android.

It has everything to do with what is considered a mobile OS NOW. Before iPhone, every mobile OS was point and click based, with scroll bars, pop up menus and even windows. Even on touch based devices which have been around a long time; again the Newton was released in 1993 and there were others before that.

Post iPhone and look at the landscape of mobile OS... they are ALL multi-touch enabled, direct manipulation devices, which is what iOS brought to the market.

Second, the patents HTC was found guilty of violating, has nothing to do with mobile OS, it has to do with data detection; recognizing familiar bits of data within a larger chunk of data and providing a method to interact with it. Such as highlighting, phone numbers, addresses, dates, etc in an email or note, which was patented and used in both the Newton OS and Mac OS 7.5 in the mid 90's.

I have to agree with you on that one. If Google and Rubin were really developing a touch phone you would have thought that their timeline wouldn't be that far off from Apple (yes... they had the tech and the drawings but did they really think it would fly before they saw the iPhone). 18 months is an eternity in the tech world.

All this crap about Apple this and Apple that, whine whine whine why don't HTC and acer etc all turn round to Google and say 'what the fuck is with the OS you supplied us, get a deal in place with Apple to protect us'

Steve Jobs made it very clear that Apple was going to defend it's IP the day the iPhone was announced. Now Apple is trying to stomp a mud hole in these companies and kick it dry they're surprised? Now it is Apple that is not playing fair, not competing, not innovating?

Actually it was multi-touch, but the long press that Android now uses to bring up menu's instead was used to zoom in.

I'm not in any way suggesting that Apple hasn't been the primary innovator in recent years for both smartphones and tablets, but that doesn't mean others can't swing on the same playground. Wherever there's market success you're going to see competitor's. That doesn't necessarily make them thief's as much as imitators. IMO even Apple's success can be traced to their imitation of Sony, both in production ideas and the very successful Walkman products.

OK fine, the patent laws aren't perfect, nor are the courts which make judgements based on them. Human judgement is prone to error and all that.

In this case however, is there really anyone who can claim with a straight face that Apple didn't revolutionize the way we think of smartphones (whereas the patent trolls have never revolutionized anything at all)? Does anyone care to deny that if all these tech companies hadn't copied Apples design they would be on the road to bankruptcy right now? In this case one can't help but think that this revolution does constitute some sort of work/innovation on the part of the one who started the it, and that this work/innovation deserves credit.

Just because the system suffers from broad/obvious patents does not mean that we should just shrug our shoulders and give up. Patent courts exist to decide these matters, and in this case it sounds like that decision is more or less made.

Agreed. Given how Google normally does things, it would have been released as a Beta with bugs and all as soon as they pulled the idea out of their ass.

Google didn't produce phones (any hardware at all in fact) and had no real control over who would use it or when they'd have their designs ready. So the observation that it took a few months for manufacturers to recognize the value in getting into the smartphone market, and only after Apple was showing success, should be no surprise. Android was ready before the handset manufacturer's that would use it were convinced it was worth pursuing. So the "18 month delay" is no indication at all that it was due to Google trying to copy/steal from Apple.

Again, I have to disagree. When you 'imitate' a patented invention by copying it, then you are by definition infringing the patent. While you may not consider that 'theft' in a technical sense, it is still against the law.

Holding a finger down for any giving amount of time, is not multi-touch. Multi-touch means more than one point of contact. What you're describing can be done with a mouse and was years before that in Mac OS.

Actually Apple (S.Jobs) has openly admitted to being a fan a Sony, in fact, Sony made all of Apple's early monitors and even leant a hand in designing Apple's first real notebook computer. There's nothing wrong with partnering up with another company to design things. And there's nothing wrong with being influenced by others. But there is a difference between influence and copy. There are many different ways to create something and finding your own way/method takes a lot of work.

Well, neither of them were the first to pursue a mobile OS; MS, Palm, et al. had mobile OSs long before Apple/Google entered the industry. That's not the point; the point is innovative features.

What is clear is that Apple was the first to bring a finished product to the market and that Google took a suspiciously long time to release a supposedly independently developed, almost identical product. so what is the casual observer to conclude?

As for the unclear, well, one supposes that that's why lawyers have all that training to be non-casual observers.

Acer Who?

Suck it, losers!

The fact that Google does not produce phones seems to indicate that it is extremely implausible that they were producing software that requires hardware that none of their potential clients were even dreaming of producing, does it not?

They absolutely did, but much of the IP that they're litigating with isn't based on that - it's core computer stuff that they patented in the 90s during the software patent gold-rush.

It's been discussed in the other IP threads, but it bears repeating. Apple is effectively defending the innovation that they really did make using IP that is only tangentially related and that is almost impossible to avoid infringing because the really profound things about the new products were for one reason or another not patentable.


Kodak and S3 both did in their day - and besides the moment people start portraying this as being about 'ownership' or 'property rights' the distinction between innovation and troll disappears.

Okay, granted... but now you've gone and said that Apple was the point man... Google was just sitting back letting others do the heavy lifting. I think Apple should get some cred for that...

All tech companies want "either money or market influence." Acer certainly would have done the same if they could have.


And exactly why is it that Android is becoming 1) more and more expensive to license despite being "free" and 2) the target of many successful lawsuits, particularly the airtight Oracle suit? I think it's because of a certain corporate character trait that is deeply embedded in Google's culture.

Google was born and bred on the web. They grew very accustomed to quickly updating their web pages and apps. It's quick and easy to push out updates to your web servers, so they banged out updates and "beta" features as quickly as possible. If there were bugs or design problems, they could fix them later in an equally quick and easy update. Why wait to get it right?

That fast and loose approach has allowed Google's web apps to grow quickly. But it has also caused Google to paint Android into a corner. By not doing sufficient due diligence and by not protecting themselves legally, they have left their flank exposed. Wide open to attack.

The same impatience and/or indifference caused their music locker service to end up as little more than a remote disk farm. Google couldn't or wouldn't spend the time and money to massage the record labels into an agreement. And caused them to lose the bidding war for all those vital Nortel patents. And caused them to release the poorly designed remix of WebTV called Google TV.

One reason for this is the fact that Google's real product isn't software. Or hardware. It's ads. You are Google's product, and they sell your eyeballs on AdMob ads to their customers. Advertisers. And when you look at it from that perspective, developing great software and hardware isn't necessary after all.

You're absolutely correct. Thanks for the correction. It's not clear whether Google was shopping around a multi-touch prototype. I'd have to see if I can find more on that.

Total BS.

Al through 2006 Google was looking into getting in the telephone business, while simultaneously strenuously denying it was. it showed various devices to manufacturers, none of which was "multi-touch" and from the sources I've been able to find, it wasn't capacitive touch either but an old school Windows Mobile type touch device.

*After* Apple announced the multi-touch iPhone they switch gears and within a few months got some partners and created the "Open Handset Alliance" which was by their own description focussed on creating an "answer" to the iPhone. In other words an open source copy of the iPhone.

In other words, Google was deliberately deceptive about getting into the phone business while Schmidt sat on the Apple board and soaked up all the info about the iPhone. They didn't at that time know what the iPhone was going to be like, (or if Schmidt did he was under NDA), but they were already set on copying it whatever it turned out to be. As soon as it became public knowledge that the iPhone was this revolutionary multi-touch device, they immediately switched to attempting to copy that and to rally the entire industry or as much as they could of it, to fight against Apple.

These are all known facts that anyone can look up.

Google and particularly Schmidt did everything they could to copy the iPhone short of actually breaking the law. Before Apple's board started talking about it, Google had no plans to enter the market. Schmidt however seems to have been actively looking into the phone business in early 2006, probably because as a member of the board he knew where Apple was about to jump. When asked even a month previous to the announcement of the iPhone, Google denied being interested in phones, and denied that they were thinking of making a Phone OS. They only got started to be interested in phones when they saw that Apple was going to be.

The second the info about multi-touch was public, Schmidt's NDA no longer applied and the copying of the multi-touch interface began in earnest. Facts.

As far as the handset manufacturers were concerned, you're probably correct that Apple was taking point. It doesn't mean that Google was just "sitting back" tho. They reportedly had an interest in entering the mobile space years before they could convince a manufacturer or two to join in. Take a look at the timeline link I posted earlier if you haven't already.

BTW, there's a smartphone history posted here. Interesting read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#History

Except ownership in the patent world is simply never that clear. There can be many reasons why the patent is invalid or inapplicable. This is why Apple chooses to fight so many infringement cases against it - not because it wants to 'steal'. Google can make the same case in many of these instances.

This is why the law doesn't class infringing patents as theft.

Oh... I've read all of that backwards and forwards... it still doesn't tell me who knew what and when... or how.

As mentioned... I'll leave that up to the courts.

HTC and Acer should listen to themselves... and innovate instead of bitching.

This sums it all up.

Fair enough. I'm not going to apply a double standard. If Apple infringed on IP they deserve to be taken to court and to pay. I'm just trying to argue against the claim that the existence of patent trolls proves that the patent system is evil/its all hopeless/there is no such thing as IP.


Not so. Patent trolls exist by patenting ideas that require no thought because they are broad/obvious, and therefore don't deserve to be patented. The distinction is that the patent trolls try to own something they didn't create (or buy), or that doesn't exist.

I think the lameness of Acer's response points to a problem in the Android universe-- most of the hardware parters are market "losers" who participated in the PC race to the bottom and whose business model is predicated on razor thin margins and volume.

As such, they're not well positioned to spend any real money on R&D, and their contribution to the mobile space is going to be limited to dropping in current parts and minor case variations. What counts for "innovation" in the Android market are things like the Asus Transformer, which simply bundles a clip-on keyboard.

Acer cannot actually compete with Apple in any meaningful way; all they can do is hope Google keeps doing popular things with Android and try to shave a few more pennies off their selling price. Beyond that, they'll dick around with case design and put mega giga on the box every time they upgrade another commodity part. Their current bellyaching is a testament to that-- they would prefer to live in a world where they can make a comfortable living as a parts assembler operating in the markets Apple creates and we all agree to pretend touch phones and tablet designs just sort of fall out of the sky. In this, they are sadly typical of Android hardware partners.

Apple can't just let normal market forces rule. Ripped-off copies of the intellectual property they worked so hard to develop have entered the market.

This isn't about when Google decided to enter the phone industry; this is about Google stealing Apples innovative features/design.

Google's innocence rests on a claim that they developed these features/designs independently from Apple, but to suppose that would be to suppose that Google was writing software to run on hardware that did not exist outside of Apple's labs.

True, and when a complaint is heard and a supporting judgment is made, as in, for example, the ruling against Apple in the Nokia case or the playlist patent case you referred to, the offending companies pay up and shut up. Or, if you are in the Android Army, you whine & cry about it.

Thompson

To be honest, when Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007 they said they patented the hell out of it, so one could easily expect lawsuits for clones.

Apple does seem to be going all out, I'm sure they'll just license out their patents instead of injunctions, though. It was just later (when the patents were granted) than sooner that Apple would actually start suing others for their intellectual property, I guess.

I'm sure Acer would be more than happy to create IOS tablets but Apple has a monopoly on their software and hardware. How is it that Microsoft gets sued for bundling their software and viewed as anti-competitive yet Apple gets away with it all the time?

They had no plans to produce a phone, and of course they'd deny rumors about what their actual plans were as much as possible. Apple's denied several things that actually were in the works. But there's also no way that Apple was unaware that Google had plans for a mobile OS. My personal feeling is that Apple/Steve Jobs wanted to keep Google close to make sure they knew what they were up to. That's why Schmidt was invited to the board. IMO, it's was Apple's idea to mine Google, not the other way around.

If you read the timeline posted again here, I think it may be clearer:
http://searchengineland.com/gphone-t...timeline-10996

The entire patent system may not be evil/hopeless. Just the software patent part, especially in the US.


If you are a software developer, and you read some of Apple's patents such as the '647 patent, it's very hard not to come to the same conclusion.

It's understandable why practising entities such as Apple and MS would choose to act in the same fashion as the trolls. By doing so they develop large IP arsenals that can be used both in offense or defence. That doesn't make it something that I want to cheer for though.

The only real difference between much of Apple's IP and say Personal Audio LLC's, is that Apple wouldn't use their patents against a small player and PA LLC would.

Are you an out of work employee from Psystar...