I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
I have thought a lot about this law suit and I finally decided that I am against Apple on this one. While I think they have the right to defend their patents ( I Own a couple of my own), I do not think they have the right to try and destroy cometition with strong arm tactics.
What patents do you have? I would like to use them in my upcoming products... thanks for the hard work, now I don't have to do that part. I can just go make money off of your patents.
I have thought a lot about this law suit and I finally decided that I am against Apple on this one. While I think they have the right to defend their patents ( I Own a couple of my own), I do not think they have the right to try and destroy cometition with strong arm tactics. The part that gets me is how they went to the ITC and are trying to halt the import of a competors product BEFORE they have their day in court to try and defent their patents. This seem more like extortion than a real claim of damages. Also the fact that they are going after Google through HTC is just wrong. If they have a problem with Google, then go after Google...
I personally ( not a patent laywer ) think the claims made by Apple are weak, to general and the patnets should never have been granted. I personally do not think they they should hold up in court. I say should because in a cout of law, justice rarely has anything to do with it.
I do realize that Apple ( or any big company ) could care less about what I think. Last year I switched from a PC and bought a Macbook and liked it. It bought a MacMini for my entertainment center and I liked it as well. I was thinking about buying another MacMini to replace an aging web server. ( I already converted the code to run on Apache ). I was also starting to buy and rent movies through iTunes. In short, I was becoming a fan of Apple.
However, I do not like what I see Apple doing lately. They seem to be becoming way to much of a control freek company. They seem to be becoming a company that wants to succed through fear and intimidation more than one that wants to succeed through innovation. I personally think they are becoming their own enemy. As a result of this lawsuit I have decided not to buy any more products from Apple. It is my single little (meaningless) vote against what they are doing as a company....
Right, the vote is meaningless. I think it makes a bigger difference to discuss this issue. I'm sure Apple is listening.
What patents do you have? I would like to use them in my upcoming products... thanks for the hard work, now I don't have to do that part. I can just go make money off of your patents.
You don't mind do you?
These are software patents. Unless you plan to sneak in to his house and steal source code, you would have to re-implement (which is hard).
Apples lawyers are testing out these patents against HTC to see which will stick. These will then set precedence for taking on bigger fish.
Apple's lawyers in this case are from the firm Kirkland and Ellis, a highly regarded international law firm. Heading the case for Kirkland and Ellis is Robert Krupka who is considered one of the top experts in IP law in the world. You can bet your bippie that there is a sophisticated strategy behind which patents have been chosen, which firms are being attacked and in what order, which courts to file in, what the time scales are likely to be, etc. Apple will be paying 10s or 100s of millions of dollars for this lawsuit. This I feel reasonably certain is something that all these mobile phone firms are thinking about too, they see what and who they are up against and it must give them a moment of pause.
I'll add that Robert Krupka has a reputation for winning big, difficult IP cases and he also has a reputation for taking cases all the way to judgement rather than settling out of court.
As far as I'm aware, Apple hasn't sued HTC for mutitouch nor has any patent been granted yet. I think it's still pending. I don't why this was mentioned in the last sentence of the article.
Apple has every right to protect their IP but it still doesn't mean the patent system isn't still broken.
... Similarly, analyst Shaw Wu with Kaufman Bros. previously said he believes Apple's "very large war chest" will likely force some competitors to ... pay royalties to the iPhone maker in order to use patented technologies such as multi-touch. ...
This is why Wu should never be believed.
Jobs and Cook have both explicitly stated that they will never licence their patented technology and everyone knows that historically Apple rarely if ever does this. It's not about the money.
I agree. I don't think you should be able to patent a concept that you have no intention of doing anything with.
from what I know, you can't patent a concept, you can only patent an implementation of a concept, ie, there needs to be a touchy feely bit to your concept or no patent.
I wish these analysts would check their facts. None of the patents in the suit regard multi-touch. It's widely believed that Apple's multi-touch patents are weak and wouldn't hold up in court.
I'd say it's 50/50 that they win and I really hope they don't. This would do more to hurt iPhone OS development than help it. Android is right at Apple's door and it scares the shit out of them. Innovate > Litigate.
Actually the patents are about the user interface, and other aspects that Apple wants protected in their IP - in their innovation if you will. And when you make glossy statements like "it is widely believed that" you need to specify to what audience you refer. If a group of seven-year-olds "widely believe" something that has a different weight than " a group of industry experts "widely believe" something. And let's understand a group of bloggers techies, geeks or fans is not an authoritative group to widely believe anything. Now if you are talking about a group of intellectual property experts, or technology experts, or stock market experts (obviously not simply self-proclaimed) then you start having a group that is worth paying attention to. And saying "it's 50/50 that they win is as about a lame a hedge as there is, you can't lose with that call now can you.
And what's this about hurting iPhone OS development? How will this "hurt" iPhone OS dev exactly? That statement makes no sense without an explanatory comment. This whole meme of Apple's bullying HTC, or "our buddies on Android" makes little sense. If, for example a gorgeous woman tells you she is attracted to you, fawns all over you and later you find your wallet missing and a bunch of changes on your hitherto pristine change cards, do you feel better because it was an attractive woman doing it? (well some of you might) But no. The expectation seems to be, "hey, Apple - look the other way while a bunch of other manufacturers use not just a look and feel approach to knocking off your innovation in a pretty well stagnant user interface market, but let them use exactly the same methodology, the same technology and ignore the years of effort (not to mention the expense of purchasing an existing firm that will give you an advantage in the interface)", because well actually doing something about it isn't very nice. And Android came from Linux, which is our ideological state of free and open everything - and therefore an ideological unicorn with fairy wings. It's not nice to challenge anything even remotely associated with that".
Android is not at Apple's door (as if it had been hanging around out the street, waiting for an opportunity to door-knock), Android has been around for a while, and is still getting built out as a mobile platform OS. But it still has some serious dev work to accomplish to be a true competitor.
Scared shitless companies don't execute a tightly targeted defense of IP. They flail around like SCO did, whacking at everything in sight. No this is a very specific strategy which has probably been planned for some time. You assume because you don't have the resources to monitor the market, that Apple is simply knee-jerking to whatever stimulus suddenly pops-up. Apple has demonstrated that they are pedantic and controlled in their approaches to product release and management - far beyond the type A controll-freakiness rep that Jobs has.
Just out of curiosity, how many commenters actually read down into the patent and not just skim the title and assume they understand the underlying technology claims? The spate of "this is too general" and "this sounds like this" would seem to indicate that few if any have. Yep. Apple should not ever, ever, ever make anyone unhappy by looking out for their own best interests - but still, somehow, innovate like the freaks they are and make us all joyously applicious. No matter how impossible and unreal that particular scenario really is.
Every singlke one of Apples patents fail either the "obviousness" or the "prior art" test. If HTC is smart, they will go to trial (and make sure the venue is not East Texas). Then Apple will pay a lot of money to have their patents overturned.
It's interesting that you've come to this conclusion. You may well know more than I, you may well be a patent attorney for all I know. But as I mention elsewhere in this thread Apple has hired a world leading IP attorney (Robert Krupka) from a world class law firm specialising in IP Law to handle this case. Do you seriously believe that he wouldn't have told Apple your sage insight if they thought it were true?
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn't call it hypocrisy by any means. Apple open sourced Grand Central because it was mutually beneficial. They also did the same thing with CUPS. There are some things which Apple will not open source either because there is no benefit to them or it is essential to what makes their product different. They are still a company that needs to earn cash and can't give away everything for free.
That being said, I question the validity of any software patent although some of these software patents that Apple has stated seem to be heavily related to hardware.
The very same. And maybe that's part of the problem. Apple has released buckets of their IP into the public domain in one way or another, so the "community" got caught off-guard when the company drew a line and said "this far, no further."
There's an argument to be made that Apple is inconsistent in defending it's IP. They're aggressively protecting iPhone-related IP, but giving away Grand Central Dispatch. I think that, too, is part of what confuses people. There seems to be this notion that Apple is somehow hypocritical because they're both participating in the whole open-source game and aggressively defending their innovations. Cognitive dissonance runs rampant over this, it seems to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by esummers
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
The way to look at it is quite simple. Apple gets to decide what it wants to share and what it doesn't want to share. That is EXACTLY the same choice EVERY OS coder has when they choose to either post their software with an OS license or not post it at all.
For the public and OS community there is also no ambiguity. What Apple has shared via an OS license it has shared and will not run down with any sort of legal prosecution, that option was explicitly abandoned when the source was posted with an OS license. That software Apple has not shared, they reserve the right to enforce IP rights over.
I think Apple is also being pretty explicit by stating, if you are trying to make money off our patents we will do what we can to stop you. But because Apple didn't sue the Android team/Community they are saying they aren't threatened by hobbyists [just don't try to turn that hobby into an infringing business though...]. This is even consistent with Apple's Psystar suit that hasn't been driven against the hobby white-boxers.
To be confused about where that line has been drawn really takes self imposed ignorance and/or a skewed sense of rights to IP. [I am not lumping anti-software patent folks into this, they are not confused and have very valid concerns that I share. Although until the actual laws change even they(we) are required to play by all but broken rules/laws.]
do not make the "but but but.. I thought apple was nice and kissy !..." NO.
apple never was that nice and it's one of the reason why Apple is different and stil there. The one time where apple make the error to be too much open (the mac prototype), it was a failure, and in 90s apple was unable to build upon their product and IP. it was catastrophic.
I'm mostly a linux fan and made my money from opensource, but you have to understand Apple has a business to protect, its independence to protect and a platform to build.
sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good, I still think it worth it. In the end Apple brought many great products, allowed khtml to be a great project (webkit), helped bsd, contributed to opengl, mpeg, and other industrial norms, in the end, apple is useful.
and no I DO NOT want a "nice apple". A Nice Apple was the dead-end company of the 90s. I never want to live again a computer industry zombified with a world of beige pc-computer.
-
Think about Sun. Sun mostly gave all their wonderful innovation and product into opensource and free software ,but without a sustainable business behind it neither Sun was able to promote them and build them in great products (linux or solaris or heck : mac os x) neither sun was able to gain profit from them. Where is Sun now ?
Apple had to go after HTC, they are a bottom feeder and are eating everyone lunch from below. If Apple lets them copy everything the iphone does and charge so little for it, this just devalues everything Apple did and does not allow any company who competes in the smart phone market to make money.
Apple change the game in the Cell phone market, prior to the iphone the service providers dictated features and what phone the consumer got, they set pricing and even gave away phones which basically told consumers the phone has no value and people do not want to pay for them. If you look at what VZ is doing they are giving away HTC smart phones to get people to mover to VZ and abandon the iphone. If this keeps up apple will exit the market since you can not make money and the likes of VZ will dictate what you get.
If Apple really wanted to wage patent wars on the industry they would have gone after every company at at once, like all those other patent whores company who are only interested in the money. They didn't they went after just one the which happens to just copy and crank them out by the millions.
This was truly a strategic move, they do not want HTC destroying the current business model and they will if they keep cranking out copies and allow service providers to give them away and charge you more for the services.
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
That's their right. That's my right. I have posted BSD and Creative Commons licensed code, but I refuse to play in GPL projects. I also sometimes keep code for myself with an eye to potential future income generating uses. This is exactly the way the whole OS world was designed to work (except in Stallman's mind).
OK, I'm a big fan of Apple and they certainly have the right to protect their IP, but most of those patents listed should never have been granted on the basis of either prior art or being totally obvious.
I'll just take one example, Patent #6,424,354: Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods. This is nothing more than the Observer design pattern which was one of the patterns detailed in the now famous Design Patterns book by the 'Gang of Four', published in 1994, four years before the patent was applied for and 8 years before it was granted. Given that it appeared in the book in 1994 it was clearly a well known design pattern long before that. So how the hell did the USPTO grant that one??
Apple is taking existing public domain IP and patenting it as their own ideas. That stinks. However, I realise that Apple is just playing by the system, and the US Patent system, at least as it applies to software, is rotten to the core
Actually the patent in question is a refinement (continuation?) of patent number 6,259,446, which was filed years before the term "Design Patterns" were even in the common geek vocabulary and before this book was written. If anything, Apple's patents serve as a basis for the book and not the other way around.
Every singlke one of Apples patents fail either the "obviousness" or the "prior art" test. If HTC is smart, they will go to trial (and make sure the venue is not East Texas). Then Apple will pay a lot of money to have their patents overturned.
You cannot apply the obviousness test after the patent has been granted, and it is even less useful years after the patent was granted. Because when it was granted, it wasn't quite so obvious.
The way to show whether something was obvious or not when the patent was filed is to show prior art that predates the filing date, not the granted date. So either cough up some prior art examples or leave obviousness out of the discussion.
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
That's just the thing though ? this is standard practice. This is how the patent system is supposed to work. What's astonishing, really, is the fact that these other guys failed to do due diligence in the first place and shipped product that tramples on somebody else's (in this case, Apple's) patents. What's even more surprising is the fact that, when confronted with this, those guys didn't alter their product or (more reasonably) just license the innovations from Apple. They had many opportunities to avoid a lawsuit, but they passed them all up. Which makes me wonder if they even have lawyers.
The whole purpose of the patent system is to protect inventions and innovations that, in retrospect, seem blindingly obvious. Lots of armchair lawyers have opined that this patent or that one isn't novel enough ?*but the fact remains that Apple was the first to think of things that now seem self-evident. And they invested a heck of a lot of time and money to think of them, so they're seeking protection through the system that's been in place for centuries for situations just like this one.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PaulMJohnson
If that's right, why are they not going after say, Ubuntu?
I have only the vaguest awareness of what "Ubuntu" us, but stipulating for sake of argument that you're right and that product also infringes ? who is Apple supposed to sue, exactly? Linux is a bunch of kids in basements. It's the IP equivalent of a botnet. Merely tracking them all down would be a huge investment of time and money, much less filing suit against all of them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shubidua
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
Agreed. I think that's the source of at least some of the grief about Apple from bloggers and on forums and stuff. I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush or anything, but I think we can all agree that the "gimme gimme" mentality does exist on the Internet, even if it's from a quarter that's small but highly vocal.
Comments
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
I have thought a lot about this law suit and I finally decided that I am against Apple on this one. While I think they have the right to defend their patents ( I Own a couple of my own), I do not think they have the right to try and destroy cometition with strong arm tactics.
What patents do you have? I would like to use them in my upcoming products... thanks for the hard work, now I don't have to do that part. I can just go make money off of your patents.
You don't mind do you?
I have thought a lot about this law suit and I finally decided that I am against Apple on this one. While I think they have the right to defend their patents ( I Own a couple of my own), I do not think they have the right to try and destroy cometition with strong arm tactics. The part that gets me is how they went to the ITC and are trying to halt the import of a competors product BEFORE they have their day in court to try and defent their patents. This seem more like extortion than a real claim of damages. Also the fact that they are going after Google through HTC is just wrong. If they have a problem with Google, then go after Google...
I personally ( not a patent laywer ) think the claims made by Apple are weak, to general and the patnets should never have been granted. I personally do not think they they should hold up in court. I say should because in a cout of law, justice rarely has anything to do with it.
I do realize that Apple ( or any big company ) could care less about what I think. Last year I switched from a PC and bought a Macbook and liked it. It bought a MacMini for my entertainment center and I liked it as well. I was thinking about buying another MacMini to replace an aging web server. ( I already converted the code to run on Apache ). I was also starting to buy and rent movies through iTunes. In short, I was becoming a fan of Apple.
However, I do not like what I see Apple doing lately. They seem to be becoming way to much of a control freek company. They seem to be becoming a company that wants to succed through fear and intimidation more than one that wants to succeed through innovation. I personally think they are becoming their own enemy. As a result of this lawsuit I have decided not to buy any more products from Apple. It is my single little (meaningless) vote against what they are doing as a company....
Right, the vote is meaningless. I think it makes a bigger difference to discuss this issue. I'm sure Apple is listening.
What patents do you have? I would like to use them in my upcoming products... thanks for the hard work, now I don't have to do that part. I can just go make money off of your patents.
You don't mind do you?
These are software patents. Unless you plan to sneak in to his house and steal source code, you would have to re-implement (which is hard).
Apples lawyers are testing out these patents against HTC to see which will stick. These will then set precedence for taking on bigger fish.
Apple's lawyers in this case are from the firm Kirkland and Ellis, a highly regarded international law firm. Heading the case for Kirkland and Ellis is Robert Krupka who is considered one of the top experts in IP law in the world. You can bet your bippie that there is a sophisticated strategy behind which patents have been chosen, which firms are being attacked and in what order, which courts to file in, what the time scales are likely to be, etc. Apple will be paying 10s or 100s of millions of dollars for this lawsuit. This I feel reasonably certain is something that all these mobile phone firms are thinking about too, they see what and who they are up against and it must give them a moment of pause.
I'll add that Robert Krupka has a reputation for winning big, difficult IP cases and he also has a reputation for taking cases all the way to judgement rather than settling out of court.
Apple has every right to protect their IP but it still doesn't mean the patent system isn't still broken.
... Similarly, analyst Shaw Wu with Kaufman Bros. previously said he believes Apple's "very large war chest" will likely force some competitors to ... pay royalties to the iPhone maker in order to use patented technologies such as multi-touch. ...
This is why Wu should never be believed.
Jobs and Cook have both explicitly stated that they will never licence their patented technology and everyone knows that historically Apple rarely if ever does this. It's not about the money.
Wu just doesn't "get" Apple IMO.
Right, the vote is meaningless. I think it makes a bigger difference to discuss this issue. I'm sure Apple is listening.
It would be nice is Apple did listen to these types of discussions, but I doubt that they do....
I am not picking on Apple here, I doubt any company really listens to it's customers...
I agree. I don't think you should be able to patent a concept that you have no intention of doing anything with.
from what I know, you can't patent a concept, you can only patent an implementation of a concept, ie, there needs to be a touchy feely bit to your concept or no patent.
I wish these analysts would check their facts. None of the patents in the suit regard multi-touch. It's widely believed that Apple's multi-touch patents are weak and wouldn't hold up in court.
I'd say it's 50/50 that they win and I really hope they don't. This would do more to hurt iPhone OS development than help it. Android is right at Apple's door and it scares the shit out of them. Innovate > Litigate.
Actually the patents are about the user interface, and other aspects that Apple wants protected in their IP - in their innovation if you will. And when you make glossy statements like "it is widely believed that" you need to specify to what audience you refer. If a group of seven-year-olds "widely believe" something that has a different weight than " a group of industry experts "widely believe" something. And let's understand a group of bloggers techies, geeks or fans is not an authoritative group to widely believe anything. Now if you are talking about a group of intellectual property experts, or technology experts, or stock market experts (obviously not simply self-proclaimed) then you start having a group that is worth paying attention to. And saying "it's 50/50 that they win is as about a lame a hedge as there is, you can't lose with that call now can you.
And what's this about hurting iPhone OS development? How will this "hurt" iPhone OS dev exactly? That statement makes no sense without an explanatory comment. This whole meme of Apple's bullying HTC, or "our buddies on Android" makes little sense. If, for example a gorgeous woman tells you she is attracted to you, fawns all over you and later you find your wallet missing and a bunch of changes on your hitherto pristine change cards, do you feel better because it was an attractive woman doing it? (well some of you might) But no. The expectation seems to be, "hey, Apple - look the other way while a bunch of other manufacturers use not just a look and feel approach to knocking off your innovation in a pretty well stagnant user interface market, but let them use exactly the same methodology, the same technology and ignore the years of effort (not to mention the expense of purchasing an existing firm that will give you an advantage in the interface)", because well actually doing something about it isn't very nice. And Android came from Linux, which is our ideological state of free and open everything - and therefore an ideological unicorn with fairy wings. It's not nice to challenge anything even remotely associated with that".
Android is not at Apple's door (as if it had been hanging around out the street, waiting for an opportunity to door-knock), Android has been around for a while, and is still getting built out as a mobile platform OS. But it still has some serious dev work to accomplish to be a true competitor.
Scared shitless companies don't execute a tightly targeted defense of IP. They flail around like SCO did, whacking at everything in sight. No this is a very specific strategy which has probably been planned for some time. You assume because you don't have the resources to monitor the market, that Apple is simply knee-jerking to whatever stimulus suddenly pops-up. Apple has demonstrated that they are pedantic and controlled in their approaches to product release and management - far beyond the type A controll-freakiness rep that Jobs has.
Just out of curiosity, how many commenters actually read down into the patent and not just skim the title and assume they understand the underlying technology claims? The spate of "this is too general" and "this sounds like this" would seem to indicate that few if any have. Yep. Apple should not ever, ever, ever make anyone unhappy by looking out for their own best interests - but still, somehow, innovate like the freaks they are and make us all joyously applicious. No matter how impossible and unreal that particular scenario really is.
Every singlke one of Apples patents fail either the "obviousness" or the "prior art" test. If HTC is smart, they will go to trial (and make sure the venue is not East Texas). Then Apple will pay a lot of money to have their patents overturned.
It's interesting that you've come to this conclusion. You may well know more than I, you may well be a patent attorney for all I know. But as I mention elsewhere in this thread Apple has hired a world leading IP attorney (Robert Krupka) from a world class law firm specialising in IP Law to handle this case. Do you seriously believe that he wouldn't have told Apple your sage insight if they thought it were true?
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn't call it hypocrisy by any means. Apple open sourced Grand Central because it was mutually beneficial. They also did the same thing with CUPS. There are some things which Apple will not open source either because there is no benefit to them or it is essential to what makes their product different. They are still a company that needs to earn cash and can't give away everything for free.
That being said, I question the validity of any software patent although some of these software patents that Apple has stated seem to be heavily related to hardware.
The very same. And maybe that's part of the problem. Apple has released buckets of their IP into the public domain in one way or another, so the "community" got caught off-guard when the company drew a line and said "this far, no further."
There's an argument to be made that Apple is inconsistent in defending it's IP. They're aggressively protecting iPhone-related IP, but giving away Grand Central Dispatch. I think that, too, is part of what confuses people. There seems to be this notion that Apple is somehow hypocritical because they're both participating in the whole open-source game and aggressively defending their innovations. Cognitive dissonance runs rampant over this, it seems to me.
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
The way to look at it is quite simple. Apple gets to decide what it wants to share and what it doesn't want to share. That is EXACTLY the same choice EVERY OS coder has when they choose to either post their software with an OS license or not post it at all.
For the public and OS community there is also no ambiguity. What Apple has shared via an OS license it has shared and will not run down with any sort of legal prosecution, that option was explicitly abandoned when the source was posted with an OS license. That software Apple has not shared, they reserve the right to enforce IP rights over.
I think Apple is also being pretty explicit by stating, if you are trying to make money off our patents we will do what we can to stop you. But because Apple didn't sue the Android team/Community they are saying they aren't threatened by hobbyists [just don't try to turn that hobby into an infringing business though...]. This is even consistent with Apple's Psystar suit that hasn't been driven against the hobby white-boxers.
To be confused about where that line has been drawn really takes self imposed ignorance and/or a skewed sense of rights to IP. [I am not lumping anti-software patent folks into this, they are not confused and have very valid concerns that I share. Although until the actual laws change even they(we) are required to play by all but broken rules/laws.]
it's not their first IP process
they used patend before, and be agressive
and used copyright too, in justice
do not make the "but but but.. I thought apple was nice and kissy !..." NO.
apple never was that nice and it's one of the reason why Apple is different and stil there. The one time where apple make the error to be too much open (the mac prototype), it was a failure, and in 90s apple was unable to build upon their product and IP. it was catastrophic.
I'm mostly a linux fan and made my money from opensource, but you have to understand Apple has a business to protect, its independence to protect and a platform to build.
sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's good, I still think it worth it. In the end Apple brought many great products, allowed khtml to be a great project (webkit), helped bsd, contributed to opengl, mpeg, and other industrial norms, in the end, apple is useful.
and no I DO NOT want a "nice apple". A Nice Apple was the dead-end company of the 90s. I never want to live again a computer industry zombified with a world of beige pc-computer.
-
Think about Sun. Sun mostly gave all their wonderful innovation and product into opensource and free software ,but without a sustainable business behind it neither Sun was able to promote them and build them in great products (linux or solaris or heck : mac os x) neither sun was able to gain profit from them. Where is Sun now ?
Apple has to strive for the right balance.
Apple change the game in the Cell phone market, prior to the iphone the service providers dictated features and what phone the consumer got, they set pricing and even gave away phones which basically told consumers the phone has no value and people do not want to pay for them. If you look at what VZ is doing they are giving away HTC smart phones to get people to mover to VZ and abandon the iphone. If this keeps up apple will exit the market since you can not make money and the likes of VZ will dictate what you get.
If Apple really wanted to wage patent wars on the industry they would have gone after every company at at once, like all those other patent whores company who are only interested in the money. They didn't they went after just one the which happens to just copy and crank them out by the millions.
This was truly a strategic move, they do not want HTC destroying the current business model and they will if they keep cranking out copies and allow service providers to give them away and charge you more for the services.
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
That's their right. That's my right. I have posted BSD and Creative Commons licensed code, but I refuse to play in GPL projects. I also sometimes keep code for myself with an eye to potential future income generating uses. This is exactly the way the whole OS world was designed to work (except in Stallman's mind).
OK, I'm a big fan of Apple and they certainly have the right to protect their IP, but most of those patents listed should never have been granted on the basis of either prior art or being totally obvious.
I'll just take one example, Patent #6,424,354: Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods. This is nothing more than the Observer design pattern which was one of the patterns detailed in the now famous Design Patterns book by the 'Gang of Four', published in 1994, four years before the patent was applied for and 8 years before it was granted. Given that it appeared in the book in 1994 it was clearly a well known design pattern long before that. So how the hell did the USPTO grant that one??
Apple is taking existing public domain IP and patenting it as their own ideas. That stinks. However, I realise that Apple is just playing by the system, and the US Patent system, at least as it applies to software, is rotten to the core
Actually the patent in question is a refinement (continuation?) of patent number 6,259,446, which was filed years before the term "Design Patterns" were even in the common geek vocabulary and before this book was written. If anything, Apple's patents serve as a basis for the book and not the other way around.
Every singlke one of Apples patents fail either the "obviousness" or the "prior art" test. If HTC is smart, they will go to trial (and make sure the venue is not East Texas). Then Apple will pay a lot of money to have their patents overturned.
You cannot apply the obviousness test after the patent has been granted, and it is even less useful years after the patent was granted. Because when it was granted, it wasn't quite so obvious.
The way to show whether something was obvious or not when the patent was filed is to show prior art that predates the filing date, not the granted date. So either cough up some prior art examples or leave obviousness out of the discussion.
These are software patents. Unless you plan to sneak in to his house and steal source code, you would have to re-implement (which is hard).
No, no. That's ok. Just tell me what the final product is. I'll get a copy and reverse engineer your code, and then I can use it for my product.
Thanks a lot!
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy is exactly why so many people are upset over this case. I think that maybe we are looking too deep in this though. Unless this becomes standard practice, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt.
That's just the thing though ? this is standard practice. This is how the patent system is supposed to work. What's astonishing, really, is the fact that these other guys failed to do due diligence in the first place and shipped product that tramples on somebody else's (in this case, Apple's) patents. What's even more surprising is the fact that, when confronted with this, those guys didn't alter their product or (more reasonably) just license the innovations from Apple. They had many opportunities to avoid a lawsuit, but they passed them all up. Which makes me wonder if they even have lawyers.
The whole purpose of the patent system is to protect inventions and innovations that, in retrospect, seem blindingly obvious. Lots of armchair lawyers have opined that this patent or that one isn't novel enough ?*but the fact remains that Apple was the first to think of things that now seem self-evident. And they invested a heck of a lot of time and money to think of them, so they're seeking protection through the system that's been in place for centuries for situations just like this one.
If that's right, why are they not going after say, Ubuntu?
I have only the vaguest awareness of what "Ubuntu" us, but stipulating for sake of argument that you're right and that product also infringes ? who is Apple supposed to sue, exactly? Linux is a bunch of kids in basements. It's the IP equivalent of a botnet. Merely tracking them all down would be a huge investment of time and money, much less filing suit against all of them.
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
Agreed. I think that's the source of at least some of the grief about Apple from bloggers and on forums and stuff. I'm not trying to paint with a broad brush or anything, but I think we can all agree that the "gimme gimme" mentality does exist on the Internet, even if it's from a quarter that's small but highly vocal.