loquitur

Ah, ye olde principal of "laches", the hey-you-cannot-lay-in-wait-longer-than-six-years thing.

Other than that, universities, being NPE's (non-practicing entities) vs. PAE's (patent assertion entities)
are a different breed of troll.   What's really not right here is that Cal Tech likely did not participate
in the 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/alphabetic soup standards committees, preferring to be a "patent holdout"
with their special "secret sauce".   So chip makers like Broadcom etc. can enter into FRAND licensing with the
standards-based patent pool, but are subject to being victimized by the ones not participating in the pools,
the ones who "lay-in-wait".

Further, Apple is the WiFi chip "user", so you might think that they are indemnified by the chip maker.
But oh no, patents cover "make, sell, and *use*", so the deep pockets entity is also targeted,
as are just plain WiFi users like you and me who can also be sued.

Apple's purchase of Ogmento/Flyby elicited cogent commentary (by the seller) on Apple's potential plans here: http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/super-ventures-augmented-reality/

Apple's modus operandi has been bringing better things to the table for existing markets,
from PCs to music players to phones to tablets to watches.  This has all been hashed out before, but involving
not being first-to-market, but not being "me too" either.   Vis-a-vis Tesla, Musk and crew's offerings seem
to serve a similar role for autos, helping to upend the internal-combustion milieu.

What is hard for me to imagine is what is possibly horribly wrong with a Tesla that Apple
can meaningfully improve upon.  Is there some amazingly better (and ultra-secret) battery tech
that Apple has in the wings?   Is Tesla's user interface so misguided that some CarPlay+Siri-like
offering should take it's place?   To go from making gadgets generally smaller than a breadbox
to something much larger just seems out-of-place.   Further, the automotive industry doesn't
"impedance-match" with the outsized profit-margins that Apple has heretofore enjoyed.

I posit that Berkshire/Buffett are finally coming around to realize that Apple is a "wide moat"
brand-name consumer products company (Apple Inc.), rather than a narrow-moat
tech company (ye olde Apple Computer Inc.), as detractors would have it.

Now that this misclassification may be arbitraged, the stock AAPL can now more readily obtain a
market 15-20 P/E, just like other branded consumer product cos. like Heinz, or Clorox, or Kimberly-Clark.

The "value vs. tech" debate was a distraction.   The perceptive take, just as Icahn
originally stumped for (though he sold for multiple short-term reasons such as countering
his oil-sector bets) is that Apple is undervalued no matter the classification.

As a kicker, Buffett (a student of Graham-Dodd investing, e.g. share-price migrating toward
the discounted present-value of future profit streams) is staking a claim that buying AAPL is
like buying dollar bills for 50 or 60 cents, not just that it was misclassified by agenda-driven
talking heads.   Apple knew and is acting on this anyway, by slowly steering towards going private
with massive buybacks.

Now that intrinsic value is officially blessed by the Miracle of Omaha, the narrative worm may yet turn.

ericthehalfbee said:

maestro64 said:

As you said this pre-dates google, This goes back to Andy Rubin, he is the one who stole this as well as other things to make Android. Google has no choice now but to define this case and hope to win. Why, Larry made it clear he will not license the API which would shut down Android, but this is also why Google has been rewriting Android so to not have this issue going forward.

I doubt Oracle would refuse licensing to Google. I think Oracle would ask that Google bring "Android Java" back into line and compatible with "regular Java" so there's no longer two different, and incompatible versions.

Speaking of incompatible, one argument Google makes is that APIs can't be copyrighted as this would prevent interoperability. However, Android isn't compatible with Java, so I'm not even sure why they are using this tactic.

Wouldn't this imply that any clean-room implementation of anything (like Linux for Unix) should "unfork"?   (Since copyright lasts
for close to a century the implications of API copyright are rather large.)   Since the U.S. adopted the Berne Convention
copyright inheres everywhere tangible media exist, but I'd be surprised that fair use for copyrighted code should be restricted to things like de minimus usage and even parody.   That juries are shown pictures of Apollo laughably shows the level of discourse required to initially decide these things.