macwiz44

- Ideas should not be allowed to be patented. We all have ideas. Think about the patent on the concept of the online “shopping cart”. So now developers have to use another name for a common practice. 

- Parents were great in the world of physical goods. You couldn’t patent the idea of a “tire as being round “, but you could patent your design with a certain rubber compound, tread pattern and how the tire was made with steel strands. But that needs to be specific so as not to be overly broad. Should I be able to cancel out all future tire development because I could just say steel bands without specify if they were twisted or straight, etc. 
- Software needs to be the same. Allow protection for your design with a relational database with these tables designed this way and the other code specified. What would happen if you gave a “build a shopping cart app” in a computer science class? Would you argue that someone could get a generic patent that covers all variations of design and that this simple concept could never be developed independent of knowledge of the original IP. 

- The concepts some of these patents are being showed on are so basic and generic that it truly does stifle innovation. 

- Epic complained about Apple’s 30% cut on in-app purchases. Fortnight is free in the App Store. Note: it is a multi gigabyte download. Multiple that for every user download and every app update/upgrade. Apple has to pay for bandwidth so this “free” download doesn’t cost Epic anything, but it does cost Apple. 

- Epic’s in-app purchase was $10, so $3 was going to Apple
- I believe on their web site Epic lowered the price to $7 to show they would “pass the savings to customers”. This is for the PC-based version I believe. 

- But here’s my item that I haven’t seen mentioned, in Epic’s new in-app purchase they were charging $8. Not $7. So in their proposed new system they are actually making more money and not passing it onto consumers. A 14.3% increase in the money they would receive from consumers. Or they are acknowledging there is a 12.5% cost to providing in-app payments to consumers. So, if we give Apple the same costs for their in-app system, then Apple is making a profit less than 20% for the iOS ecosystem and everything they have built to generate that development business model that Epic is profiting from. 

 Epic was never doing this for the consumers. They see a way to make more money and remove a cost of doing business. 

Spotlight search wouldn’t work on the Home Screen when searching for installed apps. I would see the Siri suggested apps, but typing didn’t show any installed applications. I see that works now in 14.0.1. I need that installed on my iPad now.