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Comment by zweep | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like when patents get used by big companies against small ones, but I also don’t see why a company of Google’s size should be able to just freeload on Apple’s meticulously designed interactions (that the author praises effusively) instead of designing their own.

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Because it's not actually in the interests of users/consumers (woohoo! over here! remember us?) for everyone to have to "design their own" interaction model.

Well if you believe in the “promote the useful arts” logic (I do, to an extent) then having exclusive rights to things like “butter” smooth animations makes companies like Apple more willing to invest in them, which is in the consumer’s interest.

So the efforts and rights of the company don't matter anymore? We should not just legislate everything based on the interests of the consumer.

Ah yes, the classic "But who will think of the shareholders?!?!11" argument, good point.

Frankly, yes, regulations should exist to serve consumers not companies.

Companies aren't people, and people will always be more important than an abstraction. So let's reduce the abstraction here a bit.

80,000 Apple employees.

~330,171,224 residents of the United States of America.

      330,171,224
     -     80,000
     ------------
      330,091,224

Would you say that 330,091,224 is more than 80,000?

I would.

And really, optimizing for the rights of the consumer helps everyone, including all Apple employees. And this helps the producer, too, because it allows them to ignore software patents as well.

Software patents weren't for the good of anyone but executives and legislators when legislators first forced them on everyone against the protests of software devs everywhere decades ago, they aren't suddenly for the good of the common man, now, either.

What makes software patents different from other patents? For example for things like the cotton gin.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/lpf/Patents/agains...

This article explains far more elegantly than I will as to why software patents don't make sense.

Apple got their start by copying Xerox, so it's only fair that other people should be able to copy Apple without repercussions. Besides, most of the most memorable gestures and interactions of iOS were under the direction of people who were fired after Jobs died.

Might want to go and read the history books.

Apple didn't get their start by copying Xerox. They got their start by building and selling the Apple 1/2/3/Lisa. Xerox only came into the picture during the development of the Mac. And there is this myth that Xerox invented all of the GUI metaphors we know today. But actually about half came from Apple e.g drag & drop file manipulation, multiple file system views, drop down menus, clipboard.

Also only one person was fired from Apple and that was Scott Forstall. After whom quite a number of memorable iOS gestures were invented i.e. when the click button disappeared.

Why do you lie? The Mac and Lisa both were post-Xerox-trip, and were only a year apart.

"got their start" was obviously intended to mean "in GUIs."

Apple also paid Xerox for the use of those patents.

Because they were sued (and it wasn't patents, as far as I'm aware, because Xerox didn't patent their GUI paradigm):

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/15/business/company-news-xer...

Paywalled link.

Every other history piece I've read said Xerox got a good chunk of Apple shares in exchange for them using their research. Perhaps they decided it isn't enough when they saw Apple was successful and sued for more money?

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