Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
I think there's room to debate the second and third points. But with respect to the first point, Apple is using the patent system exactly as it was intended. Apple has been researching personal computing since it was founded, and invests heavily in figuring out exactly what works to make viable products. If Apple isn't entitled to patent protection for it's discoveries, I'd argue nobody is.
Which is a fine argument to make, but we should leave Apple out of it and say that even when a company uses the system as it was intended to be used, the system is broken. If Apple's victory over HTC is scary, the real conclusion is that all patents are scary, even those that protect companies doing actual research and who sell actual products.
Meanwhile, I think that Google are the actual villains. Do they spend billions dismantling the patent system? No. Do they spend billions protecting their partners from lawsuits? No. What they do is aid and abet other companies to violate patents, and then they shrug their shoulders and sell a few more text ads for Viagra or ambulance chasing lawyers.
These things are not a problem for the real innovation guys the USA likes so much. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729720
If you're going to abuse the system to push competitors out of the market, you can do this with every competitor. Apple has not sued RIM, Palm, Microsoft, or any of the feature phones that -- from an abusive, overly broad perspective-- infringe on Apple patents.
Apple has only sued the people who took the iPhone design and replicated it. Apple is going after the cloners, not the competitors.
Before the iPhone was announced, android was an OS for a blackberry type device. It was better than RIM's OS, I believe, but it was the RIM formfactor and UI style. After the iPhone was announced, suddenly android became a touch-screen phone OS, copying the iPhone.
It is important to remember that a touch screen UI was never done before in this way. There were no touch screen phones prior to the iPhone announcement. It isn't like the iPhoen was just another phone... the iPhone was a new kind of phone. It created a new category. Just as the iPad created a new category (despite there being table PCs in the past, going way back, there was no tablet device market prior to the iPad.)
Apple invented the touchscreen UI, and much of the technologies for the modern smartphone. Apple started working on the iPhone and iOS system for the iPad project sometime around 2002-2003. Google started working on the touch version of android in 2007- after the iPhone was announced. If google had decided to compete, and launched a massive R&D effort, and invented a bunch of stuff, then they'd have patents of their own to defend with. They didn't, they just copied the iPhone.
There is no question android is designed to be an iPhone like OS running on touch screens with multi-touch. Apple invented this category of product, Apple has patented it with legitimate, innovative, non-obvious inventions.
Calling this "abuse" communicates to me that you think when it comes to software, people should be able to copy whatever they want.
I think that's bad. I think google should have innovated, and if they aren't willing to do so, then I don't think the should be able to just outsource their R&D to Apple and get the results for free.
The purpose of patents is to open the kimono and let everyone know what you've done. Apple did this, which gave google a heads up for starting their own innovations. This is good for innovation because it means companies don't have to start from scratch. It isn't a license to just copy the patent and not innovate.
The defenses I hear of the patent system remind me a lot of defenses I hear for American drug policy. At this point the evidence is overwhelming that current U.S. patent law does more to stifle than to foster innovation and this is going to hurt American global competitiveness in the long run.
Nope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada_%28KE850%29, among several others. Apple took an existing idea and executed it well. By your standards, they should be sued out of existence.
Calling this "abuse" communicates to me that you think when it comes to software, people should be able to copy whatever they want.
If by "copy" you mean "create products with similar functionality without copying code", then essentially yes. Otherwise we'd end up with one spreadsheet, one browser, one touchscreen phone, and we'd still be on Friendster.
Apple actually does comparatively little spending on R&D when contrasted with the likes of Microsoft or even Google. [1] When it comes to design, it's well known that Apple is of the mentality that good design is something recognizable and, that being the case, they don't invest in human-computer interaction research. [2]
[1] http://b2bspecialist.posterous.com/chart-randd-spending-comp...
[2] http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/97958-why-is-great-desig...
Much of their R&D is outsourced to component suppliers, paid for by advance funding of new factories and other production facilities.
But their spending is incredibly effective in terms of developing products people want.
How do you feel about the MS attacks against Android? I find it odd that so many have come out in support of Apple, but against MS. MS has taken a much softer position (licensing fees vs injunctions) and frankly the Apple patents are no stronger than MS's in these cases. In fact, I think that one of Apple's patents have prior art in Windows Mobile.
Personally, I've come around to believing that we should end SW patents (if you can actually separate them from patents at all), but as long as they're on the books a public company that isn't utilizing them to the best of their ability is violating their fudiciary duty.
BTW, why is it Google's responsibility to "spend billions dismantling the patent system"?
They say often whatever is convenient and aligned with profit motif at most times and the truth some times.
Apple (i.e. Jobs) publicly talks about how many ideas they have monopoly on to scare competition, reassure analysts and because it the current legal system it is a great advantage. That's the profit motive speaking.
At times, when talking about necessity of stealing other people's ideas, Jobs speaks the truth because we all know that everything we build is an improvement on something else. Once we patent everything, there will be nothing to build on. No ability for new people to disloge incumbents by improving on what they did in the past and therefore no incentive for incumbents to improve. Why spend effort improving things if you can collect just as much money by selling the stuff you did 5 years ago?
Provided these patent claims are valid and honored, from this point on the only end game I can see is the big platform companies racing to acquire more and more obscure patents to play a game of chicken, until they reach a point of mutually assured destruction of "you can't make phones, I can't make phones so there".
I have read some software patents (not this one) and all of them were completely obvious to me. They do not have to be obvious to a judge, they have to be obvious to "one of ordinary skill in the art". That's exactly what I am.
All of the above is not Apple's fault and I don't blame them for patenting what is essentially the context menu. But it is Apple's choice to use patents in a defensive way or to act aggressively against their competitors.
Yes they are a for profit company and it is their right to act in that way. But it is a very short sighted decision that hurts the profitability and innovative power of this entire industry. It is also short sighted because being seen as a nasty, destructive force that deems it appropriate and necessary to act in ways that are seen as unfair and anticompetitive by almost everybody can be the downfall of the mightiest companies as Microsoft and IBM can attest to.
The patents are broad enough to affect any smart phone and many other mobile devices. Context-specific actions based on local data[1] and real-time data processing[2].
The first question isn't whether or not Apple is a troll (they are clearly not), the question is: are they using patents in an anti-competitive manner. Do they have valid IP claims whose cleverness deserves protection from copycats or is this just kneecapping the competition?
Both patents cover technology that is obvious (today, they were filed 10 years ago). Neither has anything to do with what makes the iPhone special. And they are targeted at Apple's biggest competitor. So the most obvious conclusion is that this is a strategic move by Apple using IP that has no real merit.
To reiterate: This isn't using the patent system as it was intended. Apple isn't protecting the Apple-ness of their products from copycats. They are using their strong patent portfolio against competitors with weak patent portfolios.
1: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
2: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...
We need to rethink software patents. Anything that hampers the next wave of innovation is pure evil. Software, especially UI innovation with all the metaphors drawn from the physical world is nothing like inventing the cotton gin. Sure we need to reward the the innovators but Apple engineers, brilliant though they may be, are intellectual slaves who don't own their own thoughts. Whoever actually came up with these things for Apple isn't retiring early that's for sure.
All this is great but smart companies are going to flock to countries where saner laws prevail or even the wild wild east like China where nothing is safe but at least they can focus on innovation and not second guess the ideas coming from their own engineers brains.
You were on a roll, saying people shouldn't have to innovate, then suddenly you worry about hampering innovation.
Which is it? You want to be able to copy freely instead of innovating, or you want innovation to be protected?
Many comments in these threads seem to think Apple woke up one day in 2007 with the completely obvious idea of an iPhone. That's not how it happened.
Apple had been researching hand held computing since the 80's, bringing the most advanced handheld anyone had ever seen to the market, and iterating the ideas of how the software should work and the usability of that software, in directions quite different from those pursued by others such as Palm or PocketPC focused on limited capabilities more in line with what that era's hardware could actually pull off.
The market wasn't ready for Newton then, but its ideas seeped into engineering consciousness, making its innovations seem "obvious" later. Eventually, physical technology caught up with Apple's ideas, enabling the iPhone and iPod touch.
The Johnny-come-lately copycats are close enough already without their copies having to be "slavish". Whining about this or that feature they can't copy isn't becoming. If inventing's so easy, invent something better that everyone else will complain, after they see it, is obvious.
Or, have the foresight or folly to go spend nearly two decades pouring money and hard work into a product the market isn't ready for, build a huge portfolio of research-driven ideas supporting making the product, finally bring a product to market that for the first time just "feels" to everyman it works exactly the way such a product should work, and then see how you feel about that twenty years of investment being protected.
Arguably, making something feel obvious is an art. What's not obvious is that obviousness can take so much work.
Android brings more than enough innovation to the table to justify its existence. If anything Apple is borrowing more from Google now than vice-versa.
Apple did not 'copy wholesale the fundamental ideas of the Mac UI'. They paid Xerox for a license to commercialize the technology via a stock deal, and then they spent significant effort refining it to make a consumer product.
So Apple really just wants other people to play by the same rules they do.
You are the first person I've ever heard make that claim. The only support I've found for that statement is a throw-away sentence in Wikipedia's article about a lawsuit between Apple and Microsoft, which does not appear to be supported by the document cited. So, do you have a citation for that?
1) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...
Arguably we're fortunate that he struck this deal and brought these ideas into production much more effectively than Xerox was doing.
I just find the legal framework in place for copyright and software patents out of touch with reality and far from ideal. It just seems that with the way the system currently works, science fiction writers should have a mountain of patents covering the next hundred years if only they would do the paperwork and pay the legal fees. We'd still be stuck in a pre-industrial society if we had current patent laws in the 18th century.
Yawn Sensationalist, at best. The article goes on to quote everyone's favorite authority on the matter, Florian Mueller. Have we had enough of this tripe yet?
Wouldn't it be nicer if everyone just competes on quality and price? Also, in a market that moves this quickly, doesn't 'discovery' of some technique give a time-advantage already?
If the patent madness continues, let's hope the outcome is MAD, which would be better than a handful giants and trolls collecting 'taxes' on everything.
Edit: nice downvoting. Do we downvote for disagreeing these days?
I completely agree with you in regards to how things /should/ be. But it goes without saying, we aren't living in that perfect world.
I don't think the ultimate impact of this ruling is going to be the banning of "all Google Android phones and tablets." I imagine in the worst case scenario HTC, et al, have to fork over some money to license the patents.
> Wouldn't it be nicer if everyone just competes on quality and price?
No.
To be worth while, investment in R&D needs to be recouped. If cloning finished products is legal, the clone makers don't need to recoup R&D, so can undercut the price of the inventor while (since it's a clone, perhaps even produced by the same factory) matching quality.
Also bad, such as with electronics, the consumer sometimes can't tell if the clone is the same quality or not until months later when inferior parts begin to fail (especially low quality capacitors in electronics, which have a tendency to look exactly the same right up until they burst). Sometimes, as happened to Akai in the country where I lived, the brand takes the reputation hit for the problems from the copyists who were selling the copies at a price so close to the original the buyer couldn't tell whether they got an original or copy.
(A countermeasure to this is an invention so ahead of the market the production process is unique, and the inventor somehow manages to lock up 100% of manufacturing capability and capacity itself. Such inventions are relatively rare.)
> doesn't 'discovery' of some technique give a time-advantage already?
No. With JIT manufacturing, clones hit the streets sometimes before the original. Not to mention, in your world, the incentive to steal product prototypes would go through the roof, letting the lesser priced clones hit the streets during the original marketing push.
Which countries are not innovating because of weak copyright and patent law enforcement?
Cloning products is primarily copyright and trademark infringement. The companies that are victims of cloning fight back with trademark and copyright laws, typically not with patent laws.
Copyright is primarily for preventing others from directly copying a specific implementation (source code, MP3 player look & feel, etc.). Patents cover an invention, a conceptual thing. An invention doesn't need to have a physical implementation to be patentable.
For instance, LAME[1] is copyrighted itself and does not violate anyone else's copyrights, but anybody that does any MP3 encoding[2] without having an appropriate license to the underlying MP3 patents is infringing patents.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAME
[2] In a country that the MP3 encoding patents are registered, of course.
Do we care about our karma on a website on the internet?
If we're going to have software patents, there should be a separate category for them; and they should be limited to, say, 5 years tops.
This is very disappointing to me because I see Apple like a tennis player who can tell you where he is going to hit the ball, yet still beat you there every time. I think they should welcome the competition and view copycats with pride. You don't get it right all the time.
To paraphrase a joke from the last depression: $5 and some pride gets you a nice cup of coffee at starbucks.
It's kleptomaniac turtles all the way down!
If you actually ever used a Xerox desktop of the era you'll see that Mac OS was markedly simpler to use than Xerox's UI, and had all kinds of improvements over it (overlapping windows, drag and drop, a menubar than benefited from Fitt's Law).
Everyone steals ideas, but simply coping is pathetic.
So they have basically patented the context menu. How broken can a patent system possibly become before it crashes an entire economy?
Does not mean no patents make sense (although I have yet to see one in software in algorithms; but meaningful hardware patents are not unusual). The system needs to be completely rethought. As of now, the software patent system is not only easily abused, but itself is an abuse of common sense.
[/opinion]
I have not read a single software patent (and I have read some, if not this one) that was not completely obvious to me, and I am "one of ordinary skill in the art".
It seems to me that Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb ought to be prior art, but maybe there's a technicality I'm missing, because that seems like a big one for the lawyers to miss.
On the other hand, Nokia was the largest global handset seller at a time virtually nobody in the US market knew what it was. Ignoring the US market is viable, and the US market isn't for everyone. Look how many car manufacturers have tried and failed to make a go of it. (At least Americans can pronounce Nokia. Peugeot didn't stand a chance.)
Statistics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_...) would disagree with you.
If the US market is 3X smaller than China's (by volume), but spends 3X more for each phone, then the markets are roughly equivalent in the terms that a company would care about: profits.
From a purely selfish point of view (European software developer) I say bring it on, saddling U.S. software companies with these ridiculous rules should eventually make my life easier competing against them. I'll quite happily infringe these "patents" and sell my good outside the U.S.
Apple's been investing in mobile usability (e.g., recognizing and acting on structured data with a tap) for a very long time. That an iPhone has a phone attached to it is arguably a secondary characteristic.
Steve himself: "We have been shameless about stealing great ideas". It's sad to see him now, reduced to these tactics.
#1 It's bloody obvious. Pretty much everyone reinvents it (Microsoft Smart Links anyone?) SMS->Extract Phone number, etc
#2 It's so bloody obvious that there is prior open-source applications prior to 1996 that have this feature (turning phone numbers in web documents into clickable action links/context actions) I will say no more, but I have one in my possession.
#3 It's bloody LAME! Really Apple, you want consumers to not be able to use ANY Android device based on the ability to turn text links into actions that was originally issues for the NeXT Desktop? Is that really the competitive advantage between the iPhone and other devices, that it has phone number detection in text documents!?!?
Apple has proven with this that they are a patent troll. Are they suing over iPhone exclusive inventions, like multitouch, proximity sensor, using accelerometers to detect orientation, the "Swipe to Unlock" stuff and all of the things we saw in the original Jesus Phone presentation?
No.
They are trying to hurt competition over something developed for the desktop in 1996.
Total losers.
I'd say it's pretty smart. I can't guarantee it had never been done before 1996, but if I had come up with that at the time, I would have felt happy to file a patent for it.
That being said, that patent is not critical to Android. Worst case, you can't auto-extract phone numbers and emails from random text. Big deal.
Lotus Agenda is a "free-form" information manager: the information need not be
structured at all before it is entered into the database. A phrase such as
"See Wendy on Tuesday 3pm" can be entered as is without any pre-processing.
1. HTC and Moto were both sued by Apple concerning same two patents. Hence alleged infringement in OS.
2. If alleged infringement is in OS than Google might have a way in to the proceedings to invalidate patents on OHA members behalf..ie not what Apple wants to face.
3. HP by its purchase of Palm has similar patents, hence why Apple never went after Palm or HP.
Considering the way Google is currently shredding Oracle patents in the invalidation processes I have a feeling that Apple may be in for a surprise. why? Why do you think MS has been so careful not provoke any OEM to challenge them to a lawsuit? Its called do not expose patents to the opportunity to have them invalidated or narrowed in claims.
"We have always been shameless of stealing great ideas"
http://www.cultofmac.com/side-by-side-comparison-samsung-vs-...
Quite the opposite, I love my MacBook Pro and iPad, and I think Apple's products are great. But that is exactly why I am so disappointed to hear that they are now exhibiting the same behavior as Lodsys, which we have come to hate.
In the spirit of transforming the landscape and creating revolutionary devices, attacking HTC and Android is a great disappointment to me. I am very regretful that our generation's best and brightest people and corporations are caught up in these legal and corporate squabbles. Their energy could be better spent on innovation or solving real problems.
I'm very sympathetic to then negative effects of NPEs and of patents in general inhibiting smaller players.
On the other hand, I think there's a genuine case to be made that knockoff products undermine the value of expensive and risky R&D projects that have led to very real and significant innovations.
Consider the iPad - even after it was announced, commentators and executives in the industry were dismissing it. Only once it started selling in volume did the competitors suddenly jump into action.
The implication is that the rest of the industry simply didn't have the imagination or risk-tolerance to do the R&D. I would like to see more incentives for other players in the industry to do the kind of innovating that Apple has done - not less.
Sure you can argue that minor spec tweaks and UI variants are 'innovation', and I'd agree that this kind of competition is actually keeping Apple on its toes. There's certainly a place for a leader and followers both to provide value.
But a balance has to be struck. If it really is ok for any product to just be cloned as closely as possible, I think there will be less R&D done, not more.