Obama and the Smartphone Wars | Hacker News Reader

Obama and the Smartphone Wars

online.wsj.com

25 pointspalebluedot13 comments

The article states overtly that patent infringement is near unavoidable in smartphone manufacturing, but then proceeds to paint a picture of unilateral patent infringement on Google's part vs. Apple. I know the author intended to focus on one patent disagreement, but it's disingenuous to focus on Google as an infringer and Apple as a victim whilst ignoring that the opposite is at least possible.

Given Google's recent patent acquisition sprees (IBM and now Motorola), I think the opposite is getting more likely every day.

But another peculiarity of the ITC is that its rulings can be waived by the president. Verizon thinks it would be great if President Obama, in a blanket statement, made clear he would not let stand any decision blocking importation of consumer wireless devices.

Is there any precedent for a President doing this?

It doesn't seem wise either from a political or from a good-governance point of view for the President to wade in and overrule decisions made by other bodies.

Well the thing about the ITC is that one of its stated responsibilities is to advise the President on international trade. This strongly implies that the purpose of the ITC is to serve the President's (and executive branch's) decisions in international trade. Knowing this, it really doesn't seem that unusual or improper for the President to intervene on the ITC's behalf.

Aside: to almost everyone else in this thread, don't focus on the Apple vs. Google aspect of this story or the specific patent claims. While perhaps a worthwhile topic (one I probably think has been discussed to death) this story is not fundamentally about that.

Apple is giving its mobile OS away for free too (they previously used to charge some users to download new versions). Apple is "monetizing its software inventions" with high hardware margins.

The ITC is an interesting place for this to end up.

I once was in a class where an ITC commissioner (or something like that) came and talked about the ITC's role in international trade.

My limited understanding is that they typically are somewhat of a domestic alternative/pre-cursor to WTO type disputes. For example, the two cases I heard about were both antidumping cases: one about chicken products and one about bedroom furniture.

How's that for a random and mostly irrelevant contribution?

I think the author has convinced me: Obama should throw this thing back to the courts. Having an administrative panel decide on issues of this importance is not in the national interest. The courts can decide what the law says. If the law is whacked (it is), then the legislative body can fix it. That's the way things are supposed to work. Using a part of the executive branch to impact huge areas of IP law was never intended by the folks who set up the system.

How is it that Apple is the dominant player? They make the most money, sure, but they are far from the #1 unit shipper. They've only had a phone on the market for ~4-5 years at that!

It's interesting that the president has the ability to waive ITC imporation bans. But the author calling the patents Apple is using to sue "Inventions" is a little bit far fetched.

More than a little. I'm beating my favorite patent drum again, but one of Apple's alleged "inventions" (that amazingly survived first-round review at the ITC) is this:

http://www.google.com (i.e. recognizing things like URLs in free-form text and turning them into clickable actions).

Prior art for this includes such obscure pieces of software as Netscape Navigator 2 ("live" URLs in mail and newsgroup messages), released months before Apple filed for this patent.

It seems like conservatives are growing more and more anti-Google.

I thought 'conservatives' and Murdochs Wall Street Journal hated "big government" and government intervention? But if it's in the interest of protecting corporate monopolies and profits they like it? How about some more tax payer subsidized bailouts to failed corporations while we're at it?

This is the kind of comment that isn't helpful.

I really have no idea why you're assigning one columnist's opinion to "conservatives" in general, nor charging hypocrisy based on one rather carefully-reasoned opinion that maybe one arm of the Government should overrule the decisions of another arm of the Government. And I'm especially not sure why you think it's all about 'protecting corporate monopolies' when such a decision, if made, would merely be taking the side of one huge company against another huge company, and furthermore on the anti-monopolistic side.

I suspect, therefore, that you may be letting preexisting political opinions cloud your judgement.

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