Apple using patents to undermine open standards again
my.opera.com
my.opera.com
The sense of malice seems to be inferred from Apple not disclosing these sooner, but I question what the point is of having a deadline if disclosures a month prior to it are going to be considered disruptive. If this was going undermine the process, shouldn't the deadline have been sooner?
[1]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec-Exc...
What would have been less disruptive is if Apple had any other communication at all with the W3C Web Events working since it was formed more than a year ago.
Actually participating in a working group that is working an APIs they are shipping is the normal way for a W3C member to help shape a standard. If they had participated in the group, then the patents would have come up during the disclosure period for the First Public Working Draft back in May 2011. Instead, they recently even asked for other, unrelated standards (like the Game Pad API) to be moved to a different working group so they can continue to avoid participation in the Web Events WG [2].
[2]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webevents/2011Oct...
Or, better, Apple could have brought touch events to the W3C themselves after they first shipped them in Safari back in 2007. (Even better is to propose new standards before shipping them in a production browser, so that other parties can provide feedback before the standard is locked in by content compatibility - but I understand that proprietary browser vendors won't always do this because of secrecy around product launches.)
And of course, not patenting their extensions to the web platform would also be great. :(
Again, if the timing is disruptive, the group should have set an earlier deadline for disclosure. If Apple's honoring the rules, then their timing is only as disruptive as the rules allowed in the first place. So it seems more reasonable to critique and revise the rules than to cast aspersions about dedication and motives.
[1] i.e. do not simply file for and retain ownership for defensive purposes, but freely license them to prevent any offensive use on their part.
Perhaps it was a strategic error by the W3C to standardize touch events in a new working group (allowing Apple to delay longer just by refusing to participate), rather than an existing working group that Apple already participated in. But in the end, no matter what process changes a standardization body makes, Apple will always have the option to just take their things and go home. And they'll continue to do so whenever engaging the standards community is less beneficial than their other priorities (like having a stronger patent arsenal to use against mobile OS competitors).
And sure, I don't expect Apple to act any differently. They are a for-profit corporation, and they have not just an expectation but a duty to use the tools the system gives them -- including patents, secrecy, and lock-in -- to create and capture value. And they are very good at it. And they've created some tremendous value not just for their shareholders but also for users and developers.
But, thinking in the long term, remember that the open web is part of what kept alternative platforms like the Mac useful and viable through decades of Windows monopoly, and what made devices like the iPhone useful from day one, before the SDK and the app store. Open platforms like the web are great for disrupters, but for the same reason they are scary to incumbents.
If the dominant computing platforms of the 1990s were as locked-down as iOS and Windows Phone are today (with one company controlling software distribution, and forbidding any alternate ways to download and run code), then the web would never have been allowed to take off. I want to build and sustain platforms where the next web-like innovation will be allowed to happen. But today's incumbents understand what this means, so I expect a real fight to keep that possibility alive.
Sure. And at that point it will be reasonable to cast aspersions all we want. I just don't think it's reasonable to do so while they're still following the rules.
> "the web would never have been allowed to take off."
The systems being locked down isn't a big deal, I don't think. The far larger risk was the monoculture that Windows presented and thus the control Microsoft could (and tried) to exert. As long as we have healthy competition between viable alternatives, I think the mobile space will be healthier than PCs in the 90s. Carriers, manufacturers and platform vendors today may try to squeeze out third party solutions, as Verizon is trying to control the NFC wallet space. But they extent to which they might succeed is the extent to which there aren't competitors for what they offer. The operating systems they (ab)use to push this plan are largely irrelevant of their ability to get away with it. Indeed they stand at their highest chance for success, right now, with the most open mobile operating system on the market.
That said, a locked-down monoculture would be a far bigger threat than a monoculture with more freedom.
> Sure. And at that point it will be reasonable to cast aspersions all we want.
Well, that's what they did in this case. They opted out of the standards process, first by not bringing their proprietary extensions to any standards group, and later by not joining the standards group that other parties formed. No rule change will prevent outcomes like this.
I do agree that it's slightly better that they are at least W3C members (so they had to disclose their patent claims at the last minute rather than not at all), but that's the most marginal possible level of participation, and it doesn't really leave the open web or the standards community in much better shape.
(Your posts have been much more informative than the submission, thank you.)
If the disclosure came six months earlier, then there's the potential that it could have saved us six months of work writing and implementing specs that might now be abandoned. We could also be well on the way to developing and standardizing the replacement API (if one turned out to be necessary).
You're assuming the people working with the W3C even knew that Apple had these patents. Apple is a big corporation. The people that are working with the W3C probably didn't even look for the patents themselves, it was probably the legal department that finally said, "Oh here's some that might apply."
The deadline was not sooner only because Apple strategically avoided joining the relevant working group, which would have forced an earlier disclosure.
http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2009/10/30/apple-w3c-patent...
When companies submit any documentation whatsoever as part of, say, an the ITU H.264 standardization process, they are required to sign off on a form that states whether they have patent claims on that documentation. If they do, they declare that they are willing to license it under the terms required for that specification -- no surprises.
This doesn't eliminate the possibility of later surprise patents, but it does mean that it's unlikely any can come from anyone involved, because to even be involved in the process, you have to declare legally that this won't happen.
Why does the W3C not do this? If a W3C standard requires that all patents involved be licensed in a particular royalty-free manner, shouldn't even proposing an idea to the W3C require a declaration that one has no patents on said idea, or that will license ones' patent in such a manner?
[1]: Also, although Safari lead David Hyatt hinted way back in January 2007 that he would eventually bring touch events to the WHAT-WG , it never actually happened: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-Jan...
P.S. Greetings from a fellow Mudder! Thanks for ffmpeg! :)
So, to a standards body, Apple's actions are perceived as undermining standards. To Apple, they're perceived as an act to protect a R&D investment.
If Apple had no intention of ever allowing other browsers to implement touch events, then they could at least have shipped them with a vendor prefix, as Mozilla did with our "MozTouchMove" events (and other experimental or pre-standard APIs). Instead they polluted the global namespace, created a de-facto standard, and never gave a word of feedback to the standards effort that emerged around their work. Only at the very end of the process, after supporting the API in their production browser for four years, did they suddenly act to block the acceptance of a de-jure standard based on the de-facto standard they created.
Touch events are not just for novel multi-touch scenarios; in browsers like Safari they are necessary even for single-touch drag and drop handling that has been possible in desktop browsers for over a decade. If the W3C and Apple can't work out a royalty-free licensing arrangement for Apple's essential claims, then this seems very likely to fragment the mobile web even further by creating yet more "works only in Safari" pages. While we don't know the outcome yet, the path Apple has taken so far does not reflect the responsibility or stewardship toward the web that I'd like to see from a major browser vendor.
The mobile web is already in terrible shape when it comes to pages working across browsers. Do you think Google would ever push an update to Gmail that makes it not work in Firefox? Well they did exactly that to mobile Gmail this year, and didn't fix it until a month later [3]. It's like the 1990s browser war all over again. Keeping the web platform based on open standards is essential to keep it open to new browsers and technologies.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/IOs/#documentation/Apple...
[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Touch_events_%28Mozilla...
(I work for Mozilla and I am co-editor of the W3C Touch Events spec, but these opinions are my own.)
EDIT: I think your comment is an accurate reflection of Apple's priorities -- I'm arguing against Apple's actions, not against your comment.
Every time that it's happened so far they've done it at the last minute and halted the standardisation process, only to find that the patents weren't even relevant anyway.
Given the insane amount of time that the standardisation bodies take anyway, Apple's approach is extremely unhelpful.
(edit: I don't disagree that Rambus was worse -- they were, and threatened to effectively kill the competetive and vibrant DRAM market with their antics. But Rambus lost, and died. Apple is still around, and behaving badly.)
>Not disagreeing that it is an area where Apple should have behaved better
So why would you read it as a claim that "it's OK for Apple to do this"? He's just pointing out an interesting bit of history.
Not disagreeing that it is an area where Apple should have behaved better, but
The 'but' implies "Not disagreeing, but not totally agreeing either". It might have been better to not mention Apple at all:
"It's interesting to note that Rambus persued this tactic in an even worse way..."
Surely you recognize that to a lot of people this is exactly the problem, right? Using questionable patents to prevent straightforward interoperability requirements (i.e. make a web app to act like a native app) is, to me and I suspect lots of others, a fundamentally evil act.
It's all well and good to Love you some Apple. But when they start acting directly counter to the interests of the public, don't expect people to stand behind them just because they make pretty phones.
Yeah, but tough luck.
Why didn't those complaining Opera/Mozilla devs come up with the same interaction methods before Apple/fingerworks to give them to the public domain?
"""when they start acting directly counter to the interests of the public"""
Well, selling computers instead of giving them with zero profit margin is against the interest of the public too. Where do you draw the line? Why should the public benefit from something Apple invented by bypassing Apple and getting it from other vendors?
If you invoke the defense of the questionable patent, since "pinch-to-zoom" is "too obvious", then why didn't anyone else come up with it before and patented it?
It can't be both obvious AND non patented before. What it can be, though, and I think it is, is "obvious in retrospect". Which is not the same as obvious at all.
That said, I'm all for a short period (5-10 years?) where a patent can be valid.
But I don't buy the "questionable" or "obvious" argument. If it's obvious, patent it and grant it to the world, or at least establish some major prior-art.
This is so wrong it makes my brain hurt to read it. Even beyond plainly bad logic (you patent every "obvious" idea you have?!) it's contradicted by a continuous stream of "bad patent with prior art" stories on this site and a hundred others. Hell, I see some links to that sort of thing in this very thread.
"Why should the public benefit from something Apple invented by bypassing Apple and getting it from other vendors?"
Because that's is the whole point of patent law, according to the US constitution at least. And in any case that's not what's happening here. Apple isn't trying to make sure we get pinch-zoom from them, they're trying to make sure that web applications cannot get pinch-zoom at all.
If it's a multi-million making idea, why wouldn't I? (In my case, though, a little Googling reveals that someone else has thought of it first.)
You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away?
""it's contradicted by a continuous stream of "bad patent with prior art" stories on this site and a hundred others."""
How does this contradicts it? It cuts both ways, you know. If anything, it makes it even easier for someone else, like Opera, to patent something, if they can still patent it while prior art exists.
"""Because that's is the whole point of patent law, according to the US constitution at least."""
The whole point of the patent law is that ...the public should benefit by something X invented by bypassing X and getting it from their competitors?!!!!
You're reading it totally backwards. The whole point of the patent system is to PROTECT X invention.
"""Apple isn't trying to make sure we get pinch-zoom from them, they're trying to make sure that web applications cannot get pinch-zoom at all."""
Wrong again. Web applications get it in mobile Safari and Safari OS X. So, yes, they're trying to make sure we get it "from them".
As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular technology. To most people, applying pinch to zoom on a capacitive screen verses some other type of screen is pretty obvious, it works in any situation where you have multiple touch points.
None of this stopped Apple from patenting it. It didn't stop the patent system from granting the patent. And perhaps worst of all, it doesn't stop Apple from using this patent to claim that they did all sorts of work and pioneered multitouch with gestures like pinch to zoom.
The problem many of have with Apple stems from exactly this type of situation. While this is one of the most talked about, I have no doubt that you can find many other examples of Apple enforcing trivial patents granted in a narrow band, or in some caes like the Apple vs Samsung, not so narrow.
You don't typically see people complaining about patents on Latent Semantic Indexing, Page Rank, or other complex algorithms that are truly non-obvious. If our society truly believes that minor tweaks on existing ideas are grand innovations worthy of patent protection, that's a very sad statement on the human condition.
Don't know where you live, but the constitution of my nation is pretty damn clear that the whole point of the patent system is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I don't see anything in there about "protection".
(edit with a little less snark: you're misreading what I said. Patents provide protection as a means to an end. What I was saying is that the goal of the patent system is very much to get inventions into the hands of the public, and into the hands of other inventors who can improve them. Apple's attempts to kill off web standards here is very much in violation of that principle.)
Half a world away.
"""but the constitution of my nation is pretty damn clear that the whole point of the patent system is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I don't see anything in there about "protection"."""
Yes, because a one line "mission plan" summary totally summarizes the law and how it's used.
"""Patents provide protection as a means to an end. What I was saying is that the goal of the patent system is very much to get inventions into the hands of the public, and into the hands of other inventors who can improve them."""
That goal could be accomplished without the patent system altogether. Just make everything open. That would get inventions to the hands of the public and other inventors even faster.
The actual use of the patent system is to present barriers to the copying of inventions, to allow the one who come up with it to profit.
Now this is supposed to encourage R&D, and thus the party line about "advancement" etc (which is totally secondary and only comes as a side effect of patenting, whereas restriction of copying is the immediate effect).
So, yeah, Apple's attempts are against the abstract principle behind the patent office, but much in line with it's pragmatic use.
Minority Report - 2002
iPhone - announced Jan 2007
As long as an obvious idea can be turned into a patent (and they definitely are! remember the swing patent [1]?) then one attempt to patent it has to be the first. Your statement can't be true unless all obvious ideas have somehow been patented since the dawn of time.
[1]: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178-boy-takes-swing-a...
Yeah, but I'm not talking "fire" here. The context is ideas that can generate lots of money and companies want to use like crazy. Like pinch-to-zoom.
If they claim it's obvious why didn't they implement it in their products first? Why wasn't it part of the web standards from before the iPhone? And why nobody patented it? That's the gist of my argument.
What drives patent applications for things like pinch-to-zoom isn't novelty, but companies with vast legal teams who throw patents against the wall to see what sticks. My name appears on some patent applications. Not because those patents describe things that are novel (because they don't) but because the company I was working for at the time went into a "patent everything" phase. I regret allowing them to even use my name on those applications.
All of this is ultimately the USPTO's fault for basically rubber stamping whatever comes through the door and letting the courts figure it out. Filing clearly stupid patents should come with a penalty akin to frivolous lawsuits, but at this point I doubt the system will ever change, at least until the USA completes its long but accelerating slide into economic irrelevance.
I don't know exactly how to express this, but maybe it's best to say that I'm always "concerned" when an argument occurs where one party is fighting the wrong battle. That's also just an opinion. "Apple shouldn't have these touch patents" is a lot harder fight to win than "Apple is a bad company and does mean things to the W3C." I question the effectiveness of the latter though. Say you convince people that Apple is a meanie and is undermining standards, have you produced any significant outcome that will change things? Apple's historical disposition hasn't exactly been yielding to consumers' interests. They decide what consumers want, build it, then make a ton of money. You have to find a way to assault that head on, or use the power of law to prevent them from using these tactics.
Convincing those who are paying attention that Apple undermining standards won't amount to much.
Indeed. It was invented by Douglas Englebart at UC Berkeley in the 60s.
During an interview, he says "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
(I agree with the princple of what the GP post is saying though)
"Pioneered" is a strong word for a technology whose development they had nothing to do with, then just bought it out so that no one else can innovate upon it: http://sysop073.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-multitouched-your-mom...
That's the problem. The marketing that "Apple invented the PC, Apple invented the GUI, Apple invented music players, apple invented pads" is one thing. But to actually continually threaten competitors with law suits is just being a bully.
When did Apple file for its pinch-zoom patent? Jeff Han figured out a good way to commoditize multi-touch hardware, but the pinch-zoom multi-touch interface existed well before Apple made it mainstream.
As a result, isn't it so that software patents in some countries inhibit the development of standards on a global scale? That's troubling.
It's important that the groups work slowly to clear all legal issues so that standards can truly be used on a global scale.
However, if anybody wanted to actually use those standards, he/she would get sued.
I can't speak for the validity of the patents involved in Norway or whether Apple could pursue Opera for distributing a browser infringing on their patents in the US. But for the others, the patent situation is very relevant.
So it wouldn't matter if the standard just decided to standardize something that Apple claims patents on, if Microsoft and Mozilla then couldn't implement the standard due to those patents....
The longer they can delay the standardization of touch events, the easier it is for them to maintain dominance in the tablet and phone markets with their UX design & proprietary apps marketplace ("those web apps are harder to use because they don't behave with touch right!").
Of course they don't want a standard yet. They're the ones doing it best and reaping the rewards.
To me, it seem, that Apple knows its a lost battle before it even begins. So the only purpose here is to delay the open standard for as long as possible.
Why do I think this? Because they filed it at the last minute...not once, not twice, but three time!