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Comment by mindstab | Hacker News Reader

Why are people so upset with Yahoo? Apple is still incredibly popular with the tech crowd, I bet many of these blogs and comments were written with their hardware and software, and they are currently suing just about every phone manufacturer over patents?

Aside from the fact it's not a web thing, how is this different? Or is that difference somehow enough for people to choke down their bile and keep using apple products?

I originally was going to post something about banding together and boycotting Yahoo but then remember the HUGE apple fan group that lives here.

Apple is worse than Yahoo IMHO (considering this is like Yahoos first suit) and yet no one cares. So why do people care about this?

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Is OK if hate them both?

But seriously, the thing is that the phone market has never been "free" in the sense that the web has been free. Since to become a carrier you have always needed a significant capital investment in hardware, the model of also needing to pay patent-rent for your software has been just a piece of this. But creating a website has been the freest possible activity - even having your own server only involve nominal expenses and nominal control relative to becoming a phone carrier.

Further, the web is currently the closest thing to a free press that exists today. Anything to exerts control over this is doubly compared to the certainly objectionable activity of extracting patent-rent from a given industry.

I think this argument shows Yahoo is at least as bad in its action as Apple here (even though I actually have been Yahoo-sympathetic and Apple-hostile up till now). Censoring the App Store is an abusive, monopolistic practice but it still left the web, anything that puts breaks on the web itself is maximally terrible (that terribleness greater-than-or-equal to other problems so I'll still accept the answer "they're all bad").

> Further, the web is currently the closest thing to a free press that exists today. Anything to exerts control over this is doubly compared to the certainly objectionable activity of extracting patent-rent from a given industry.

What about things like amazon's 1 click patent. They are a web company. I can find in 1 second on google a 1999 case where they used that patent

http://www.zdnet.com/news/amazon-sues-rival-over-1-click/103...

I don't know what you are talking about.

HN's pro-Apple bias. The "slide to unlock" patent is just as bad as anything Yahoo is doing.

Slide-to-unlock doesn't seem like it is a fundamental requirement of modern phones, surely there are a lot of good alternatives. That makes it look a lot more like it was copied to make devices seem more iPhone line.

Customizable user pages, and activity streams are a lot harder to work around for modern web applications. The fact that there aren't a lot of alternatives also suggests that they are obvious technologies. If Yahoo really owns those things, how many modern web applications are not vulnerable.

It's true that 'slide to unlock' seems like a superficial feature, but that's actually a point in Apples's favor.

By pursuing superficial claims, they aren't trying to blow the competition out of the water by claiming ownership of fundamental ideas - they're just trying to stop them making products that feel like imitations of their brand.

Don't try to justify it, Apple has not ideals any more. I admired Jobs of what he did as a person, improving the state of the Technology for everyone. There wouldn't have been a real mobile world (including Android and WP7) like we have today.

I don't see any more what Apple's major goal is. if they would hold to their premise: "Create the best user experience" they wouldn't do stuff like that.

I'm not trying it justify it, but neither to I think inaccurate bashing is helpful.

They are being sued too (and were sued first by Nokia) in this dirty patent war. I think it's naive to expect them to simply ignore all that.

It is possible for them to both try to build the best products for the consumer, and simultaneously act like a business operating in a tough environment.

If startups / entrepreneurs who claim to be innovative would work with the patent landscape, rather than irrationally fearing and hating it, they would find that a huge patent portfolio or broad patent like those Yahoo owns are really just big houses of cards. A true innovator can topple it readily just using innovation; and then, voila, those innovations are now patentable.

I am reminded of star wars in this case: The more you tighten your grip, Admiral Tarkin, the more systems will slip through your fingers.

Apple is pretty much playing the game you play as a hardware manufacture. You pay for a lot of patents just to do business. A lot of Apple, Samsung, IBM, etc. patents are not these business process style patents. I'm not too happy about the business process-style stuff Apple or Amazon have, but I understand the rest.

This patent is about as business / software process as you get. It is just a consequence of solving a problem that would be solved the same way by anyone of with skills as a product of normal training in the field. Like "One Click" or "IsNot", it is really hard to understand why the rules were changed to allow this type of thing.

Apple is suing over dumb gimmicky UI patents such as slide to unlock.

yep, not my favorite as I said, but there are others in their portfolio that are more "solid".

To be fair, the use of this 'dumb gimmick' makes both sides look bad - is it really the only way to unlock a phone?

Couldn't HTC et al have worked around it?

Why should they have to?

Some of their customers want it, it is a trivial idea and there's video proof that Apple didn't invent it anyway (Neonode N1m).

If there's prior art then indeed the patent should be invalidated.

Whether their customers want it is irrelevant. Sadly there is no good criteria for what is 'trivial' or not, and that is a big problem with the current system. I don't think slide-to-unlock is any more trivial than the crank, but it's not my opinion that matters.

My point is that if its just a 'gimmick' i.e. not important, then HTC should be easily able to work around it.

The fact they haven't suggests that either it's hard to come up with a good alternative, or they are intentionally copying Apple.

It's worth noting that Apple suing over superficial things is more about preventing direct imitation. They aren't trying to kill their competitors by claiming fundamental technologies. I think this is actually evidence of a moderate approach.

> If there's prior art then indeed the patent should be invalidated.

Yes, but we know that doesn't always happen (and demonstrably isn't happening in some of Apple's lawsuits).

> It's worth noting that Apple suing over superficial things is more about preventing direct imitation. They aren't trying to kill their competitors by claiming fundamental technologies. I think this is actually evidence of a moderate approach.

That's not true. Apple is suing over plenty of fundamental, ridiculously broad patents as well, but (with the exception of the "clickable-actions-in-text" patent) we happen to not be talking about them here (in part because Apple lost on some of the more fundamental patents they've asserted).

Here's an article from two months ago that describes some of what Apple is suing over: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/12/apples-first-major...

Quoting the article we have:

- "one on layering an object oriented application on top of a procedural operating system (i.e. Mac OS X on top of UNIX)"

- "a method for dynamic object message passing translation"

- "automatically recognizing certain data structures and offering actions for that data (i.e. "Data Detectors")" (what I've described as "clickable-actions-in-text")

- "a method for performing realtime signal processing within a non-realtime OS"

Apple happened to lose at the ITC on 3 of these 4 (the only one still standing is "Data Detectors"/"clickable-actions-in-text"), but this is clear evidence that Apple is suing over fundamental technologies (I'd say fundamental ideas, which is even worse) as well as superficial ones. Given that "Data Detectors" dates back to the Power Macintosh help system, I suspect Apple is using every bit of patent ammunition they have. I certainly don't see any evidence here that Apple is showing restraint.

I'll emphasize again that "Data Detectors" is something that virtually every email client since the mid-to-late 90s does when they make URLs and email addresses clickable, specifically because the idea is so obvious and obviously useful. Should they all have to stop because Apple took an obvious idea to the patent office first? Even when Netscape did it months before Apple in Netscape Navigator 2.0b1?

Oh, I almost forgot. HN just infringed on Apple's "Data Detectors" patent here. Should they stop?

Fair enough, these broad patents indicate that they aren't showing restraint.

However my point was that 'swipe-to-unlock' seeming to be about something 'trivial' doesn't in itself make Apple look bad, and that still stands. It's not an example of Apple abusing the patent system whereas the others are.

If they've lost on the broad patents, then that's a sign that the system isn't as broken as we think. Arguably the fact that they've been tested and found wanting actually improves things.

Also, I'd point out that your concern seems to be primarily about the criteria for obviousness, which I agree is severely problematic, and is only going to get worse if we switch to first-to-file.

People are also so upset with Apple.

right

remember that "people" are not one single entity. some people are pissed at apple for abusing patents. others love apple. the people who are pissed at apple are pissed at yahoo. yahoo doesn't have the fans that apple does though, so the overall tone of the internet comes across as more negative.

>Why are people so upset with Yahoo?

Because after years of inept technical execution, executive shenanigans and other corporate failures, they are resorting to trolling instead of actually doing anything innovative.

Perhaps, but facebook is trolling us all right now. I mean come on, a (free)social media platform where they make money off of other peoples ads, and now about to become "the biggest IPO ever"? lulz

Yeah, I don't facebook. Never have, never will.

The key stat is how much time an average user spends on facebook, it's taken a massive slice out of TV. That's a lot of time to show them ads for even if passively

it's not the fact that the tech crowd is upset with yahoo that surprises me, it's that they are not more upset with apple.

It's based on the crowd's judgement of merit and who is filing the lawsuit and why.

That is to say, Yahoo is viewed as non-innovative, and their action is viewed to be the result of a new CEO intent on aggressively finding pennies through any means including just by lawsuit. Meanwhile, most of Yahoo's team is apparently against this action.

So, it's the context. If you drop the context and equate Apple to Yahoo, then it's easier to arrive at: why is everybody upset when a company files a patent lawsuit.

I bet the same people upset about Yahoo also find Apple's lawsuits to be distasteful. Apple is viewed as a very innovative company, so they're given slack when it comes to suing over issues related to innovation.

The reality is Apple filed lawsuit on company that actually invented Mobile Phone (Motorola) about a silly design patent.

Facebook didn't invent anything.

In reality Apple should be the real bad guy in whole patent issue.

Are you trying to say the iPhone changed nothing? It wasn't an innovation and innovation stopped the day Motorola invented the "Mobile Phone"?

Sure, the iPhone is a mobile phone but it's no way any more similar to what Motorola invented than how similar Motorola's mobile phone is to the original landline phone.

But, for various legal and practical reasons, Apple isn't suing over the things that made the iPhone and the iPad innovative.

Instead, they're suing over ticky-tack nonsense that other people did before like:

- "slide-to-unlock" (Neonode N1m)

- clicking to call phone numbers they detect in text messages and email (Palm Treo among many, many examples - especially if you look at analogous desktop functionality like recognizing URLs in email that makes the concept obvious)

- tablets that are black rectangles with rounded corners (Knight-Ridder concept tablet from 1994, the movie version of 2001, ...)

Perhaps if more people were aware of exactly what Apple was actually suing over they'd be less supportive.

All that prior art will certainly bubble to the surface during the trial process. There is a cottage industry around finding it - kind of like bounty hunting. See articleonepartners.com, a service that lets researchers be rewarded for invalidating litigious patents.

Facebook didn't invent anything.

They did invent some interesting infrastructure and dev-level stuff, which they've open-sourced.

but why is it so bad that the new CEO (I dont see that it matters he is new on the job) of any company whether Yahoo! or Xahoo! is going after another multi-billion company that he believes is infringe and making money off of someone's else invention?

I asked that 3 times and got nothing other than downvotes...

Why don't people like software patents? Because their power (total monopoly over an idea) is out of sync with the difficultly in acquiring one (stick an engineer in a room with a notepad for 10 minutes, then get a few lawyers to translate it into legal hieroglyphics).

But you are correct that nobody really cares when the defendant is a multi-billion dollar company. Facebook can look after themselves just fine. If Yahoo were suing a startup, the backlash would be far stronger.

How is being able to personalise a web page innovative? It's just basic common sense. You've been able to "personalise" the desktop on your computer for decades. How does moving things to the web suddenly make it innovative. It's just like all the silly patents that have been filed that take an existing patent and just add "on a mobile device" to the end.

The patent system is broken, these are not the reasons it was created!

but this patent was not filled in 2012, it was submitted when most of us barely understood email or instant messaging. You looking at it from a wrong perspective. Please go back in time and then revise it.

I think patenting a lock slider by Apple is more ridiculous than patenting apparatus to change IM into email.

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