Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I really hope this comes back to bit Apple in the ass. It seems there has been a story about Apple doing something shitty everyday for the past few days, and the taste it leaves in my mouth is just getting worse and worse.
The windows tiles may or may not be an advance, but they are clearly not a row of buttons just like the 1st gen iPhone and 2 out of every 3 smart phones that followed.
Well I owned three phones back in 2002-2006 which had rows to buttons and were not iPhone. I get that iPhone is a great phone but please give credit where its due. Even BB had rows of button.
Edit: Not that iPhone was the first to use those elements, just that they where copying whatever the leader did. If windows phone starts to win I expect a switch to a lot of 'tile' interfaces.
http://osxdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/tablets-befor...
We can argue whether or not it's right for Apple to fight to protect this design, but let's not pretend that these tablets were developed completely independent of the iPad's design.
Some of those earlier tablets had rounded corners.
I imagine many of them would have looked much more like the modern tablets had technology been available at the time. For example, the battery, the weight, the durable glass, the display, the wireless options... all these things contributed to the ability to make a tablet without big rubber bumpers on the side of it.
Yes, Apple's design is nicer looking and they should be respected for pushing forward the manufacturing technology. But we don't allow auto makers to sue each other and block the sales of entire models because curves are in fashion one year and more angular shapes in fashion the next.
http://images.wikia.com/victorious/images/6/65/That_guys_Pea...
These patent wars might help consumers by allowing Apple to leverage the money they spend on R&D, giving them the traction necessary to invest further R&D, and pushing Apple's competitors to come up with new and different ideas.
Apple has undeniably pushed the entire cell phone industry forward, and in the process had a tremendous impact on the software, entertainment, and game industries.
If everyone is free to copy their work and compete with them on price, and Apple could lose the market position they (in theory) earned through innovation, and may not be able to get it back. At the same time, if nobody else is innovating to do things differently from Apple, all we get are clones.
You wouldn't be referring to IP shenanigans would you?
I'm sorry but I'm always going to have trouble with the idea of a company resting on its laurels, yet bringing continual revenue in year after year after year because a piece of government paper says that no one else is allowed to do anything remotely resembling what that company is doing since they got there first.
Also:
"A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data." Last I checked federated search has had a wikipedia article since 2005. Hardly seems like innovation pioneered by Apple and stolen by evil Google.
Slide to unlock... have you used an airplane bathroom?
c'mon people
I don't see evidence that Apple is resting on their laurels, but I do remember what happened with Mac OS and Windows back in the 80s/early 90s.
> "A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data." Last I checked federated search has had a wikipedia article since 2005. Hardly seems like innovation pioneered by Apple and stolen by evil Google.
It's a one-line description of a patent. I have no idea what it actually covers, do you? It might be as obvious as slide-to-unlock, but I have no idea.
> Slide to unlock... have you used an airplane bathroom?
An airplane bathroom isn't solving the problem of how to prevent accidental unlock in your pocket without making unlocking unduly difficult.
I think slide-to-unlock is pretty obvious once you go down the road of touch interfaces, but it's worth remembering why we're down that road at all now.
Yeah that Star Trek was a great show.
This argument frequently pops up in discussions of some patent troll action.
While patents are always more specific than a one sentence description, when you read the patent claims, the extra bits that make the patent more specific are not the interesting part of the patents. That's why one-sentence descriptions exist; they distill the interesting novel parts of the patent and leave all the other crud out.
More importantly, how are we to know that it's impossible to develop devices with equivalent functionality not covered by patent, functionality that users will accept and will not result in lower marketshare? Companies expose themselves to 3 times the damages if they go looking for patents covering devices they want to make, and find one. "Then they shouldn't release the product then." Really? In the break-neck development cycle of modern handheld devices, it is not possible to challenge a patent that looks invalid before developing the product.
How can such a system hope to function properly?
The entire patent system is broken, and arguing that patents are more complex or specific than the summaries ("one click checkout", "slide to unlock") is true, but irrelevant.
I see prior art for slide to unlock: A door bolt. Apple would argue, and the USPTO and courts would probably agree, that translating the idea from a physical moving bolt to a virtual bar on a touchscreen device is novel and not obvious and therefore it's patentable, but distinctions like that don't seem important to me.
I think this stuff is largely obvious too, but my devil's argument is predicated around the notion that it might still come out to consumer's benefit anyway.
It's not as if the mobile market was particularly on fire before Apple got involved and completely changed the game, if you can remember back 3-4 years.
Here's what I wrote a couple weeks back on the topic:
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"...Apple won the smartphone market, and certainly raised overall ease-of-use standards in the market, but that doesn't mean that smartphones would have been objectively worse otherwise - just different, possibly better or worse. We would possibly have much more freedom in terms of app stores.
The fact that Apple stamped its mark on the global phone market and is making huge profits is absolutely not an inherent reason to be thankful for them. They won most of the market and now enjoy a massive network effect advantage (larger market => more developers developing for iOS => improved and cheaper app offerings => larger market); why respect them for doing the equivalent of what Facebook did in the social networking arena (make the most popular UX in the market)?
To be sure, a few companies deserve actual respect - for me, those are the companies that treat their customers well, are highly socially responsible, encourage openness, and play fair with all. Even better if they go beyond immediate profit goals to genuinely drive innovation. Most companies just want to make a buck by winning the market - nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't inherently deserve respect.
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Ultimately, the innovative value of the patents in this case is very little, and people were doing similar things before the patents were granted. Apple's "impact" and massive success and dominance are not things I think we should be thankful for.
What disproves your argument that "all we get are clones" is that all manner of tech startups are clearly innovating all the time despite not receiving patents for their ideas. The market is simply too rich, and the network effect too rewarding, for developers to give up innovation simply because they can't patent ideas.
* Apple would be where they are with or without these patents - copyright would probably be sufficient.
* They are holding back innovation by attempting to win via legal means what they should be winning by marketing better products.
* These patent wars exclude companies which do not have the deep pockets to fight with the 'big boys', who can and do use patents as a club to snuff out upstarts.
I guess now that Apple is without Steve, they have lost the creative drive to innovate. With how good Jelly Bean looks and how good the SIII looks, Apple does not need to worry about clones.
I'm not proud of enabling them by contributing to their ecosystem.
What made it that especially interesting was that it alleviated a large part of the need for copy+paste. If you'll recall, the first iPhone OS didn't ship with copy+paste.
I'm having trouble figuring out what "A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data" actually refers to.
The fact that these programs were written tells us that software writers innovate regardless of whether patents are issued for their work or not. That's the nature of software (and technology in general). The difference is, some software makers don't expect to protect their new features from competitors with patents. That's the crux of it, imo.
I think the thing I'm hung up on is that Apple stormed into the phone market and did a whole bunch of smart things that nobody had thought of, but are obvious in retrospect.
I don't agree with software patents, but I can't help but hesitate before agreeing that it's beneficial to the industry to let Apple's competitors wholesale copy their work (even the small things).
The question of if something is orthogonal to the question of if something deserves protection.
Should apple not do this? This is hardball, we're talking billions... and they know they have a limitied window to take advantage of this before they have to continue. They'll make more than the hundred million they put up to do this in the time it takes to settle things. No fanboy-ism here - but the iPhone DID fundamentally change the close-minded walled-garden ripoff stagnant mobile world to get off it's ass and innovate.
Are the patents absurd? Blame the patent system, not Apple for using it. Be sure their competitors are just waiting for a patent opportunity to come along to smash Apple over the head with. Let the big boys play their game. Apple anted up 95 million dollars that they lose if the case does not go in their favour... this isn't a freebie by a longshot.
So until the legal system levels the playing field and fixes the patent system or otherwise makes this type of action impossible, it's dog eat dog.
And in the end - the courts will decide. Don't like the patent system? talk to your representatives in government. Don't want to do that because it "won't matter"? Then you don't have much standing in my books to argue either way. Think politicians care about money? they care about VOTES, which money really helps buy - but convince them they have your votes and they money doesn't matter, they don't need campaign money if they have their votes locked.
I think viewpoints differ largely at this point. While I agree that Apple has every right to use any and all legal ways to defend itself and potentially harm competitors; given that everyone is aware of the absurdity of majority of patents, it does seem wrong to use them offensively. There is no law against being douch-stupid-ignorant; laws are not always moral/right - they follow morality only slowly and caters to only the most easiest morality questions. Rationality allows Apple to do whatever it can, only the current morality doesn't.
I like Samsung stuff, I have a Galaxy Tab 10.1 and I'm an Android guy. I'm not going to go buy an iPhone if the Gnex gets banned.
Ever since they sued that German cafe I have had very little hope for them ever to take the righteous path again.
This is like Honda trying to sue Toyota for making a car with a steering wheel.
The government is too incompetent to fix this mess, and market pressure isn't going to do it either. That leaves us, the actual engineers. It's our job to tell the companies we work for that litigating instead of competing isn't acceptable.
Take 2 otherwise identical people and give them a question where one of them has a personal stake in the answer, while the other one doesn't, and you will generally find that these seemingly rational individuals have come to different conclusions.
Such is human nature.
Because the FRAND abuses originated by Motorola and supported by Google is some of the most disgraceful behaviour seen in the industry since the days of Rambus. You don't participate in the creation of a standard and then turn around and sue companies who adopt those standards in good faith. It undermines the entire industry. If other companies had done this there would be no WiFi, Bluetooth, USB etc.
Anyway I assume that you're fully supportive of the FTC/EU investigating Google for anti-competitive behaviour ?
You do if you're grasping at straws to defend yourself against the initial patent aggressors. Can't really blame them.
Because it sets an example where every tiny little contributor to a standard can hold every implementer at ransom. It would be the unravelling of the entire IT industry.
"Apple was ordered to post a bond of $95 million to enact the injunction, which would be used to pay Samsung damages if the decision is later reversed."
When Android surfaced, it did not look blatantly like the iPhone. That is, until the Galaxy appeared. From the moment I saw a Galaxy prototype it was obvious: they were going to get sued.
Whether or not the iOS vs Android war makes sense at a high level is an interesting discussion, but this is pretty simple: Samsung practically begged to be the first to get sued. There isn't a lot to say about it after that.
It's up to those two companies to work it out. Until that happens, this is what we get -- and Samsung, at least, has little to complain about.
There's a huge difference between the two, and the article isn't quite clear on what the finding is. The bond makes it sound like it could be the latter, but everybody here seems to be assuming it's the former.