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Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

So then you're boycotting Motorola and Google products as well because they had a similar injunction against Apple in Germany right? If not why?

I find it amusing how emotional tech people get over these patent wars. Its one companies legal team versus the other over legalities and trivialities. If you looked at how often car companies sued each other over look and feel patents you would realize the whole thing is a non issue. If you want to change things start with the legal frameworks that allow it to happen. Complaining that companies are using every trick available is somewhat of a non surprise. You might want to start with the patent office and their granting of patents though.

But "I'll remember this for a long, long time", really? That is quite sad, evaluate technology for its tech, not for the companies legal team. But whatever.

Note: I'm not arguing for or against apple or google and their legal teams with this post at all.

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"Evaluate technology for its tech, not for the company's legal team."

No. Doing so means that I can become complicit in legal actions that ultimately hurt me as a consumer by providing companies like Apple with the revenue they need to fund such attacks. One must consider the legal actions, the social actions, etc. of a company when buying their products; it's part of being a responsible and long-term self-interested consumer.

I'm curious then, what exactly do you buy? Almost every company on this planet has done things both legally and socially that would mean you boycott almost all corporations. This would asus is out, samsung, motorola, <insert any major manufacturer of anything here>, how do you correlate this view with the rest of the products you buy?

Do you drive a car and fill it with gasoline or diesel? Then likely you're implicating yourself in the extraction of natural resources and disasters with this viewpoint. While I applaud the concept, it seems a bit restrictive. Note I'm not saying you should deny when companies do bad things like an oil spill disaster, but if we're going to glom on extra responsibilities for corporations that build devices we buy we're going down a very slippery slope that can only end with abandoning modern lifestyles.

Also another question, if patents are granted and being infringed, are you saying companies should not act upon infringement? If yes, then why would companies get patents?

I get that there are compromises made in every decision I make, and that to that extent, I am complicit in the actions taken by the companies that I support. I certainly did not mean to exempt myself from that; rather, I was trying to argue against the philosophy that such considerations should be ignored. While I get that pragmatism is important, I disagree that we can disregard the actions of the companies we support.

As for the point about patents, I think that there's a difference between acting on infringement and actively seeking to expand their patents post-hoc to shut down competition. More broadly, I think that the USPTO needs to be much more selective about patents, to avoid precisely these kinds of problems.

No worries, sorry for the late reply, had to go watch sports and drink beer. :)

I was just trying to find out exactly what it was that sparked your personal boycott and how that extends to other areas of life.

Personally I can't be arsed to care about tech company patent litigation since there are much worse things to worry about. In essence I'm referring to things like child labor/environment damage etc.... I'm not absolving tech companies, but on a scale of 1-10 as to ethical considerations its not that high on the list I would rank.

Basically that's my view in a nutshell, at work so I can't give a full reply, tschuss!

Apple shot first. Google has patents that they can use defensively, I say anything that happens to Apple is fair turn about after the 10.1

You didn't see Google suing Bing over the pagerank algorithm. I'm sure Google has patents relating to map-reduce but distributed computing is still taking off.

If the patent game were played out to its fullest without reform, all innovation would virtually grind to a halt, so a broad gentlemen's agreement is in place not to use patents. Apple don't care, they want to stop innovation so everyone buys their shit. Yes it's capitalism, but it's also marketing, and our consumption choices are the only votes we get in this game.

I'm curious why the patent system in other areas hasn't caused "all innovation would grind to a halt" to occur like you presume.

To play devils advocate here, maybe the entire tech press is much ado about nothing for pageviews. Which is largely what I think is occurring, there is less news in tech so there has to be something to fill in page views.

Also referring to Apples products as "shit" makes me question your general statements. Relax a little and don't take sides on what is inevitably a non-issue. The us versus them group attitude isn't necessary for this discussion.

Note, Google was rather mad at Bing about basically scraping their pages. That said its a different situation entirely and not analogous to the case at hand as they aren't similar in the least.

So I'll ask you the same as I asked before. Given that patents have been granted, should Apple enforce patents they see as infringing on other companies? If not, what determining factor should they use to apply patents? Also, if it wasn't patented by other companies before Apple, why did those companies not patent it? Why should companies only use patents for defense if others are infringing?

If your answer is to win in the court of public opinion I think you are ignoring the legal frameworks that patents sit within. Its a nice pie in the sky opinion, but I think its really shortsighted to imagine a company that is highly profitable to change its ways just to appease a bunch of tech journalists and nerds that often don't have domain knowledge (I'm in this camp as well) to give a true assessment of the situation.

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