Apple's Secrets Revealed During Trial
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
"I realized I have this incredibly powerful device, why can't it figure out the right size for me?" he said. So, he challenged his team to make the software automatically size the text into the center of the screen when he double-tapped around a webpage."
This is why we're in such a sad state with regard to software patents. This guy genuinely believes that he "invented" something. And that it should be patentable.
Of course, anybody who has actually built anything knows that what he actually did was "decide how something should work". You do this dozens of times when putting out a new product, and it's not in any way a big deal. Certainly not something you should call "inventing", and absolutely not something that you should consider patenting.
It's just one of thousands of design decisions you make. It's just sad to watch people who don't understand that making things worse for everybody.
In my opinion the biggest problem with patents is that it's impossible to put the theory in practice no matter how great the theory is. On paper, patenting only non-trivial ideas sounds good. On practice that rule simply doesn't exist because it's impossible to define objectively.
Sounds like a very useful feature to me, and something that competitors or previous products did not had.
And "deciding how something should work" sounds like a perfectly good description of an _invention_.
How you came to the conclusion that "If the implementation is too hard, the idea was worthless", I can't even begin to think.
Difficulty of implementation and worthiness of idea are totally orthogonal.
There are tons of very important ideas that had a very difficult implementation. E.g the idea behind the atomic bomb was very valuable despite the fact that the implementation took some of the top minds, several years and millions of dollars.
If you take only one patent as an example, maybe not. But if Apple couldn't secure ANY patent on the iPhone, and any competitor was free to copy it as he liked, well, not only the might have not produced it, but the very industry might not even exist and have the scope it has today.
The iPhone is a very successful product, and it owes very little of that success to patents.
It's true that when some areas offer artificial monopolies and others don't, investors like the former. But extending the domain of monopolies isn't the only way to debias that.
Apple makes the Mac Pro, the iMac, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, which are all generic computers, which anyone can (and does) copy. Do you think they would not do it since they can't patent a laptop computer, that's rectangular? Or an all-in-one computer? Or a tower computer?
And that is what should be patentable, if anything at all should be patentable. The algorithm to account for design elements and make intelligent choices.
Not "tap twice to zoom".
I am against patents in general. But this is perfectly in line with past hardware patents. For example compare to 1950s radios where the volume control was also the on/off switch. Pull it out, and the radio was on, push it in, it was off, and it remembered the volume that you wanted. That button design was patented.
I don't see a difference in kind on that patent and the double-click patent.
This isn't art--even a cursory exploration of the solution space with vague constraints should get you there.
Well I didn't say that they were... but I'm not sure I agree with your statement anyway. Do you have any evidence that that isn't what they were intended for?
Incidentally I think that there was some ingenuity there. When Jacob Rabinow created the pull-button, he had been asked to improve a push-button tuner. (A review of the source informs me that when you pulled it had the station, not the volume. My bad. I have not seen one of these radios in decades...) His reason for switching is that he knew the problems with existing push-button tuners, and could design a better pull-button tuner. The manufacturer he invented it for did not want to accept it because nobody else was building them.
Incidentally the inventor of that was Jacob Rabinow. Take a glance at http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/patents.html to see all of his patents. Given how many inventions he had, he clearly did not spend long on each. But his claim would e that without the patent system he would have had no incentive to invent them, and would have worked on other stuff.
I'm not defending this either way. Merely stating the official view of what the patent system is supposed to have been for. (And my personal feelings are the other way.)
We're heading towards a world where all the money is getting funneled towards patent lawsuits and away from building products. This is not a good thing.
And since software has such low barriers to entry, this really does not help progress.
See http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s..., in the comments: "I remember when Larry was doing that testing. One of the things he tested was the three-button mouse, which is what Xerox had used. He found out that inexperienced computer users (the market that Lisa was aimed at, believe it or not) got too confused -- they couldn't remember what each of the buttons did. Same problem with a two-button mouse. So the one-button mouse was born. Of course, that meant that we needed double-click and triple-click, but that's another story..."
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... shows screenshots of the UI that had the first double-click interface, in 1980 or 1981.
And they don't, so why bring it up.
> or that double-click doesn't logically follow from the reduction in mouse button count.
Lots of things "logically follow", but only a few make sense. Figuring that out seems to actually be fairly difficult as the state of the art shows.
Excuse me, what on earth is non-obvious about that?
When enumerating the alternatives to the pinch-gesture (the awkwardness of which becomes obvious within the first few days of use) then you end up with a rather short list of 10-12 items - and that's counting rather esoteric ones like a physical jog-dial.
Apple chose double-tap, just like anyone else in their right mind (other than Sony) would.
If that's not textbook example for a trivial "invention" then I don't know what is.
It's the difference between going to the patent office with an idea for "an engine that runs on steam" and actually designing a steam engine. See how much broader in scope the first one is?
It's not like zoom hadn't been implemented, or they had to reflow anything.
And you could argue that zooming in on an HTML bounding box would be obvious to an engineer developing web browsers.
In any case, if it's so obvious, where's the prior art? It's not as if web browsers haven't been around for nearly 20 years.
It seems to me that Apple has justification to defend wholesale copying of the myriad of little design decisions that they made that are synergistic. It's clear that they spent a huge amount of effort and cost doing this, and were able to succeed in a way that many had tried previously and failed.
The legal ways that one can defend such synergistic design work is limited. One common way, for better or worse, is to patent some of the individual elements to throw gum in the works of anyone trying to make derivatives of your work.
But if the process isn't difficult, and we can assume that people individually have used zoom to zoom in on text, then the extent of the innovation is having it as a preset.
In practice, I'd take it a step further: Patents aren't about doing things that are hard. They're about doing things that are new... to the patent office.
So is changing the mechanism to a double-tap when implementing it on a device with a touchscreen worth patenting?
And that's the thing about software. It's so easy to make, compared to designing/manufacturing something physical, that there are thousands of programs out there that you've probably never used, doing who knows what, and yet people are expected to know if something's novel and patentable?
Technology has and continues to advance at ridiculous pace. Many software developments are dependent on hardware. Until the hardware exists no one can even try to solve the problem. I don't want a company which has first access to hardware to automatically get all the software patents that derive from it.
Google is hard at work on their glasses. Lots of companies are. The hardware isn't there yet. We're getting there though. Eventually someone is going to have hardware that enables all kinds of cool things to be done that have never been done before. Our culture / society / economy doesn't need to compound their reward of being first with a 20 year exclusive.
That's fine, so patent the _specific algorithm_ used to make that decision. Implementations are fine to patent, IMHO. Broad concepts, such as "it should zoom in when I tap twice" are not.
The sum of these design decisions make the product, they are the most important aspect the project.
(1) Providing a solution to a known problem.
(2) Figuring out that something is a problem and providing a solution.
I'd argue that (2) is more valuable than (1) as there are likely to be other solutions in the case of (1) so the payoff is relatively small.
Figuring out that a problem exists and solving it is far more valuable.
Yes, I know that most of us work on (1), but surely our self-interest is irrlevant.
The fact is, he identified a problem and then handed it off to others to solve. Any of us could've identified that problem, and most of us could've implemented the solution after a bit of work.
Especially in a group environment (dev listserv, public forums, etc.) we expect to have users that can identify problems and others that can solve them. Adding patents and claiming "Invention!" for incremental improvements is harming progress.
Not so fast. None of you did, despite the fact that mobile devices aren't new.
When I first saw tetris, I said "wow, I could have invented that, I was just looking at asymmetric block figures". However, I didn't.
Almost everything is trivial in hindsight.
>Especially in a group environment (dev listserv, public forums, etc.) we expect to have users that can identify problems and others that can solve them.
Are you claiming that Apple execs can't invent anything because they have too many indirect subordinates? Or that groups only produce improvements that are too trivial to warrant protection?
I wasn't in industry when that issue came up, and I wasn't employed by Apple. So, it really isn't fair to hold me responsible for a problem I didn't have. I've only recently begun carrying a mobile device of any sort, furthermore.
There are infinitely many problems that I haven't solved nor, I reckon, have you. I will not argue, though, that we automatically are not capable of solving them, as we have not encountered them and have no reason to solve them.
Given the constraints, given the hardware, given the opportunity and incentive, we certainly could come up with something similar. Just because we did not does not mean we could not.
This logic puts us in the unfortunate opportunity of saying "Well, the first person to run into the problem, to them goes the spoils!"
That's rubbish, and heavily encourages either wasteful flailing about in the problem space wasting resources, or worse, explicitly avoiding exploring even the same areas as others because you'd hate to be a few minutes late.
We need to be free to attempt solutions to problems regardless of who else has worked on them and to what success.
Second, the point I was making was not that Apple execs can't invent anything (indeed, I believe I set the bar fairly low for novelty!) or that groups only find trivial progress.
The point was that in a community we expect some users to find problems and others to find solutions--and these may be different folks, spread far in time and space. You made some statement seeming to imply that one must both discover and solve a problem, and that is what I took issue with.
Not relevant.
> and I wasn't employed by Apple.
Huh? Lots of people not employed by apple invent things.
> So, it really isn't fair to hold me responsible for a problem I didn't have.
"You" wasn't directed at just you. It was directed at the thousands of people who walked right by that problem.
Like I said, hindsight, just like I had with tetris.
> Given the constraints, given the hardware, given the opportunity and incentive,
Why do you think that being given something is relevant?
Some folks have "time machines" (Bill Joy reference). They get to invent in that context.
> Well, the first person to run into the problem, to them goes the spoils!"
That's pretty much how it works. Folks with domain knowledge have an advantage. So do people who think creatively. And so on.
> heavily encourages either wasteful flailing about in the problem space wasting resources
No, it doesn't.
> We need to be free to attempt solutions to problems regardless of who else has worked on them and to what success.
You are "free to attempt solutions". You just have to succeed first.
> You made some statement seeming to imply that one must both discover and solve a problem
No I didn't. I said that some inventions address known problems while others both discover the problem and a solution.
I pointed out that lots of us work on the first kind of invention, but the second kind is just as valid.
Who owns the patents for tool use and fire brandishing?
Sounds like everybody came up with similar, unprotectable stuff, with great inspiration from each other. Not guilty. Next case!
This smells like utter bullshit. This isn't a shipyard, but designers and engineers - and they're all direct reports?
1,000 people who directly reported to him
certainly does.
Sure a human will vastly outperform the state of the art algorithm on any one patent but when talking about thousands of applications week in week out and increasing, some kind of automation to filter the cruft would be useful. Surely as bad as things are now, the worst that could happen is no effect? Would certainly be a better application of machine learning than classifying the mood of movie ratings or calculating social media "klout".
As for the patent office being more productive... At least on the subject of prior art, they don't want to be. After all, they're paid by the patent.
Sure, most trials are only de facto public since most of the public cannot access trials and only court decisions get published. If Apple really wanted to avoid to disclose these 'secrets', it could have filed a respective motion AFAIK.
Anyway, pastebinned:
Parallel processors running perpendicular today.
>Anyway, pastebinned:
Thanks!
I do understand that Apple may very well have lifted ideas from Sony and others and I have to admit that it is a valid argument. I'm only speculating as to why the judge decided not to admit the "inspired by Sony" evidence. In my eyes I can see my reasoning as being realistic though I'm not sure if it's right or wrong.
As an aside, and really, beyond the scope of the law, if you look at this from a human perspective and ignore the black and white aspects of the law, I think it's pretty obvious that Samsung has been imitating Apple's designs. Forget who worked on touch screens first and forget who first created a brick style phone with the same kind of interface because I really think that's irrelevant. Lots of phones look and function like the iPhone and the iPhone looks and functions like lots of other phones but what's really important here are the details of the design and not the generalities. If you look at Samsung's phones that came out after the iPhone you see what seems to be an attempt to piggyback off the iPhones success and maybe even confuse consumers into buying the wrong phone or making them think, as they often do, "it's basically the same thing". The minor details of Samsung's phones and tablets like the middle "home" button, the radius of the corners, the thickness, and even their packaging are so similar that if you took the logos off the phones and/or boxes its easy for even an informed consumer to mistake the two from ten feet away. I've seen tons of touchscreen phones both close up ans far away and most of the time it's not difficult at all to tell an iPhone apart from the others despite the similarities they all share (that's even without my glasses on). But if you take the Samsung phones and tablets in question and compare only those then it's quite easy to not be able to tell the difference until you're actually close enough to hold it up to your face. Legally, that's probably not important but practically that's the real issue. Even if Samsung had come out with touchscreen phones in a style like the iPhone ten years before Apple it shouldn't matter because Samsung began making what really look like clones of the iPhone only after Apple put the iPhone out.
I know if I argued this in court I'd be on shaky ground but I'm not arguing the legalities. I'm looking at this through the eyes of a real person. Touch screens, sing button or multi-button, rounded corners, etc. don't matter. When you see a copy of something else, you know it. I think whether Apple wins or loses the case it doesn't matter nor will it settle the argument. People who have seen the phones and tablets in question all know and see what happened and with so many touchscreen devices out there that are obviously very easy to differentiate from the iDevices, it can't be a coincidence that two companies were working on designs so similar right down to the tiniest details at around the same time. I think Occam's Razor applies here. The simplest explanation is that lots of companies were working on similar designs around the same time but when Apple's took off Samsung purposely started designing their devices to look like Apple's to piggy-back off their success. The result? Moms who always buy the wrong thing bought a Samsung phone or tablet as Christmas gifts because "they're basically the same thing, right?" and Apple sued Samsung.
At various times over the past several years, Apple has sued Nokia, HTC, Motorola and Samsung, plus several smaller companies over a wide variety of smartphones and tablets using many of the same design and user interface patents. This isn't about Apple being offended by copying. This is about Apple using the legal system to attack their competition. Note that many of the patents involved (like "data detection" and "universal search") date back to Macintosh user interface features from years (sometimes more than a decade) before the iPhone.
Sadly, I expect the judge wouldn't allow it, but I'd love to see the Samsung lawyer show the jury the whole gallery of devices (from all vendors) that Apple has sued over using these patents. That would make what is going on much clearer.
Apple's patent abuse and legal shenanigans aside, there's a handful of Samsung phones and tablets that just couldn't have come out looking like almost perfect clones of the iPhone and iPad by accident. Apple is being an asshole. But they're right that Samsung copied.
However, the main problem with this story is that the "copied" design is for a Sony Walkman, not a mobile phone. Also, the Sony-inspired design submitted by Shin Nishibori, an Apple industrial designer, was just one of many prototypes that didn't make the final cut.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/08/01/the-sony-device-samsu...
http://www.itreviews.com/hardware/audio-video-players/sony-w...