The Next Step in Apple's Thermonuclear War Against Android
groklaw.net
groklaw.net
Imagine a decentralized app store where people can make a living without having to deal with apple's ridiculous review process or ideas of what's appropriate. I suppose the major challenge is getting all the non-geeks into this ecosystem and away from iTunes and other privately owned app stores.
This is obviously wishful thinking. However given the importance of mobile computing going forward I think it's worth imagining the best mobile ecosystem possible.
So far, "freedom of App Store speech" and money don't seem to be correlated at all. (Or all the millionaires on OpenMoko and Cydia are being quiet to prevent a gold rush on their turf.)
I think the only instance where Apple's guidelines are prohibitive to making a living is porn. I for one would be a thousand times more likely to pay for porn on the trusted platform that is Apple, rather than on some dubious website.
Is it possible to use this as an advantage against established app stores? Or is Google already established as the platform to be on for mobile porn? (I can't check first hand, thanks to Google's GeoIP madness.)
Google has similar guidelines to Apple on this front (see Zinio's comments about why they don't have Android/iOS versions of adult magazines, for example). The only notable difference I can think of is that there's probably more post-filtering than pre-filtering of apps.
The enforcement of Apple's "guidelines" for apps harm developers' ability to make money on the app store far beyond porn. I have a non-porn, totally above-bar app that serves a niche that makes $n/day. I re-skinned my app to serve a different, larger niche and it was rejected multiple times for bizarre, ambiguous reasons. If this second app were in the store today I would be making more money. I'd bet my income would be at least 2 * $n/day from the apps combined.
- Can be uninstalled easily, and leave no trace behind (remember "Register cleaners"?)
- Cannot interfere with other apps
- Cannot run in the background and spy on your surfing habits
- Cannot steal your credit card information and upload it to Russian mafia servers
For a long time, the standard geek response to these problems is "that's the user's problem -- they should be more careful about what they install". The response appears to be "fuck you, I don't want to waste my time worrying about whether this purple monkey screen saver will secretly empty my retirement account."
If you can find a way to make this "free and open" system also safe, then I think you'll have a winner.
With the amount of non-techies I know with jailbroken phones with all kinds of super-tacky OS hacks installed, that is definitely not the only response.
"Fuck you, I don't want to waste my time" is actually the response developers should be giving to Apple when they are made to wait more than a month for their app to be reviewed and finally it gets rejected for a political, ideological, arbitrary, or personal (competes with an Apple service) reason.
Sadly, today, the more accurate statement is all of them are theoretically solvable by sandboxing and permissions mechanisms. Getting those sandboxes and permissions where they need to be at a technical level, explaining those permissions to users in a way they can understand and make decisions based on and making the overall framework as transparent and usable enough is very much an unsolved problem.
I just think it is important to remember where the weaknesses are and why some people are making an alternative tradeoff.
As someone who gets dragged in to sorting out the IT issues of friends, family, neighbours and who knows what else, there is a lot of benefit to the Apple approach at what is for most people, little real cost.
The problem is the absoluteness of their position. I don't mind if they make people jump through hoops to jailbreak phones, I don't mind if their default support position for phones is to restore them to factory settings before they'll even look at it, but I think allowing for the possibility of jail breaking as an accepted thing would be good for both choice, and making sure Apple stay honest.
Have a think about the types of application that are trotted out when people want to point out the advantages of open android :
a) new virtual keyboards - not possible with sandboxing
b) new launcher screens - not possible with sandboxing
c) access to data from other apps - not possible with sandboxing
Or rather, if you can do these things with sandboxing, then sandboxing is not providing the protection that you need. How do you guarantee that the funky new keyboard you just downloaded isn't actually a keylogger sending all of your passwords to a server somewhere for nefarious purposes. Or less nefariously, how do you know that the new keyboard hasn't forgotten to implement a special key that is necessary fo you to use application X. How do you go about backing out that installation of the keyboard, including the reinstallation of the default keyboard?
On the other hand, if you protect against these problems of security and confidence that an app won't break the system, what exactly are the advantages that such a system would have compared to a closed system such as Apple provides?
Android isn't an immature product. google have activated something like 300 million devices. 300 million opportunities for your theoretical issue to manifest and yet it hasn't.
Of course, back in reality, I do actually know someone that installed Swype on their Android phone, didn't like it, and couldn't figure how to get back to the default keyboard, so I don't know why you think these types of problems aren't already cropping up in the Android world.
Turning on Swype implicitly trains you in how to turn it off.
3 & 4 are not prohibited by the App Store review process.
Of course, the iphone app can steal all kinds of information on your phone and send it to russian servers.
Do you really believe the App Store review can prevent malware?
Or are you really only talking about the _perception_ of the App Store review process?
The closest thing we have to that is the web. You can run stores on it completely decentralized, and you can access it from all mobile devices.
One data point or trend that seems to support the above idea: The popularity of free apps that are monetized via in-app-purchase. Would be great if the future saw more free web apps monetized via app-in-purchase provided by Stripe or similar.
Wasn't "Slide to Unlock" invalidated in the process against HTC?
But that's not the problem. The problem is that you never know which patents will be asserted against you, and by that point the horse is out of the barn. You've now got to spend millions of dollars on lawyers for years to invalidate their improvidently granted patents. And the work-around doesn't do much good when they're asking for damages for past infringement on the millions of devices you've already shipped or suddenly having your trucks stopped at the border (and interrupting your business and straining your relationships with retailers) during the period before you can retool your supply chain to incorporate the work-around. Especially when the second you release a new product with a new set of work-arounds, they come at you with a new set of patents.
Software patents have got to go.
Perhaps, firstly, you have to have a more vigorous application process that is peer reviewed (where peers are basically your competitors!).
Secondly, you have to declare the valuation of the patent. This is then taxed by the government, similarly to property tax. If you decide to value your patent at $0, then you pay $0 tax.
The valuation of the patent determines the damage payment.
This combination means that you can't just keep a patent indefinitely, waiting for someone to infringe and then extract money from them. Peer review means that you can't patent something that will stop your competitors from continusing business. Real innovation will get thru because your peers will have no case of prior art, but "bad" patents won't get thru as your competitors will search hard for prior art to stop you (aka, incentives are aligned amongst the parties).
I'd rather just see software patents thrown out entirely but I think this is the most reasonable suggestion I've seen for fixing the current system. If that tax were rolled back into funding real scrutiny of incoming patents the whole system might not be the cancer it's become now.
It also means that you'd get lots of press around big stated-value (and so big potential claim) patents, so people in the same industry would know which patents to avoid infringing, hopefully much reducing risk of accidental infringement.
This sounds more clever than it actually is. Think about it:
First of all, this makes the patent system totally worthless to the little guy. If Joe Inventor has the Billion Dollar Idea, he can't value it at a billion dollars even if it is worth that much because the first year's taxes would bankrupt him before he can recoup the money. But if he values it at substantially less than that, the big guys come along and infringe and just pay damages that are way less than the value of infringing.
But you can't allow the patent holder to periodically revalue the patent and change the amount of tax being paid on it because that breaks the system, since the big guys could just value all their patents at $0 until they see someone infringing, then revalue them at a trillion dollars the day before they file the lawsuit.
And the alternative of not allowing revaluation ignores what a crap shoot patents are. Sometimes you don't know that something is going to take off until it does. If you have five or ten genuinely good ideas but can only expect one or two to gain market acceptance, and you don't know which ones at the time of filing, you can't value them all at a billion dollars or you'll be crushed by taxes, but if you value the wrong ones highly then the patent system isn't providing you with the desired incentive because when the infringers come around you won't be able to collect sufficient damages to deter them.
More than that, think about what you would be doing to patent litigation: Valuing an individual software patent at a billion dollars is insane for anyone because of the taxes that would be due on it and because of the potential of someone finding a work-around that makes that valuation worthless, so instead the strategy (much like today) will be to collect many thousands of patents, valued in the low millions individually, but instead of asserting five or ten in litigation, plaintiffs will have to assert a much larger number of them in order to arrive at the desired amount of damages. These trials are a giant mass of spaghetti even with five or ten patents, can you imagine a hundred? So it does nothing to solve the problem of upstanding defendants being coerced into unjust settlements for fear of being crushed by litigation costs.
So the taxes thing is not really going to do it I don't think. (And that's before the Tea Party gets a billion dollar donation from Intellectual Ventures to go on TV and scream about taxes on innovators, and before the tax provision gets eaten by all the same loopholes that allow Microsoft to not pay income tax.)
Which leaves the suggestion that we need a more rigorous vetting of patents -- and I'm all for that, but easier said than done. Peer review probably wouldn't hurt, but you've got a serious free rider problem. If IBM files for a spurious patent then in theory Google and Microsoft each have an incentive to hire lawyers and try to oppose their application, but they also have an incentive to save money by letting their other competitors do it. And because patents are bought and sold like commodities, you can't just concentrate on fighting your own competitors' attempts to get bad patents, because anyone who is awarded a low quality patent is a potential supplier of them to your competitors, so anyone who decides they want to subsidize their competitors by being the first to start policing bad patents in the industry will have to do so against the world rather than only their own actual competitors. You end up with a situation where nobody wants to be the first mover to start opposing competitors' patents because there will inevitably be retaliation, so nobody does, and all the big players are happier to continue the existing system of everyone big having an arsenal of low quality patents that in most cases just get cross-licensed to one another.
It seems to me it would be better to just throw out software patents and be done with it. No one can even agree whether the existing or proposed systems would encourage more innovation than they impede, but no one can dispute that any system of software patents involves the employment of a large army of soul-crushing patent lawyers with engineering degrees who the world would be better off if they were set to work doing actual engineering instead.
So may be there isn't a proper solution, because the premise is that the idea of patents is flawed?
I don't think the idea of patents is flawed. They work well in certain industries (namely pharmaceuticals). The problem is that the patent system was never designed to cover intangible goods. The idea that one single device can simultaneously infringe tens of thousands of separate patents is an abomination.
That leaves the problem of how to exclude software from patentability without causing problems for Pfizer and General Electric, but I think that's coming at it from the wrong end. Never mind what you can get a patent to cover or not, just make intangible goods incapable of patent infringement. Pass a law that says that if all you're doing is distributing bits or executing a program on a general purpose computer, you can't be liable for patent infringement whatsoever. That should have no effect on the makers of cholesterol medication and jet turbines while solving the problem for software developers.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/31/3207848/apple-vs-samsung-c...
Like Groklaw, they seem to have their own opinions and eschew the bullshit-objective style of modern mainstream news, whereby all claims and opinions are treated as if equally valid.
"Maybe it's time to pay the money and let everyone go back to making cool shit," is how The Verge ends one piece.
It's true that Groklaw's stance has been opinionated, but I don't think that has gotten in the way of reporting this story.
[EDIT: Fixed gender pronoun.]
That analogy is not perfect, I do read and find value in both but the bias can be horribly grating and would love to find a reliable substitute.
Speaking of which The Verge's coverage has been excellent although there's a lot of forced false equivalence and it's pitched to a slightly lower information audience (I guess this make them CNN in my bad analogy?).
I made a similar criticism of its editorial stance 750 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603929).
If what you're really bothered with is the bias. Then I suggest listening to TWIL. They're almost as through, and they at least try to stay neutral. (Their recent discussion on this case had actual lawyers defending both sides, and even those defending Apple agreed with the point PJ is making in this post).
"But, in contrast, here's the Apple design patent, D504889, about those rounded corners -- how do you code around it? A tablet in the shape of a parallelogram?"
But the jury found Samsung's actual tablets, which are rectangles with rounded corners, do not infringe this patent. So her analysis that it's impossible to design around this is false.
Here's one from another recent post:
"Apple's lawyers are still clueless that the public is for the most part repulsed by Apple's IP aggression."
This isn't supported by any evidence and is almost certainly made up. I'm not aware of any survey supporting this claim.
At this point, I'm unable to tell which information about the case on Groklaw is factual and which is made up. As far as I can tell, the quotes from actual court documents are accurate, but I can't really tell about the rest.
Copy-and-pasting from a comment I just made in another thread about how merely having an obvious patent does cause problems: You don't have to contest the patent for it to be suppressing others' design. I once worked for a company that made a humidifying air pump. We had to have the water tank held in with a removable flap rather than a door because our main competitor had patented 'holding the tank in with a hinged flap/door'. Sure, you could fight it in court, down the track, after hardware design (which is much more expensive than people realise). Or you could move onto the next problem and have a slightly inferior product.
- She got you | Rhetorical questions != Not False Statements.
[Edit: Agree she could have been more informative.]
[but if anyone knows?]
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Dom...
The software on the Apple side could not be placed into the processor on the prior art and vice versa. That means they are not interchangeable. That changed everything right there.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/apple-and-oranges-appl...
> we as jurors were sworn to abide by the rules and the stipulations in law as they exist today, at the time we made the decision.
Can't jurors just ignore laws that they feel are unjust?
Judges and lawyers hate it, but at worst it's grounds for dismissal from a jury, not a crime.
The jury also found that the Nexus S 4G infringed the scrolling patent even though it doesn't include "bounce back" and, instead, using stock Android's "overscroll glow" (which, in theory, was supposed to work around the Apple patent). I'd say the breadth of this particular patent is an unsettled question, at the very least.
You are technically correct - Germany invaded Poland first. But German and Soviet invasions of Poland were just 18 days apart: 1 September and 17 September 1939. All according to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [1] signed shortly before that - on 23 August 1939.
However, I do hold out some degree of hope that the high-profile nature of these products, along with the self-evident insanity of these patents that give one company exclusive dominion over basic concepts (rounded rectangles, pinch-to-zoom) may be enough to make more people aware of how broken the patent system is.
So while I doubt Apple has any intention other than to keep exploiting the flaws in the patent system to attack its competitors, if there is an upside to any of this nonsense, that would be it.
Edit: Even though most of us on this forum probably reserve the most contempt for patent trolls like Myrhvold, with his zombie horde of non-practicing entities, I actually think that these cases resonate wayyyyy more with the non-programmer mainstream audience.
Indie programmers having to pay royalties behind the scenes to some shell company? For most people, that's not too interesting. The Galaxy Nexus getting pulled off the market because it can search for things? This is at least something that people have heard of, can understand, and can see doesn't make sense.
Absolutely. A Google-designed product getting pulled because of search? Does not compute.
5,946,647 (the “’647 Patent”), System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data
6,847,959 (the “’959 Patent”), Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system
8,046,721 (the “’721 Patent”), Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image
8,074,172 (the “’172 Patent”), Method, system, and graphical user interface for providing word recommendations
8,014,760 [Part 2] (the “’760 Patent”), Missed telephone call management for a portable multifunction device
5,666,502 (the “’502 Patent”), Graphical user interface using historical lists with field classes
7,761,414 (the “’414 Patent”), Asynchronous data synchronization amongst devices
8,086,604 (the “’604 Patent”), Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system*
This is a new claim and not one that will find many takers imho.
"Apple has said they are not interested in licensing"
This is far from the truth. They certainly offered licensing to Samsung. $30/device might sound like a lot but that was a starting point in a negotiation.
One of the benefits of Android being open source and free software is that it encourages small players to start competing with giants by giving them a nice OS and the ability to tweak it. This is why we can have smartphones, tablets, netbooks, smartwatches, ski goggles, cameras running Android. All designed and produced by many different companies, from multinational giants to small Kickstarter startups. No worries though. Soon, every one of them will realize they can get sued for "text correction" and how naive they were to think that they can just build upon open source and free software to realize their goals. As a startup should you care? Absolutely not! You should simply develop for iOS only, using iMacs and Macbooks.
And if they gain traction, they will be sued by Apple.
If you wanted to see either Open WebOS or MeeGo in the US (rather than China), Apple's lawsuits have effectively closed that door for the foreseeable future. No smartphone startup would be crazy enough to wade into this legal minefield.
> This is a new claim and not one that will find many takers imho.
So Netscape Navigator 2.0b1 was cribbing off the the iPhone when it designed "Live URLs" detecting URLs and email addresses in mail and newsgroup messages? And Borland had a particularly good time machine to add detecting phone numbers to dial in your notes to the Sidekick TSR in the 80s?
Oh, I forgot, Google clearly copied Siri when it released "universal search" for the G1 (in Cupcake, IIRC). I mean they should have known that porting Google Desktop Search to Android would obviously infringe on Apple's patents. I've sure Eric Schmidt got the idea for Desktop Search in an Apple board meeting. I just wonder how he got his notes back to Googlers in 2004.
I am a big fan of open source but I totally disagree on this specific case.
Yes, it's not the signs of a healthy industry, as most software patents are silly and things will get sillier as this progresses. Most are being patented simply because they can, to add a number to the total as ammo for next licensing discussion.