Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone 5 design | Hacker News Reader

Chinese company uses leaked photos to copy, patent iPhone 5 design

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195 pointsvelodrome177 comments

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I would not say this for any other company, but Apple somewhat deserves it.

For re-inventing the smartphone back in 2007 and for not wanting others to clone the best features?

> not wanting others to clone the best features?

Yes. It hinders progress.

Also for all this patent mess with Samsung, et al.

Oh no, not another thread about whether patents should exist or not or for how many years.

The fact is that they exist, iPhone was REVOLUTIONARY when announced and soon after others started cloning it. Go and look at Samsung and Android pre-iPhone and let's talk. Just because something is copied a lot doesn't mean that Apple should roll over. Nokia, for example, came up with a great phone that doesn't seem to clone the iPhone.

By the way, E=Mc2 is pretty obvious to me too--now.

It wasn't revolutionary. It was evolutionary. There's a big difference.

Are these two concepts exclusive?

I think so, see my reply to rorrr above. To my mind, revolutionary = patentable, evolutionary = not so much.

Yes, one means slow change, the other means fast change.

I would rather say that one (revolution) means turning the thing on its head and (often) starting from scratch. The other (evolution) means building incrementally on whats come before.

By your logic, Google should sue Apple over the new maps in iOS6 because it's pretty much a copy of the Google Maps app.

If the "new maps in iOS6 because [are] pretty much a copy of the Google Maps app" then Google should be able and should sue Apple.

Regarding design protection: Ford can't copy Jaguar or Ferrari, can it?

Those two cars (Ford vs Jaguar) seem no more dissimilar to me than a Samsung Galaxy S2 and an iPhone: http://www.carautoportal.com/car-images/ford/ford-gt/ford-gt... http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/2011/05/Jaguar-C-X...

That cannot be solved in a few HN posts; judges, juries and appeal courts decide that. My point was that certain designs are unique, virtually all cars have four tires, round steering wheel, baggage area, airbags etc but we kinda know when we see a Jaguar, Porsche, Corvette or a Ferrari.

Not really. From the point of view of someone not into cars, Porsche and Corvette have differences and similarities, but only by looking at the brand name on the car you know which one is which. Similarly, someone knowledgeable about smartphones can tell an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy apart even without reading the brand name (that is nonetheless well visible on Samsung phones). I haven't heard about Porsche suing Corvette because they have copied the design and users may be deceived, and I don't expect the same happening about smartphones.

to be fair to onetimeuse001, Ford did own Jaguar at one time, so it might be a bad comparison.

Honestly I thought about it and wanted to check but many brands have been bought and sold so many times :). The idea was that each unique car has their own look and design and that sets them apart from the rest.

Apple made the Google maps app.

Nice use of a one-time-use account.

Go and look at the LG Prada prior to the iPhone. Appletard.

iPhone or Android is more than one feature, so "check LG Prada" isn't enough.

The only Apple product I have is iTunes and spent probably $50 with them. Any more insults?

This comment doesn't belong on HN. Please don't be rude.

Actually this whole discussion doesn't belong on HN.

By the way, E=Mc2 is pretty obvious to me too--now.

And if physicists had been forbidden to use the formula without paying severe fees after it was discovered, we'd be a lot worse off.

But that's not Apple's problem, is it? Nokia was the first to sue them, Microsoft sued Android manufacturers, too, and they also have to pay a per device bill due to patent law. It's great that in the sciences there exists no such thing as patents, and I also believe that patent law is a mess. But why is Apple measured on different moral standards than other companies? Why should they not go for what is, by current law, rightfully theirs? Just as Nokia and Microsoft did. And I'd bet a lot that if Samsung had come out with the first iPhone, they'd go after copycats just as well. It's business practice.

I think the point where Apple goes too far is the perception that too much is never enough. They're already the most successful business in history - do they really need to use lawsuits to ensure they have no competitors?

The fact that they use these frivolous patents to do so is just icing on the righteous indignation cake.

Looks like Apple managed to eke out a bit of money from their products, despite all the copycats, though.

The world would clearly be a better place if only Xerox could use the GUI and mouse. Or if only Opera were allowed to use tabs. Or if only Apple could use multi-touch.

Do you see the problem with that argument? You're hurting consumers when you limit the technologies a company can employ. And when it gets into the realm of shapes, then you have an incredibly broken system.

The other side: I would not spend $X billion and risk bankruptcy to invent something that can be stolen 48 hours after I patent it. Do you see the problem with that argument? You're hurting consumers when you don't allow companies to profit for a while from the technologies a company risked everything to invent.

Xerox patents have a limited time, they (maybe) can be licensed or exchanged with other patents licenses. Or, gasp....a resourceful company can invest billions to come with a new way to skin the cat.

>> And when it gets into the realm of shapes, then you have an incredibly broken system.

The biggest lie told by Samsung's shills to hide the details. If that was the case Apple would have sued everyone making phones with round corners. Samsung has a habit of waiting to see what sells and then clone them to get all the benefits without the risks.

>I would not spend $X billion and risk bankruptcy to invent something

Then spend that money on resources and sell them for a profit. Buy a mine or a farm or something else that works with that perspective.

And now imagine Apple had done exactly that. Would the consumer really have it better now?

I don't even have to think.

Yes.

I read an article on furniture design recently and how it is almost impossible to patent new designs. The article was showing how small design companies and mom and pop design businesses were struggling because every great design was ripped off by larger companies with a couple of minor changes and sold for way cheaper than the small company could manufacturer for.

That being said: Patent law is broken as it is now.

Innovation and inspiration, patented by Braun [1], errr, I mean Apple.

[1] http://visual.ly/braun-or-apple

1977 was the latest design unless I didn't read it correctly. Any patent protection would have expired already.

So once the patent expires it's then morally fine to claim the "inspiration" for a certain design?

Yes. The inventor who has invested a lot of time and money in R&D should have had more than enough opportunity to reap the benefits of that investment by then.

We're going on a tangent. The idea is that whoever comes out first and patents "it" get some exclusive use. After that it becomes public so others can use and build upon it.

If Braun was still marketing those products they might have complained. Apple said that they're making less money because people are buying Samsung phones that use Apple's patented idea /look and feel. True or not that's another story.

Legally, yes. You get to decide on the morality of it.

Legal means application of the law, and law should be derived from morality. If we think something legal is not moral, it should not be legal and we should strive to change the law.

A false comparison that was debunked some time ago, even by the Braun lead designer: "I have always regarded Apple products — and the kind words Jony Ive has said about me and my work — as a compliment. Without doubt there are few companies in the world that genuinely understand and practise the power of good design in their products and their businesses".

"I very much doubt there is a single designer at Apple who has felt flattered by Samsung. And, on the flip side, I doubt there is a single designer at Samsung who sees their work as homage to Apple. " http://daringfireball.net/2012/09/homage_vs_ripoff

The fact that Dieter Rams is flattered doesnt make it a false comparison, au contraire, it means he sees obvious "influence". Also how can daringfireball's opinion be considered an unbiased source.

All this proves is Dieter Rams is a good guy. Apple on the other hand learned to copy but not to play nice.

I suggest you read the Daring Fireball article, which states:

"This is the subjective line between homage and rip-off. The old joke is that homage is when you copy someone else; a rip-off is when someone else copies you. But to me, it’s about the difference between drawing inspiration to create something new, versus slavishly copying to create something derivative. That’s the difference between great artists stealing and bad artists copying.

Apple’s products are in different categories than the corresponding Braun devices, and are separated by decades. But there’s no denying the inspiration. Jony Ive himself has readily acknowledged the influence."

Influence is not the same thing as imitation.

These lines are for courts to decide (I didn't know the braun radios myself, but the iPad and the iPhone calculator seem pretty much imitations)

In the end, depending on the financial damage at stake, some people will sue, while others may be flattered.

>> "I very much doubt there is a single designer at Apple who has felt flattered by Samsung. And, on the flip side, I doubt there is a single designer at Samsung who sees their work as homage to Apple. "

Braun and Apple are not in the same market, Samsung and Apple are, that's why.

Right, these are for entirely different types of devices. The Apple devices look similar, but they're entirely different beasts. There're lots of businesses that sell products which copy lots of Apple's distinctive design yet they're in entirely different markets and so Apple doesn't care about that, and nobody else does. The reason why Apple went against Samsung is because they're copying in order to sell the same type of device. In this case, the copying will cost them market share. I doubt that braun will sell less radios because the G5 or PowerMac looked like their radio.

Yet it wouldn't be unjustified to claim that, when an ipod looks like a braun radio or when instagram looks like a polaroid, it's a new product attempting to capitalize on previous brand awareness (even if they are not the same business).

Well, I wouldn't say capitalize. To be honest, before someone found out, a couple of years ago, most people never knew about the Braun products, while everybody knew about the iPod. Polaroid is a different example, since while Instagram is well known, Polaroid was also well known. But again, this is Ok, and this is also Ok with Apple. There're vibrators that look like Apple devices, there're TV's, radios, alarm-clocks, calculators, that all look like Apple devices, and Apple doesn't care about it. (Fun example: http://www.megagadgets.de/mipad-taschenrechner.html)

They care if somebody copies their devices really close, and then goes into their market

Years ago, there was a small american company selling PC's that looked 99% like Macs (not Psystar). I forgot the name, but here Apple also went to the courtroom. Same problem here, these people copied not only their designs, but they copied really closely on products that competed directly with Apple's products in Apple's markets.

Apart from that, the Braun products are from the 70ties, and the Braun designed said he was flattered by Apple picking up where they left off.

Interestingly, Polaroid does exactly what you said: When somebody releases something that has the distinct Polaroid picture look, they threaten with a lawsuit. I experienced it up front: One of my apps was rejected from the app store because my pictures in there looked like Polaroids, and the rejection was in order to prevent me from getting sued by Polaroid, which seems to have happened before.

eMachines developed a computer that looked exactly like the original iMac similar to the way the Galaxy S looked exactly like the iPhone 3g. eMachines did end up getting sued by Apple.

They don't even hide it. Ive took "inspiration" from best of braun and sony, and Jobs heavily admired and copied Sony (he basically made another sony, but more efficient). I personally don't see problem with that, they took and mish mashed inspiration from several good sources and made them their own. All artists I know do this, including myself - just not on that scale.

>I personally don't see problem with that

But Apple sees a problem in that. When they do it, they consider it to be perfectly fine and give it names like 'inspiration'.

But when others do it they act like they were the first ones to bring it to earth and others are 'stealing' it from them.

I agree and it's a shame.

Did you not see the Samsung internal slide deck that came out in the proceedings, showing page after page of comparisons between iPhone and Touchwiz apps and which parts Samsung should copy?

As a software developer, I'm really tired of people who keep acting like the iPhone wasn't innovative because smartphones existed... yeah they did. They ran on shitty embedded kernels, were starved for resources, and were useless for anything but clunky caricatures of desktop software. My Nokia N73 'smartphone' needed 10 seconds to go from opening the lens cover to being able to take a picture. And you know what? It still sold, because they all sucked.

iOS had the entire mature OS X stack in it, with Quartz/PDF, OpenGL, CoreAudio/Image/Video, ... The innovation is in how that was used to provide the total package, not in the features you tick off on a list. And the fact that people like Steve Ballmer dissed and derided it on features, only to adopt the exact same strategy years later for Windows Phone—down to the limited feature set of the first Metro release—shows that the industry really did not get it at all. It has nothing to do with shiny rounded rectangles, and everything to do with what that rectangle does and how.

The best sign of a revolutionary product is that it immediately becomes so self-evident that nobody can imagine not having thought of it themselves.

Then again, they didn't sue apple, eventhough Sony makes smartphones. So it seems to me that it's not unfair to point at Apple for following unconventional business practices.

Different devices, decades apart. Let us know when Apple sues someone for making a toaster that looks like an iPhone, 30 years later. :)

That's stylistic homage to old (30,40 year old) designs, and in a new, totally different context, like Spielberg basing Indiana Jones on forties adventure movies, or Lucas basing the space battles on dogfighting scenes from WWII movies. Braun's designs, like old Bauhaus stuff, is design language 101, you're supposed to use it and be inspired by it.

They are not copying something just after it came out and in the same concept, just to make a quick back. That would be like the nth thriller to copy the Friday and 13th concept or the nth cheap spy movie to copy James Bond (to continue the filmic analogies).

Please remember how absolutely nobody was offended by the Nest Thermosthat while everyone talked about how it was strongly inspired by Apple. If Samsung had built a fridge that looks like an Apple product, the same would have been true.

Or another thing - I vividly remember a series of Samsung screens that were 100% designed to be used with the white plastic era of Apple computers. Guess what, Apple didn't sue them into obvlivion. (I wouldn't even be surprised if Apple Stores had featured them.)

Apple : Braun is absolutely not like Samsung : Apple.

Like notifications?

Oh please. Can we stop pretending Apple invented everything in 2007 and everyone else had been clueless for centuries before? I get to see this every week on HN and it gets seriously old.

And even if it were true it seems like Apple never had a problem to keep selling their devices while the evil copiers were swarming the market. Hardly a good example of useful patent protection.

That's the opposite of the good old tiger repellent rock. Patents don't do anything look how well Apple does without them, wait Apple has and uses them. The truth is we don't know what a high tech international corporation would be like without patents because they all have them. You can't even say Apple would be as successful if they where less aggressive because they are already successful and they do use them.

http://www.criticalthinking.org.uk/tigerrepellantrock/

My point is that Apple was doing very well without having to resort to patent claims/protection - when it came out with the iPhone, it was a success not because they had patents for it, but because people were BUYING it willingly. People buys things and do not care what is protected by patents or what is not. As long as Apple make desirable devices, why do they need to resort to patents ? They already have a significant advantage on the supply chain side that nobody else can reproduce so far. There are many ways you can protect your business without having to take the patent claims to court. It's very obvious.

This is like the desktop idea Microsoft stole from Apple. Doesn't matter that Xerox did it first or that it was inevitable as computers were becoming more powerful.

It's not like there is prior art for most of the touch patents with the diamond touch. The patents are also as absurd as patenting the double click. For any touch device, we want to maximize touch area. To do that, a square is best. A square doesn't fit well in pockets so a rectangle is better for a phone. It's also very uncomfortable to have a rectangle with sharp edges in your pocket. But wait... we don't have the freedom to design something useful, Apple did that first!

What really ticks me off is that touch based phones were coming with or without Apple as the technology was becoming cheap enough. The only difference is that Apple did it first and they did it well (few companies do anything well). They didn't really invent much in the process but combined many existing concepts into an awesome product. What scares me is that most of these patents are obvious and completly ridiculous and shouldn't be grounds for granting Apple a monopoly on smartphones.

(slightly OT but Apple paid Xerox for the GUI and then did significant development on it - compare a Smalltalk/80 system to the Lisa and you can see how much Apple did to improve it)

This is not about enhancements but about the patentability and prior art of common concepts

Apple evolved the smartphone into something the average consumer actually wanted to buy. Is that assertion more palatable for you?

For a very narrow definition of "average consumer", palatable, sure. Patentable, no.

Don't you remember? Or are you too young to recall what phones were like prior to the first iPhone. I despise the current climate of litigation; but I remember., and all the claims otherwise won't make me forget.

Yes that exactly,

And also for Newton re-inventing the laws of diffraction back in 1672 when humans before that were just staring at rainbows like dumb elephants

And also for Thales re-inventing triangles just before the the 58th Olympiad (548–545 BC) while peasants back in the day thought they we just fancy things children used to draw with sticks in the dirt.

And also for Uguuk Buguuk (not sure about this one's name) for inventing something called the iWheel that enabled objects to be transported in batches, more easily. And he was dumbfounded when he saw how fast it leaked, the iWheel thing.

Come on, now... Serves them right (and WTF with apple anyway, Steve is dead). Nice thing the Whole world is not yet under US (patent) legislations domination.

Somewhere out there, the guy who invented the Handspring Treo is sitting in a rocking chair yelling at his TV: "Apple didn't invent anything! They stole my ideas!"

Get over it. Apple stood on the shoulders of giants and has the best marketers in the world.

I keep waiting for the "Apple is all marketing" meme to go away but it just refuses to. When Apple introduced the first iPhone the commercials they aired simply showed someone using the device. No clever marketing or cheap sales tactics; just letting the device speak for itself. Marketing doesn't make a product usable. Saying Apple is all marketing is nothing more than a thinly veiled barb at anyone who has ever bought an Apple product, as if they naively let themselves be duped into paying too much for too little. Give it a rest, already, it's tired.

I'm a Mac owner. They make great products. But people don't know about great products without great marketing (the tech-startup entrepreneur's trap). Great products don't just speak for themselves, people need to know about them.

I'm tired of people thinking that Apple divined the design of the iPhone out of the ether like Einstein did for his theory of general relativity.

They iterated on some great ideas, combined them with a lot of stuff that existed before, refined them, and sold them.

You're missing the point. The first iPhone commercial (not counting the "Hello." spot during the Oscars) was literally someone using the device and someone narrating: "This is how you turn it on. This is your music. This is your email."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7...

They let the device speak for itself, which was an innovative departure from the typical message of 'look how cool you'll be if you buy this'. Not many products could survive -- let alone crush the market like iPhone has -- left to speak for themselves.

How am I missing the point? You make it sound like the marketing was really innovative, whether or not the product was (it was a great product that could speak for itself, you're absolutely right). It (the marketing) was different and fresh for the period of time, same as the product.

I'm not saying that the iPhone isn't innovative or that it's success is solely due to clever marketing. I'm saying I'm getting tired of these threads where people think that Steve Jobs heard the word of God like Muhammad and recorded his schematics and source code and the iPhone came right out of left field. It was a combination of a great product, at the right time, with the right sales pitch. All of us would be so lucky as to find the product-trifecta.

Look, I despise Apple for believing that they should not only be able to patent things like two-finger-pinch but that they deserve a patent on it, but there is nothing good about this for anyone. They make good products. True knockoffs like this Goophone are a plague to progress.

Sad to see this is the top HN story. The fact that this seems to be being taken seriously here is crazy. Obviously, a patent of someone else's design, no matter how it was come by, is not a valid one.

[Decline of HN, jumping the shark, get off my lawn etc.]

unfortunately in china patenting someone elses design is valid and will result in apple having to settle with them. The rules and laws in china are very lax and poorly enforced especially when foreign companies go to court with local companies. Just look at what happend with proview and apple a few month ago over the ipad trademark

Can you provide evidence that "patenting someone elses design is valid" in China? Lacking it, I find it very hard to believe that there's a patent system anywhere that doesn't require you to attest that the thing your applying to patent was invented by you.

The Proview case is a tangent - Proview (claimed to?) have had the iPad trademark (not patent, but ignoring that...) since 2000, well before Apple. From what I've read, the lawsuit was about whether Proview had in the past sold the Chinese rights to it Apple or not.

> very hard to believe there's a patent system anywhere that doesn't require you to attest that the thing your applying to patent was invented by you.

11 years ago a man from Australia patented the wheel. It's obvious he didn't invent it. You can basically patent anything in some countries as long as there's not yet an existing patent.

Presuming this is not just an urban legend, being granted a patent doesn't mean it's valid. No one who managed to get a patent on the wheel would be able make it stand up in any court.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-...

Seems legit. But you're right, it won't stand up in any court.

It won't? Let's assume it comes to a Jury trial and we get another Jury that doesn't need to look at prior art.

I don't mean that as a joke. If it's possible to trick a patent examiner by making complets so complicated that he doesn't understand them, why shouldn't it be possible to trick a Jury?

One typically has to pay to seek remedy from a court.

In the US, a stick was patented. To be precise, "An apparatus for use as a toy by an animal, for example a dog, to either fetch carry or chew includes a main section with at least one protrusion extending therefrom that resembles a branch in appearance."

http://www.google.com/patents/US6360693

It was issued on Mar 26, 2002. It had an interesting history after being issued, too.

I see it as the the cult of Apple's totalitarian grip on HN-discussion finally letting go.

It's already a few years past due.

When was that? Could you quote some threads from the past that display "Apple's totalitarian grip on HN-discussion"?

Sorry, but I don't feel like hunting specific threads.

I just remember back in the days (before I quit HN and then later rejoined) people would get down-voted to heck for speaking against Apple, people would get slow-banned and people would get stern emails from PG if they spoke too crossly against Apple when Apple did all the questionable things Apple constantly does.

You take my word for it or not. I think it qualifies as "cult of Apple's totalitarian grip on HN-discussion".

I'd also like too see some links. I've been here for years and don't recall anything like that.

Ah anecdotes, the facts of the internet. I'm only 1135 days here, this must have happened before my time on HN. Wished I'd experienced the "stern emails from PG".

"You take my word for it or not."

Well, not. Sorry, too much science education to think anecdotes are relevant in any way.

So are you calling him a liar or not?

Well, josteink refused to show any evidence, so why should he be taken seriously?

That isn't what I asked. Either you think he's lying and need to call it out directly and state your reasons why, or you don't.

Difficulty: "Because he didn't provide evidence" is not proof of deception. Either what he's saying did happen, or it did not. Dismissing something as anecdotal only matters in scientific discussions about statistics, notsomuch real life. If we followed such rigorous rules for everyday discussion, nothing would ever be talked about.

>>Either you think he's lying and need to call it out directly and state your reasons why, or you don't.

False dichotomy. Lying implies the intent to deceive, which he may not have. He may simply be remembering things incorrectly, or viewing past events through a reality distortion field. This is why anecdotal evidence is utterly meaningless in discussions like this: when you are making statements about "the way things used to be" you need to provide actual evidence supporting those statements.

There are other options. Remembering incorrectly. Being delusional. Etc. There's a difference. While he could be spouting lies, I think calling him a liar adds the idea that he has the intent to deceive, whereas he might not, but still inadverdantly spout lies.

You may think my definition of liar is improper, but I think the nuanced difference is very important in everyday conversation.

This is much too simple. E.g. he could be wrong but thinks he is right. Or he might be right and thinks he's right but for the wrong reasons. etc. He could be an Android fanboy paid by Samsung or Google. Who knows? Who cares?

I'm only interested in facts for his argument as I thought to myself 'In 3yrs HN looked like a very anti-Apple site to me. But there are obviously people here who came to the conclusion that this was a very pro-Apple site.' And I'm interested why this is the case and we got very different feelings from HN.

The more worrisome phenomena is the cult of the whiny fandroid.

OP (what is the correct description here?) is perhaps exaggerating a bit, but to be fair I also noticed a general "Apple cannot do any wrong" culture on HN. I can't point off hand to specific threads but is just a feeling I got from checking comments and seeing what was down voted or up voted.

It is somewhat frustrating when a community like HN does this but on the other hand the upsides of the HN community by far out-weigh the downsides.

It's true. This is not a community where people are expected to objective and fair, some of them have very strong biases towards Apple and some of those people happen to be more equal than others around here.

For instance I had myself banned once because I said something irreverent about his holiness Steve Jobs. It's ok, I don't need the karma since at any given time I only happen to find an average of 2 interesting articles on the HN front page, the rest being more or less the same recycled crappy themes ("why you should(n't) do <<insert latest hype/cliche/truism>>", "<<insert generic statement>>... and that's ok", "why I <<insert action at past tense>> <<insert retarded product name>>", "... javascript framework ... " and so on). Only leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I'm a bit late to the party and I can't get on my old account anymore, but the sheer number of Apple related threads was one of the reasons I left when I did.

I can't say when it started, but there frequently stood on the top the "questionable app store rejection for a seemingly minor detail" (and the releated "Apple morally objected to this content"). Other favorites were "Steve Jobs ate a leaf of lettuce" and "Steve Jobs swore this one time" and other nonsense.

The defining moments were when the iPhone 4(?) was released, and the words AntennaGate plastered the first page like there were shining details in the news every 15 minutes, when the whole thing played out like (1) Discovery (2) Accusation (3) Denial (4) Excuse (5) Patch to display accuracy. It was all drama from start to finish.

The other moment, while I will freely admit was significant news, was Steve Jobs' death. Praises were sung for him for a solid two weeks, followed by excerpts from the Biography for the next month.

Apple is an important company to the community here, and that's fine, but the karma system and the knowledge that people liked Apple lead users posting every Apple related story.

This isn't perfect, but there's a twitter account that marks stories which hit the front page named @HNFrontPage. Using an external search engine (Topsy) which has records dating back to May 2008 (~1590 days) we can find 7,847[1] stories about Apple have hit the front page, making for around 4.9 Apple stories on the front page per day.

Here are a small selection of stories voted to the front page about Steve Job's death, with points and comment count.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078434 537 points, 17 comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078510 367 points, 10 comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078479 343 points, 14 comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078335 303 points, 1 comment (a source link which points to the first thread in this list)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3078514 151 points, 0 comments (a second posting of one of the above)

[1] Search used: http://topsy.com/s?q=Apple+OR+%22Steve+Jobs%22+OR+iPhone+OR+...

But did it have to swing so hard in the other direction?

Hilarious as this is, it's a bit baffling that so many people seem to think it "serves them right" when in fact it makes the perfect case for why design patents exist.

If you're the sort of person who thinks a rounded rectangle shouldn't be patentable, this should annoy you.

Their fake iPhone (Goophone Y6) apparently retails for 250$ USD. http://shop.goophone.hk/product-28.html. I suspect the quality is pretty bad... Also, Google apps such as Maps, YouTube, etc. might not be available since they require a license from Google. I'll try to get a hand on a sample this weekend if I pass by Huaqiangbei (mostly out of curiosity).

And that one obviously does break Apples design patent. Apple could easily sue them over that.

Apple does have a design patent in China?

...and judges to enforce it?

If they imported it into the US or manufactured it there. And if it did Apple might be able to get an injunction by 2014 based on the speed of the Samsung case.

It may be that Chinese law offers some protection but it won't be the same as US law.

i think, Goophone plans to use patent at design for legal action. And Chinese judiciary acting on behalf of Chinese companys. On this based apple may lose in China again

Apple is too big for that, at some point comrades from the Politburo start getting involved, as it hurts business.

Agreed. The Polit buro gets a cut of everything. The kind of jobs and wealth Apple creates in China? Massive. (Besides, I thought there was no copyright in China as "everything belongs to the people".

wonder, how much percent retail sales device apple have in china and what losses Apple will be there in these regards? If it was not China i thought that it just piar action. Now, many people talk about this company. Yestarday i did not know about Goophone nothing. But i remember history about iPad...

Not just that, China needs to draw a line in the sand or they will be seen as totally toxic by Western companies. That would mean less jobs, investments and ultimately http://www.fullissue.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Guilloti... for the leaders.

Doing this to Apple can get you in a few newspapers, and that's not good for China Inc :)

I bet they have plenty of time to make a sh*t load of money before Apple goes after them. Then, they will probably move to another floor of the factory, open under a new company name (when your selling fakes, your brand name doesn't matter much) and start again. Seems like a viable business plan in China.

Does anybody know what software it's running?

Android with an iOS theme probably. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gau.go.lau...

The quality will be bad; most no-name rip off phones (like http://www.aliexpress.com/item/N9-3-6-LCD-ONE-sim-dual-band-...) have a lot of design flaws and very cheap parts. The power supply electronics and the plugs will randomly break, short circuit etc. I buy them for cheap hardware prototyping, as they do have everything in there for a very low price. So when prototyping a device, it makes sense to just use that instead of doing something yourself (well to me at least). When the prototyping phase is done, I would never have the final product made in China. I can do it better locally. It'll be slightly more expensive, but not much and you are sure of the quality. In EU moulding and CNC are not very costly anymore due to the lack of work and the quality is very high.

Edit: I forgot to say; it's rather depressing if this is actually the iphone 5 design. It's boring.

> I would never have the final product made in China.

But you are aware, that FoxConn, who are a major company in the production of the iPhone have their HQ in Taipeh, which is, coincidently, in China? Other products made by FoxConn are the iPad, the iPod, the Kindle, the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Major customers include Motorola Mobility, Nokia and Samsung Electronics.

To put it short: The final product isn't always made IN China, but almost certainly made by a chinese company, employing chinese standards.

EDIT: To make things a bit clearer, the country Taipeh (Taipei) is in is obviously Taiwan, officially called Republic of China. Just to let you know where the "China" came from in the above written.

I am aware of that :) I don't say it's impossible if you have enough resources (like Apple). For a small(er) company it's very hard to do it though. Even if you go there. For instance OpenPandora.org has had a lot of miserable quality from the casings coming from China. They moved production to Germany.

German production is almost always superior in quality to the far-east products, there's no doubt about that. You've got to give that to the germans, they do know how to produce things. They're more expensive though, and unfortunately that is what ultimately counts for the big players.

That's also what I suspect to be the prime reason why we haven't got a proper free phone yet. Free as in free speech that is, running some variation of Linux with the necessary device drivers to use GSM/HSDPA/LTE/whatever, since Android isn't really free. It's just jolly expensive to build one of those if you're a small player and customers aren't prepared to pay for it.

This is one of the most repugnant and misinformed posts I've seen on HN in a long time.

Taipei isn't a country. It's the capital city of Taiwan, which has had de facto independence for over 60 years but is unrecognized by the UN as a country due to the fact that China carries a veto and will cut relations with any country that does recognize Taiwan.

Taiwan has never been part of the PRC (which is the country commonly referred to as "China"). Taiwan has a separate currency, democratic governance, a separate military and a separate national identity for virtually the entire populace except for a few graying nationalist soldiers. Its "standards" as you put it are much closer to Japanese or Korean standards than they are to Chinese ones.

Furthermore, even going back before WWII, Taiwan was a Japanese colony, not Chinese. You have to go all the way back to the Qing Dynasty before Taiwan was controlled by China. Using that kind of reasoning, most of Eastern Europe would belong to the Austrian Monarchy.

Note: I've spent over 7 years living in Taiwan and also 2 years in Beijing.

Yes you're right, I got terribly mixed up here. My apologies. That got me interested in the regions history (of which, as I just demonstrated, I have no clue) though, I'll read into it a little when I've got some spare time.

It's fun to follow the rip off phone market from China, where all that phones look fairly decent on features, but in reality they are often so bad they are impossible to use. One iPhone knock off I bought for fun, had a radio tuner, and dual sim support. The touch screen was so bad, it required a stylus to operate and even with that it was almost impossible to use. The software was also really bad. For example, if you were composing an SMS and made a mistake, which would happen due to the bad screen, you had to hit two buttons to correct it. Both options were right next to the option to cancel the entire message, which you would inevitably hit. It also would answer the call if anything was touching the screen when a call came in, which was always unless it was on a table. Video playback was at 12fps. It shipped with two batteries, which I thought was nice, until it turns out that they die after a few charges.

It goes for most rip off stuff indeed; and not only that. The white label companies ship stuff which is simply unusable as you say. You have to be a hacker/modder to make it work. Which then actually works fine for the price. Out of the box however it's pure crap. If it has a custom OS (not android/linux) then you really need to look out; Android usually is already bad with the wrong/non working drivers etc, but when they made something themselves it's usually so bad that you cannot use it at all.

It's stuff to experiment with to try out different cases and such, but for real day to day use, you would not buy it.

So they did an apple on apple itself? :) [Yes I know its extreme but Apple is a company that sued MOTOROLA inventor of cellphones with cellphone patent]

You got your facts mixed.

People defending GooPhone and making stupid comments about Apple? I agree Patent system's kinda broken. But if this is real, is real stupidity and height of IP theft.

How do you steal IP? Has someone broken into the patent office and rifled through the filing cabinets?

Technically it is possible to steal a copyright, by falsely claiming to be the owner. I presume you could do something similar with a patent.

It's not theft, they just found it on the floor and used it.

On the subject of Chinese phones, check out the Mi Two.

http://www.xiaomi.com/mi2

Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 Quad core, 1500 MHz, Krait Adreno 320 2GB RAM

Pretty impressive, especially for the price.

Xiaomi has cult followers in China, fyi. Its like the Apple for Android phones in China. And Mi Two is running Android 4.1.

Apple is a mass-market cult, Xiaomi is Peter-jackson-before-he-was-famous cult-movie cult.

Everyone I have ever asked in China about Xiaomi and Meizu phones brushed them off as "shānzhài iPhone..."

These guys are pretty well known for running a very polished custom ROM as well, MIUI.

Ran it on my devices until 4.x was (kind of, not really, in a crappy way) available. If you have an older android handset which won't receive any future upgrades: Might be worth checking out these guys.

Same here. I ran it until my device (HTC Desire Z, T-Mobile G2 in the US) was discontinued by the MIUIAndroid folks.

http://img03.taobaocdn.com/imgextra/i3/101108915/T2dGR5XhBXX...

The last picture on their website...

Would be interesting to hear if they can ban Apple's exports from China.

That would in fact be pretty devastating for Apple I believe.

Depends on how fast Foxconn builds new facilities in Vietnam.

They are already in Brazil.

That would do massive damage to Foxconn and given that they're the single largest private employer in China, I suspect that the Chinese government would be pretty keen to make sure that that didn't happen.

As far as I know, design can't be patented. It can only be a matter of authorship and thus copyright. Apparently there seemed to be some confusion about this in the Apple vs Samsung case. Maybe it is only the media that is making such type of confusions.

The problem with China is that its legal system is told to have a strong bias in favor of Chinese companies/people.

I expect such situations might incline countries to retaliate in the same way and on similar basis instead of fixing the patent system.

There is a category of patents called "design patents".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

In Apple v. Samsung, Samsung was found to infringe some of these, see e.g. http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/ban-this-apple-lists-8-...

In most countries there is some bias. The legal system might be unbiased, but the legislative system is not.

LOL, the goophone website even tell consumers to avoid getting a fake goophone and to report all fakes...

Maybe the best demonstration of how broken the patent system is.

Except this is the Chinese patent system, not the American one. Both systems are broken, but in entirely different (and opposite) ways.

What do you mean? Could you please highlight the attributes of the Chinese patent system?

I'm interested that you and others on here so badly want this to be about the patent system you know and hate that you completely miss that it's China's patent system. It has far more of a problem with both laxity and corruption than over-enforcement.

Seems like a slam-dunk leaked photos = prior art.

...if only Chinese courts cared about such obtuse concepts as 'facts' and 'logic'.

What is your experience with Chinese courts regarding patent cases? Any sources?

I live in China. A friend of mine was recently assaulted in a bar. Family of the perpetrator came to the hospital with the policeman assigned to the case and pressured my friend to accept money in lieu of pressing charges. Depending on how much 'guanxi' the perpetrators family have, if he does press charges, documents and evidence may get 'lost' and my friends employer could get in trouble with the local government, lose it's license etc. Although I can't talk about patent law, I know there are really no 'laws' in the city I live in - everything is negotiable and rests on how much you can spend and what your standing is with government officials. I love living here, but China is a mafia state.

Thanks for your insights.

I was expecting a glib reply such as your own and I'm saddened that I'm not disappointed.

I live in China... money and relationships come first, justice is an afterthought.

China, where they Party all the time. Just don't cause China to lose face, or your's will be seen no more.

A couple of things:

Your friend's assault case - he's not a multi-billion dollar company with a massive investment in the mainland.

Chinese consumers don't simply love him, like they do Apple products. (First-hand experience.)

I notice the Goophone people are based in Hong Kong where the rule of law is quite a bit stronger.

Apple have the money, they have the relationships. This whole thing is clearly grandstanding on the Goophone people's part.

I am willing to put cash money on the line to say it's inconsequential to Apple launching the iPhone 5 on the mainland. There will be a delay - the usual delay for Apple products that mainland China experiences and nothing to do with this knockoff junk.

If money and relationships come first you're suggesting that this other company has more money than Apple? Or indeed more clout (given how big a client of Foxconn, the largest private employer in China, it is)?

Don't be too sure. In Apple vs. Samsung, one of the allegedly infringing phones was dropped from the case. You see, it had been made prior to Apple's patent. I believe that they were also unable to inform the jury of that for whatever reason.

Can anyone translate this? http://www.goophone.hk/ - I've noticed they mention iPhone 5 on the actual site! Also, it looks like it's Hong Kong, not China (different rules to play by)

I just got my wife (Taiwanese) to read it, and she translated the red block of text. She wasn't very clear, but it says something along the lines of:

"Beware of imitation products. The genuine goophone has a 'small bee' logo. If you see any phones with a similar design to the goophone but without the 'small bee' it is an imitation. Report counterfeit products by calling 0755-88877119"

I've been laughing for the past 5 minutes ...

And thousands of people will call to report a counterfit product with apple in it instead of the 'small bee'.

This whole thing is a difficult issue. Who is to decide what devices look similar enough, to deserve calling it a “copy”? In principle what we do here is: we implement a neural network for object recognition, and train it to recognize a certain device. Now we run this classifier on other devices and need to settle for a confidence value which says if a device is a copy or not. But who should decide what exactly this confidence value should be?

For example, what if we decide to say that a 0.921 value means a device is a copy, and we find out that Samsungs older devices get a 0.884 confidence?

All those values are very artificial.

The law will always have to deal with continuous and imprecisely defined concepts. Speed limits, drinking age, gross vs non-gross misconduct, etc. Continuity alone is a weak argument against anything, sometimes it's so weak that it has its own fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

So, while I believe the intellectual "property" should be eliminated, it's not because of the continuity involved in enforcing it.

>This whole thing is a difficult issue. Who is to decide what devices look similar enough, to deserve calling it a “copy”?

Here's a guideline: if there is a document in your company saying ("let's copy this thing") --as in Samsung's case--, it's a copy.

Or if you created your design from leaked photos of prototypes ("as in this case") --it's a copy.

For the rest, how about a "jury" (i.e impartial to both parties common people)?

Even when we directly say “We’ll copy it!”, it could still come out as having the classifier outputting a small confidence value. So, in my opinion this should not count. There should be a confidence value of a neural network involved.

In the case of a real copy, the classifier should have a confidence of 1.0, or be enormously close to it.

In order to train your Neural Net you will need sample data; which will consist of examples of what are and are not "similar" devices. Someone will have to decide what looks similar enough to the object device, therefore your Neural Net will be as objective as the sample data.

Don't think of Neural nets as a higher order intelligence - it's only as clever as the sample data used, but rather something that can make consistent decisions.

What goes around comes around.

"... the company has actually patented the knockoff design in China and is poised to sue Apple if it launches the next-generation iPhone in China later this year."

Take that, Apple!

live by the sword, die by the sword ?

As if Apple didn't already file the same patents. As if the leaked photos aren't already prior art.

"... the company has actually patented the knockoff design in China and is poised to sue Apple if it launches the next-generation iPhone in China later this year."

Seems like the Apple vs the rest of the World patent war is taking on new heights...

You better watch out for the skin deep.

The best rebuttal Apple can make to any of this, is to polish their OS and their core apps as much as possible. It's ropey software that takes the polish away from supposedly glamorous devices.

I'm so tired of these stupid phone patent wars. Is there a realistic solution to this or will it just phase out and be replaced by the next rebecca black-esque tech-reporter-BS?

I'll be surprised if Apple has not patented iPhone 5 in China by now, their second or third biggest market.

'First to file' FTW. /snark+depression

How serious does the Chinese government actually take copyrights? =p

Copyrights well... it's like you make up some deals (in your western family) and then you go somewhere else (to the east) and ask people there to live by your deals. Because you see yourself as the One everybody must follow. And it works as long as you have a (military) might to protect your interests. BTW this is the principle how any legal system works, all over the scale from a family law to international law. And now imagine yourself loosing that might: two lost wars, economic crisis... well, deals made up by clowns have never been taken seriously.

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