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Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

This makes me sad for a variety of reasons. One, because HP are being assholes and making what is clearly a knock-off product. Apple has every right to be upset, and probably sue them for trade dress infringement.

And second, because everyone (on both sides) is going to be conflating this with Apple's UI patents, which are total bullshit and which they shouldn't be able to sue over. Ah well.

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I'm sad because there are a lot of great design solutions waiting to be discovered. I think a company the size of HP (and especially with their roots) should be able to provide the market novel and world-class design. The problem is that they don't want to take the risk anymore--they'd rather copy market-proven concepts. The modern film industry is in a very similar and sad spot.

I wish HP saw your comment.

This is romanticising the film industry; it has not changed much in the past few decades. People remember one or two films a year out of THOUSANDS. It's always been that way; there are a few gems in a sea of the same old shit.

I agree that this may be a decades-old problem. But it's not just that there are that many bad scripts and movies by the numbers. It's this sad reality: creating sequel 4 of a known series is a much safer financial bet than greenlighting something original. That was my analogy here.

Thousands overall maybe, but the number of mass market films is in the hundreds.

I, personally, have a familiar definition of "mass market film". I grew up in a small town with about nine total screens, usually one movie per screen and one screen per movie. Figure they turn over 4 screens per week for new releases. That's 208 movies per year. You'd need 3-4 more doublings to get it over 1000, so it's pretty clear that "hundreds" is the better order of magnitude.

I picked a year at random: 2008. The following movies were all released in 2008: The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Kung Fu Panda, Gran Torino, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and Quantum of Solace. Your average moviegoer will easily remember more than "one or two" of those (though not necessarily the same ones).

So the proportion goes from two in a thousand to maybe five in 250, or from 1 in 500 to 1 in 50.

Is this a 'good artists copy, great artists steal' example? I get the sense they're underestimating the modern consumer. Even though the shape and color have been duplicated, the slightly educated consumer will likely notice the cheap plastics and same crappy OS that made up the beige boxes.

I am not a lawyer but it seems to me that the concept of trade dress is being abused here.

Trade dress like trademark doesn't exist to protect design. It exists to prevent consumers from actually thinking they are buying a different product. However much of a "knock-off" this might be, can you seriously argue someone would actually believe this is an Apple? Seriously.

You don't argue it, you do surveys and see if it confuses people. Remember, trade dress doesn't just protect the dress as seen in store. It protects, e.g., someone noticing their neighbor's new computer that she says she is very happy with. I can totally see an unsophisticated consumer confusing the two.

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

As you are obviously implying, Apple secured the rights to Xerox's technology, very much unlike HP.

No, Apple paid to visit the PARC, they did not buy or licence any patents

False. Apple obtained a license from Xerox for the technology being developed at PARC by selling them pre-IPO Apple shares.

Further, by bringing this up, you are trying to say that Apple copied Xerox years ago, which is a form of trying to say "its ok to copy apple or steal their technology because apple did it in the past".

Which is silly because if it was wrong for Apple to do it, as you imply, it is also wrong for HP or Samsung to do it, as you are trying to justify.

Further, when you tell a falsehood like this-- one that you really, if you're at all informed on the issue, would know is a falsehood, you impeach your own integrity.

Is the Wikipedia article then also incorrect when it states clearly that the shares were exchanged to get a visit NOT A LICENSE: "In return for the right to buy US$1,000,000 of pre-IPO stock, Xerox granted Apple Computer three days access to the PARC facilities."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Xerox_PAR...

Yes, like an expensive trip to the park, just for a little fun.

That's willfully disingenuous. One does not pay a million dollars of pre-IPO stock to see a bunch of ideas and not use them.

Well, licence implies that there was some kind of license-agreement or contract. Was there? Where is the evidence?

Presumably, the inventions at PARC were protected by nothing but trade secret, so the only release of IP involved was to literally reveal the secrets to Apple.

You'll notice that Xerox never filed a patent suit, that Apple's industrial design and trade dress were in fact remarkably different from Xerox's, and that the Lisa and Macintosh interfaces were remarkably different from that of the Alto in any case.

What you've said is true, but it should be noted that not only did Xerox never file a patent suit - nobody filed a software patent suit for at least a decade afterwards. Software patents were at that time unknown. If Xerox had wanted to file a software patent suit, a good lawyer would have disabused them of that notion instantly by pointing out that that wasn't how patents worked then.

So the fact that Xerox didn't file a patent suit doesn't say much, I don't think. That doesn't mean that Xerox wasn't in the wrong or that Apple wasn't in the right; it just means that patent lawsuits really weren't the way people went about these things then.

Conversely, if Xerox had software patents, they would have likely licensed them to Apple anyway.

It's probably likely that not only did Xerox not imagine that software patents were a thing, they probably didn't even imagine that you could copyright the "look and feel" of software.

It seems that Apple did financially compensate Xerox for both the visit and the ideas:

"Fact: Apple obtained permission ahead of the Xerox PARC visit. In addition, Apple provided compensation in exchange for the various Xerox PARC ideas such as the GUI"

http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...

Apple paid to have access to PARC ideas:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#Xerox_PAR...

"Xerox did go to trial to protect the Star user interface. In 1989, after Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement of its Macintosh user interface in Windows, Xerox filed a similar lawsuit against Apple; however, it was thrown out because a three year statute of limitations had passed. (Apple eventually lost its lawsuit in 1994, losing all claims to the user interface)."

Apple didn't pay for any patents, it paid for a tour.

False. Apple obtained a license from Xerox for the technology being developed at PARC by selling them pre-IPO Apple shares. Further, by bringing this up, you are trying to say that Apple copied Xerox years ago, which is a form of trying to say "its ok to copy apple or steal their technology because apple did it in the past". Which is silly because if it was wrong for Apple to do it, as you imply, it is also wrong for HP or Samsung to do it, as you are trying to justify. Further, when you tell a falsehood like this-- one that you really, if you're at all informed on the issue, would know is a falsehood, you impeach your own integrity.

Sorry, I don't want to imply that Apple was wrong for copying Xerox. I was trying to make a point about the similarity of the act (though it's possible that you hadn't seen the explanation I gave (you asked for it) when you wrote this).

I'm interested to see a citation about this license you claim that Apple bought. Xerox didn't seem to think that a license was bought. They sued (much later).

Nirvana's mistaken a bit here. They didn't license the technology, but they "did" allow Xerox to buy 100,000 Apple shares for just a million dollar (a year before their IPO).

This long article has much more details: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...

I was aware of the share deal but I wasn't aware that this issue had been covered in the New Yorker. Thanks for this.

I really don't think that posts that consist of nothing but a single link, like this one, should be acceptable. You link to a web page and don't make any argument. This is disingenuous.

It lets you pretend like you've taken a position or refuted the person you're responding to, but since you haven't actually said anything you can't be debated with. You can't be pinned down on saying any position, which means you can't be refuted.

Now, if you made an argument, and then linked to a wikipedia page to support that argument, besides the fact that wikipedia is not authoritative and is edited by amateurs, often with an agenda, that would be much better. At least then you're introducing potential facts to support an argument.

I think pointing out the Xerox Star is sufficient to make my point.

I agree that it's important that you can pin my argument down though so hopefully this will make it clear: HP's copying of the iMac is not much different from Apple's copying of the Xerox Star. The two main differences are that a) Apple copied a huge amount from Xerox and HP seem to just have copied the UI rather superficially and the end result seems mediocre and b) America has software patents now.

Apple licensed the technology that it "copied" from Xerox. Are you suggesting that HP has licensed the loc of the iMac from Apple?

I don't know whether HP licensed anything. I doubt it, I suppose.

It seems Apple didn't license anything from Xerox either. Considering you think otherwise, I'd be interested in a citation. It's well documented that Xerox tried to sue (but they failed).

Xerox and Apple had a deal, so all you are implying is wrong. I found this article, it's German, but a couple YT videos are embedded about that time. I read about it in the Steve Jobs bio too.

http://www.mac-history.de/die-geschichte-des-apple-macintosh...

I googled the Xerox v Apple case, and in the first paragraph of section I ("ALLEGATIONS OF XEROX' COMPLAINT"), it says:

> On June 9, 1981, Xerox granted Apple a license pursuant to which Apple agreed to "participate in a project with the Learning Research Group at PARC/Xerox for the purpose of implementing the Smalltalk-80 language and system on a hardware system to be developed by [Apple]."

So clearly even Xerox admitted they licensed some of their work to Apple.

[1]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=3538913398421433...

Hold on - that doesn't seem to say what people want to think it's saying, does it? That's a license to use Smalltalk-80 in products. It isn't a license to use the Xerox Parc system or look and feel at all. I think the point remains: if there had been software patents at the time of the original litigation, Xerox would have won. Am I missing something?

Here is a referenced blog post, that also discusses the lawsuit:

http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...

I wonder if all those beige PC clone makers did licence anything from anyone design wise. In other words, what if Apple design is to become the ned beige PC style? Cheap PC keyboards all look the same, and nobody complains. Same for screens, etc. What makes Apple design so distinctive is partly because it's neat, and partly because they're the sole computer makers to use it.

read "new" beige PC, not ned (or nerd, or nod).

I hate this. You're attempting to re-litigate something in public court that was already handled in actual, real-people court almost 20 years ago. Read the Legacy[0] section of your link.

Apple also licensed the tech behind Xerox Star. At least Xerox was compensated for their work in some manner.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star#Legacy

Sorry you hate it. I'm not sure how I'm attempting to re-litigate...that is something to do with litigation, and I'm not a lawyer.

That article absolutely does not say that Apple licensed anything from Xerox. It only says that Xerox later tried to sue over it but it was thrown out due to age.

From the page linked in footnote 10 I found the following tidbit:

> Tesler: No, we didn’t have one here. We went to the NCC when the Star was announced and looked at it. And in fact it did have an immediate impact. A few months after looking at it we made some changes to our user interface based on ideas that we got from it. For example, the desktop manager we had before was completely different; it didn’t use icons at all, and we never liked it very much. We decided to change ours to the icon base. That was probably the only thing we got from the Star, I think. Most of our Xerox inspiration was Smalltalk rather than Star.

Just thought this was interesting. And it's probably the modern equivalent of being inspired to move to touchscreen-based devices instead of keypad devices. Which, I might add, is pretty different than being "inspired" to completely clone a competing touchscreen-based device instead of coming up with your own UI and behaviors around the touchscreen metaphor.

That strikes me as an oversimplification. According to the NYT article [1], Xerox filed an "unfair competition" lawsuit, which was correctly dismissed (as Apple never tried to mislead consumers about whether they were buying an Apple computer or a Xerox computer, among other things).

The only reference to age I found is, according to a lawyer quoted in that article, "Xerox had waited too long to file a copyright infringement case and had to resort to a weaker charge of unfair competition". It looks like the statue of limitations on copyright infringement was (at the time) 3 years [2].

It's not clear to me if this is true or not. According to the case itself, "Xerox argues that an infringement action would not afford the relief it desires". (Is that lawyer-speak for "oops we forgot to file the right charges in time"?) Either way, I can find no record of a copyright infringement case brought by Xerox against Apple.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-s... [2]: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507

So, you're saying that you hate it when people express dissenting opinions after cases have been decided? Should civil rights activists not have brought up their opinions after Plessy v. Ferguson?

In the long run, the court of public opinion is the driver of change. What makes the status quo so great that you hate it when people dissent? I don't agree with the person you're disagreeing with, but where would we be if we couldn't even discuss it?

Frm what i have read about the Star, nobody would confuse it with a Mac or vice versa. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... indicates that at least some of the people who built the Macintosh Think similarly.

Probably no one would confuse it, but I don't think many would confuse this HP with a Mac either. The HP is, like the Star, running a different OS.

Is it? I boot my Mac into Windows fairly often. And that's irrelevant anyway, because HP is not selling an OS, they are selling hardware that happens to look extremely similar to an iMac.

In fact, on that first photo on the linked article I genuinely thought they had placed an Apple wireless keyboard and magic trackpad in front of the HP computer. And the only reason I knew that wasn't an iMac was because of the lack of the apple-logo-on-aluminum bar at the bottom, which was simply replaced by an HP logo in the exact same spot.

> I really don't think that posts that consist of nothing but a single link, like this one, should be acceptable. You link to a web page and don't make any argument. This is disingenuous.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

But seriously, a post which is a single link seems fine to me, so long as the information is related to the discussion at hand. For all one knows, the commenter was in line and commenting from her cell phone, and had to talk to a salesperson the next second.

Please see my list of ways to reassign credit for everything Apple does to save time:

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=4423

After all, you don't want to just admit that Apple invented the rounded rectangle.

Hard to tell whether you're being sarcastic or not, but for what it's worth I wouldn't say that Apple deserves no credit. (I think they deserve lot of credit, but copying is something they do too.)

I really don't see how Apple's actions some 30 years ago excuse obvious trade dress violations by HP. Even if we accept that Apple "copied" Xerox, it is still clear that HP is grossly copying the iMac design. How is that remotely acceptable?

Sorry, I'm not trying to say that its relevant to any case that Apple might raise. IANAL, let alone an American one. I'm trying to point out that copying is rife (and, I would argue, legitimate) in technology.

For the record, I am being sarcastic (which I believe the linked post makes clear).

That's not really the same at all: hardware design and software design are very different legally. Apple didn't copy the physical design of the Xerox Star, whereas it's pretty clear that HP are 'inspired' by the iMac here.

Industrial design and software design are rather different.

- And they didn't copy the software or GUI either. They took the concepts and did something, if not entirely different, then at least something fairly original with them.

It might be bullish, but at least it was not blatant copying.

This bubbles up every time one of these arguments appears, bear in mind industrial design around that point was heavily constrained by toolchains and what could be manufactured. This does not give Apple a free pass, they could have picked different colour plastic, or different proportions or a dozen other things.

Manufacturing has improved massively in 30 years, that's why the argument is about now and not then.

The Xerox Star computer did not look like a Mac. That was a totally different machine.

Your comment would be fair had Apple built the Lisa to weight 100 pounds and boot in 10 minutes. If you never saw a Star in operation, I strongly suggest you watch one of the many videos available on YouTube. You'll see how little Apple borrowed beyond black letters on a white background.

And how unusable the Star really was.

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