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Comment by calpaterson | Hacker News Reader

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

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...

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.

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