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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

This is certainly a bad thing that shouldn't happen to any company, but at the same time I can't help but think this is some kind of poetic justice Apple is receiving for all the "patent trolling" they've done over the past few years with some very bogus claims. Maybe karma is real. When you breed a certain kind of culture in the industry or in your company, this is what you get out of it.

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> Maybe karma is real.

The Just World Hypothesis is antithetical to how justice works because it causes us to shortchange the process of always establishing, from scratch and without bias, the good or bad of any given case.

    This is because people are uncomfortable believing that suffering
    is often random, that sometimes bad things happen for no reason at
    all. Instead, we prefer to believe that people must have done
    something to deserve what they get. This is obviously a reassuring
    and comforting belief, which explains its wide appeal. (‘If bad
    things only happen to those who deserve them, and I’m a good
    person, then I can be sure that nothing bad will happen to me‘,
    Ulpian notes at one point). For us moderns, belief in the just
    world can be thought of as a failure to apply the null hypothesis
    in the moral domain: rejecting the explanation of chance, we
    prefer to believe that everything that happens is deserved. As
    should be obvious, the just world hypothesis manifests as the
    doctrine of karma in a number of religious traditions.

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2013/06/01/n-guilty-men-a-medita...

If this is karma, it's karma that travelled backwards in time and attacked Apple 3 years before any of the patent law suits Apple filed against other companies in the current mobile device IP war.

So no, it's not karma or poetic justice. It's just another symptom of the same underlying problem of patents and the ridiculous farce it has made out of the tech business.

The lawsuit was filed in 2012. How is that "3 years before" Apple became a patent bully themselves?

I may be misinterpreting, but I believe this is referring to when the conflict of interested started, not when the lawsuit was filed. I could be wrong as I'm reading the article as stating that the mess started in 2007 (days after iPhone release) when is a lot longer than 3 years.

I find your comment to be incredibly immature, in a very sad way. There are so many interesting things to discuss about this case, and yet you couldn't find anything to say other than "haha, I love how they are being given a taste of their own medicine!!!"

edit: bring on the downvotes. The HN crowd certainly loves brainless cheerleading.

I second your opinion.

He has commented earlier that he is in his teens.

It's not considered trolling when you're defending your own products. What do you think patents are for?

It's not patent trolling unless the company suing makes a living out of it. Apple actually makes some stuff, you know.

A company is not a "patent troll" unless the company makes a living only doing it. However, what Apple brought against Samsung and what is being described here is a pretty clear-cut case of patent trolling.

It's not patent trolling if you sue based on patents you implemented in your own products either. That's the whole point of the patent system, dammit.

I don't think you know what patent trolling means, neither how patents work.

Click this patent[1]. Click "Original document". Tell me with a straight face that this is not patent trolling.

They patented "the ornamental design for an electronic device" which is a "thin rectangular cuboid with rounded corners"[2]. Tell me with a straight face this is the point of the patent system.

[1] http://worldwide.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=USD...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Samsung_Electroni...

This is an industrial design patent, and there are many like that. [1] Try coping the Coke bottle and you´ll be sued. Try coping the iPhone and you´ll be sued. Simple.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

You do not understand the term "patent trolling". Give up.

So you _do_ think that this is a valid, enforceable patent that represents how the system _should_ work?

It is not clear cut at all. Your bias is showing.

They invented the stuff they protected. The system, as it stands, only works if the owner of the patent/trademark/IP takes step to defend it.

Did they? It sounds like they had access to confidential Apple documents, which allowed them to rewrite their patent in a way to make it look like Apple infringed on technology they invented. Remember, the point of a patent is to disclose new inventions.

My argument's premise is that Apple is not a patent troll - the notion of poetic justice isn't quite applicable here.

Not saying anything about the lawyers.

"They" = Apple

It's not karma. When there's a gang war, most people getting shot are gangsters. Not because it's karma, but because that's a gang war, what you'd expect? In the same way, when there's a rampant patent trolling war, patent trolls are getting sued too. Unfortunately, just as in gang war, innocent people get their quality of life severely degraded and sometimes are caught in the crossfire too.

> Maybe karma is real.

It isn't.

i think karma is very real, but its not this mysterious mythic thing people think it is. people misunderstand "karma". If one sows good will, and creates many positive connections, one is much more likely to have better "luck" throught ones life, simply because one has a better support network, or less players willing to act against your party. thats not to say bad thing dont still randomy happen, or that everything really does even out in the end. but your chances of success are much greater if one practices good karma.

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