throwawaykf03

Tablet PCs are a case in point -- Microsoft or HP had not abandoned the tablet market. They were iterating and releasing tablets even after the iPad was released. They just didn't make the leap that Apple did to create a tablet that appealed to the masses.

Also, regarding the "riskier to be too late" comment: The book "Copycats" by Oded Shenkar makes the case that it's frequently the imitators that win the market rather than the innovators. This blog post reviews it and cites some interesting statistics from it: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/08/03/down-with-innovation-up...

Also, AFAIK Hotmail (or live or outlook or whatever it's called now) does not, and never has, targeted ads based on keywords in the email. I'm not that big on privacy so I still use Gmail but at least MS is not being hypocritical in that respect.

Bing search, on the other hand, does all the sorts of tracking and mining Google (and Facebook etc.) does, but so far the Scroogled campaign hasn't said anything about search.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-...

2. The "I'm a Mac" campaign was childish, and even though I was predominantly on Windows then and the ads were so very wrong, I laughed along at them. Similarly, I'm primarily a Gmail user, but that GmailMan character is hilarious.

3. However the campaign appears to us, apparently it's working?! http://adage.com/article/digital/microsoft-s-google-bashing-...

On the other hand, some doubt if that's really translating into commercial success: http://marketingland.com/microsoft-scroogled-campaign-61887

http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

http://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-ac...

I haven't seen a single Google employee (that I know of) here or on other forums who's had a nice thing to say about patents. I'm sure there are some pro-patent Google employees, they just don't seem to post on here :-)

But I don't understand what you mean by "corporate America"... Aren't companies that are complaining loudly about software patents also part of "corporate America"? How is that an echo chamber?

But it could also be short for "modifications", as in "XBox mods". (Ostensibly to appeal to tinkerers?)

The best part of a name is, you don't have to explain it -- let people derive whatever meanings they want. You'll often be surprised (and not always pleasantly!) at the unexpected connotations people derive from a name.

No, you've been living in an echo chamber :-)

Open source enthusiasts may well want to share their work for free (or statistically more likely, use others' work for free), but that's their prerogative. Most companies will not give away their competitive advantage and will seek to protect it anyway they can, and similarly, they are well within their rights to do so.

However, open source seems to be the dominant religion around here. And also you have a lot of Google employees here, and Google is a bit handicapped when it comes to patents at the moment. This is why you hear a disproportionate amount of anti-patent rhetoric. Outside these circles, most engineers are either ignorant about patents or quite proud of their patents.

Now, I cannot imagine what unearthly sequence of events led to a snafu where MS had to ask an outside party to reverse engineer their own stuff in order to document it... But that may explain your experience.

However if you want to avoid integration with the Microsoft universe (which should be opt-out IIRC, though I haven't installed Skype on Windows in ages), you may need to look elsewhere. I was about to suggest Google Hangouts, but that's just inviting integration with another universe :-)

WebRTC-based solutions may be a decent option long term, but I'm not convinced they'll work as well as Skype or Hangout, because its NAT traversal is somewhat limited, so some peers may be unreachable, especially if corporate networks are involved. Skype and most P2P software perform a lot of hacks to get past NATs. Hangout, AFAIK, doesn't have these problems as it is server-based.

As for "advanced technology", Apple is far behind Microsoft and Google these days when it comes to cutting edge stuff, but this is mostly because they both have fingers in a lot of pies while Apple restricts itself to a few highly profitable niche areas.

Here's a study that directly refutes the claims article from another researcher with a lot more data:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1597919

It finds that Eastern District of Texas is not even in the top 5 when it comes to plaintiff win rates.

1. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2117421

2. http://blog.patentology.com.au/2012/06/29-billion-us-troll-t...

And there are other, less obvious, reasons VCs may be interested in patents. The second study (and other studies) showed that having at least one patent is correlated with significantly higher chances of a startup having a successful exit.

The reasons behind this correlation is not clear, but if it presents such a powerful signal, VCs have a good reason to look for patents.

Yes, it's called estoppel [1] which, amongst other things, basically means, "whatever you say can and will be used against you". This includes whatever comments and arguments they made during prosecution of the patent.

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

Since (AFAIAK) you're an attorney but not a patent attorney, I'm curious, are you speaking from experience, or basing this opinion on a certain Ars Technica article?

1. The 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1429049), finding that while only 25% of all software startups file patents, about 67% of venture-funded startups do.

2. "Do Patents Facilitate Financing in the Software Industry?", Ronald J. Mann, 2005, (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=510103), finding that the answer seem to be "yes", amongst other interesting conclusions.

The Wikipedia entry has surprisingly little backstory, so it turned out to be a poor choice on my part. But the gist is that like the Stac case, Microsoft was in active discussions to license or buy i4i's Office plugin before they turned around and, without warning, built it themselves into the next release of Word. Unlike the Stac, and indeed most, patent lawsuits, Microsoft was found guilty of willfull infringement.

I'm mostly a fan of Microsoft, and I don't really believe all the hate it gets is justified, but this is one case where it was really a bad actor.

I know everyone takes this for granted, but there is no empirical evidence Microsoft harmed the tech industry in the years leading up to the antitrust suit:

"Did Microsoft Deter Software Innovation?", Josh Lerner, May 2001

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=269498

Fairly easy read, laying out the data, methodologies and controls used, as well as limitations and potential flaws thereof. It uses metrics like VC financing, employment growth, patenting, etc. as proxies to measure innovation, and finds absolutely no evidence that Microsoft harmed the tech sectors it was alleged to in the antitrust suit.

Of course, this was before Microsoft let IE languish at v6 for the next 5 years :-)

2. The use of Apple's existing APIs to do the "heavy lifting" has no bearing on the "quality" of the patent or the novelty (if any) of the work. All inventions are built on prior work.

3. As a corollary, the triviality of implementation is orthogonal to obviousness of an idea. As an extreme example, RSA is pretty easy to implement, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless. (Of course, patents very rarely cover anything as groundbreaking -- the bar is and always has been much lower.)

4. If you are concerned that this leads to an unnecessarily broad patent, submit it to askpatents.com, along with any relevant prior art. This will increase the chances an examiner will find it, especially since it's highly unlikely that they're going to look at WWDC videos.

Unfortunately, as it's not even a non-provisional application at this point, you would need to wait for one to be filed and published. This could be as much as two and a half years from now, and I doubt anyone will even remember by then.

As for "excluding competitors", Google is having a tough time with antitrust regulators in the EU for exactly that. For a more obvious example, see their shenanigans with YouTube and Windows Phone.

I don't think it was that simple, considering that the Nortel portfolio covers a wide array of different technology areas and industries. What other feasible choice did they have? Transfer the patents to themselves? Six companies were involved, each infringing different subsets of the portfolio: who gets what patents? Even if they did divvy up the portfolio somehow, they certainly weren't going to keep them lying around, not after paying so much for them -- They had to be licensed. Splitting the portfolio would not only make it weaker, but it would mean multiple individual licensing efforts. Rockstar currently fulfills the same function that MPEG-LA does.

> And "operate autonomously" doesn't mean much when you first fill the subsidiary with nothing but litigators and patents that have already been licensed to everyone meaningful other than the parent's competitors.

If you read the document linked in the comment I cited, no, those patents were not licensed to anybody meaningful until the auction. But licensing efforts were on the way years when they were still owned by Nortel and before Rockstar was created, so pretty much everybody knew what was coming. That is why all these companies, including Google, were bidding for these patents in the billions.

> It's like setting loose a rabid animal near your competitor's business and then trying to disclaim responsibility because the animal was "operating autonomously." What did they expect to happen?

Well, they paid billions for these patents. Is it fair to them that other infringers get away scott free?

> Lawsuits against Google's customers instead of Google.

Google makes pretty much no money directly from Android. This inherently makes it difficult to extract damages from them. Not to mention that since Google bought Motorola, they do have lawsuits directly against Google as well.

> Suppose Apple files a suit against an Android manufacturer, then a year into the litigation they show up and say "oh hi, we just bought some new patents, so let's throw out all the work we did getting to this point in the trial and start over." That clearly stinks of harassment...

That's not how patent lawsuits work. Dozens or hundreds of patents are involved in a portfolio, but it's not feasible to sue over more than a handful of them, because court resources are extremely limited. If you see how past patent lawsuits have progressed, companies assert a small bunch of patents and over time winnow them down to an even smaller number that are mostly likely to prevail. It's actually rare to see new patents being asserted partway through a lawsuit because, as you said, it annoys judges -- typically a whole new lawsuit is filed instead, which is a whole lot of extra work.

This is intrinsically unfair to the patent-owners with large portfolios, because no matter how many patents are being infringed, they only get to assert a few, and even if they prevail, damages are limited to the patents asserted. This is why companies try to get injunctions -- that is the only way to get enough leverage to properly license an entire portfolio.

Multiple lawsuits seem like harassment only if you disregard the flip side of the coin, which is widespread infringement.

> By filing the litigation through Rockstar, they get a separate trial with two bites at the apple in front of two juries, the litigation costs more for the target because they have to defend two overlapping cases in different courts instead of having them consolidated, and they can do it again and again with different troll subsidiaries until their smaller competitors are destroyed.

If different patents and/or different products are involved, the cases are not overlapping, so it's not the same apple that they're getting bites at.

Now the same author may churn out book after book which seem pretty repetitive, but that may be because it's their own style. That is, their works may certainly be formulaic, but at least it's their own formula.

So what I meant by the comparison with pop music is, the criticism is not just that the same artist puts out albums that sound like their previous ones, but rather that all artists start to sound like each other. And that is what I fear may happen with "pop lit": in the quest to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, all authors may end up sounding like each other.

Some may point out that mass-produced "pop literature" is not really new: for instance, the entire Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series was just that. However, since this is not a widespread practice so far, (almost) nobody has complained about it.

But once this data starts getting used more and more, and feedback loops get more efficient, eventually pop literature may suffer from the same criticisms as pop music. In a way it's good: you're giving the customers what they want. But it also has the downside that creators will shape themselves to their audiences rather than express themselves freely, limiting the variety and individuality of creative output. As long as enough creators choose the latter at least once in a while, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

However, this is just the low-hanging fruit and does not explore the full potential of e-readers. E-readers need not just be dumb terminals that phone home with reader behavior -- they're fully capable general-purpose computers, and we should use them as such! We should be thinking of e-readers that "adapt" to the reader and the material. And not just an "average reader" profiled aggregately over an entire audience, but individual readers. Let the authors freely express themselves, and let technology bridge the gap between the creative work and the reader.

I haven't thought it through completely, but we certainly have the technology -- things like NLP and machine learning and user profiling and heuristics can go a long way in performing basic adaptive tasks. User likes short chapters but the book has long ones? Re-segment the text to match the user's preferences! (Maybe using a variant of text tiling.) User looking for new reads? Recommend books based on similarity of reading behaviors! They could even change the language based on user profiles. User too young? Tone down the profanity! User too old? Replace "really whips the llamma's ass" with "totally funkadelic"!

Technology is, of course, not advanced enough, so we would still rely on human input to a great extent. Editorial staff (or other readers) would need to provide tons of annotations and metadata that can help e-readers adapt better.

But eventually it may happen that for the same material two users may end up having very different reading experiences.

But what makes you say these patents don't cover aspects of Apple's and Microsoft's and the other shareholders' products? The patents involved in the Rockstar lawsuits cover networking, touch-screens and search. The shareholders make products which obviously infringed on these patents to varying extents, and that is why they paid billions for them.

Considering they've paid all that money to secure a "freedom to operate", so to speak, is it fair to them that everyone else gets to infringe with impunity?