Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart.
"These are not patents on innovation, they’re patents on simple ideas and features that you didn’t even think of first but you were the first to patent."
Then the magical aspect of patent law called "prior art" would come into play and it wouldn't be patentable. Yet it is - and yet despite all of Samsungs insistences and millions (no doubt) spent on prior art research - nothing has been shown prior to the date of filing that anything existed. It's no different than Amazon's One-click.
It would be interesting - if you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ? According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".
The problems with the patent industry are patents abused by companies who have absolutely no interest in developing them but rather trolling them to simply extract money from other companies. Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls. If you dont actively use it as it is meant to be - you have nothing. The requirements and the search of prior art should be greater and longer - to ensure patents are truly innovative and this should not be the role of the courts (due to expense, time and so on within the legal system)
The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy, with an idea against the onslaught of bigger companies just copying them outright and giving them no chance. You state "gone are the days of Steve Wozniak" and indeed "gone would be the days of apple" long ago - because he just wanted everyone to have everything and thats not how you run any business.
I agree that patent law needs reform - but I totally disagree that your somewhat misconstrued article that we should simply destroy patents all together. It should destroy them if they are not being actively used - but a company trying to protect its innovations in not something that I'm against. If you had a startup and a patentable innovation - it would be ridiculous to assume that you would be willing to forgo millions/billions in revenue for some abstract concept of "a greater good". America is a capitalist society and therefore you are fighting that as a concept - not the patent industry. I know my post will get down-voted but it's a reality of business and running a business - you either file for protection or you don't and get copied.
Just because something makes you money doesn't mean it's inherently good or useful, and it doesn't mean it should be protected by law. Every time a company's competitors catch up to it, and every time technology makes a company's business model obsolete, they turn to the law to try to wipe the competition/technology out of existence. And, quite frankly, it's bullshit.
You're right, the entire basis of patents was to protect the little guys. But nowadays the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 200 years, the big guys have wielded their influence to change the system to their benefit. And now they abuse patents to crush anything that threatens their leadership position, whether that's a little guy trying to innovate or another big guy trying to play catch up.
Either way, the consumer loses, and for what? Innovation certainly isn't any better off.
Either way, the consumer loses, and for what? Innovation certainly isn't any better off.
You have no way of knowing whether this is true. Patents could come with a host of disadvantages and drags on innovation and still be a net positive for innovation. There's just no way to know without a control group.
As long as we're throwing out opinions, I find it very hard to believe that the patent system, broken though it is, is anything other than a HUGE net positive for innovation. I'm talking about the patent system across all industries, but I suspect the same would be true for the tech industry specifically. Companies across many industries regularly spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to develop products that are primarily protected by patents. If we did away with patents, many of those investments would no longer be made, and the rest would be as shrouded in secrecy as possible. And secrecy is a patent that potentially never expires.
I find it very hard to believe that the patent system, broken though it is, is anything other than a HUGE net positive for innovation. I'm talking about the patent system across all industries, but I suspect the same would be true for the tech industry specifically.
The Economist (hardly a bastion of the free software movement) quoted a 2008 study showing:
A study in 2008 found that American public companies' total profits from patents (excluding pharmaceuticals) in 1999 were about $4 billion—but that the associated litigation costs were $14 billion.[1]
Clearly the litigation costs have grown significantly since 1999. It is unclear to me if the profits have kept pace, but even if they have that still would mean patents cost over 3-times the financial benefit they bring.
But how much of that revenue would they miss out on without patents, taking crosslicensing out of the picture? I suspect very little. People buy iphones for the whole product's look and feel, not for any specific feature.
It's a myth that software must be protected through patents. Copyright and trade dress law is sufficient.
> You have no way of knowing whether this is true.
There is a whole field dedicated to answering this kinds of questions, it is called economics, and there is quite a bit of research in this area analyzing historical evidence from different legal systems, times and industries.
And most of the evidence indicates that patents hinder and stop innovation, and that most innovation and progress happens when there are no patents:
You're correct that economics is a science, but you make an error when you say "most of the evidence", and then link to an ideological position.
Science doesn't work that way. Even if the preponderance of evidence were the standard, you haven't provided evidence that the preponderance of the evidence supports your position. And even if every economist in the world shared the same opinion, it would be a meaningless claim (even if you got a petition and they all signed it) from a scientific standpoint.
I believe you are wrong, but I would fall into the same error if I simply made the opposite claims you do, and I cannot prove my position scientifically, so I won't argue it.
You're correct that economics is a science, but you make an error when you say "most of the evidence", and then link to an ideological position.
It is a mistake to simply link to a book and said it is evidence, because that's just being a lazy person. People should be able to come up with their own arguments in a discussion.
That being said, it's an economic book that should be evaluated on its own merit. Calling a book "ideological" is quite unfair unless you're prepared to make an argument against the book's arguments.
>> And secrecy is a patent that potentially never expires.
Do you seriously believe, no one else can come up same/similar functionality/product? I would like a system where they keep the patent secret(nothing is published) for 5 years, and if in 5 years no one comes up with same/similar idea, patent is granted for next 10 years (rather than current 20 years from filing), otherwise patent is not granted. My guess is 99% of software patents will go away.
That would slow innovation to a standstill.. After you invent something, you couldn't use it for 5 years. Everyone would be even more secretive and it would favour big companies who could afford to 1) sit on ideas for 5 years 2) register as many patents as possible.
If you take the lawsuit for what it is, namely that only Apple can have pinch-to-zoom et.al, yes the consumer loses.
But if this lawsuit makes vendors keep a little more distance between each other, I'm all for it. As a consumer, I'd rather have a wide array of choices rather than one cash cow and its copycats, and I'd argue that this is what most people would understand as innovation. (And this is the opposite of innovation: http://allthingsd.com/20120807/samsungs-2010-report-on-how-i...)
> Just because something makes you money doesn't mean it's inherently good or useful, and it doesn't mean it should be protected by law.
Are we talking about patentable innovations, or something else? A lot of patentable innovations do not make anything, a lot things which are not patentable make boat load of bucks. Your comment seem to have clouded this distinction.
It seems to me that you are questioning the basis of government granted monopoly. But this grant is not on the basis of money generation, but on innovation and benefits to the society by disclosure.
Imagine if someone discovered and invented a principle and device for unlimited cheap source of energy. If he kept it to himself, it may definitely help him to unknown riches. And possibly the secret could die with him. But if he shared his secret sauce, then all of us in the society will benefit a lot. Patents are a means to that end. What do you think?
> Imagine if someone discovered and invented a principle and device for unlimited cheap source of energy.
First of all, this imaginary genius could still choose to not disclose his innovation. Patents are optional. Take for instance the Coca Cola recipe. Its kept as a trade secret [1]. But consumers can still choose to drink Pepsi and co. instead.
Second, I doubt a case like this, an truly important innovation that only one person will come up with, has ever occurred or will ever occur. If you look at the history of science and innovation, there is apparently always multiple people or groups working independently on the very same innovation. Famous examples are the first piloted flight [2] or the discovery of calculus [3].
For me this is the strongest case against, today's, patent law. We overstate the importance of the supposed single genius that humanity depends on. And yes, I question the the basis for any monopoly.
In the Apple vs Samsung case though, it was _also_ about consumer confusion. Samsung did not only use Apples innovation like pinch-to-zoom, which in my opinion should be fine, but tried to fool buyers into thinking that they got an iPhone by copying Apple's look and feel.
You could say, that any idiot would see the difference. There is no Apple logo or iPhone label on Samsung products. But, I argue, thats just our geeky perspective. My grand parents or even parents wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless I write them a note with 'A P P L E' on it.
I could live happily with this problem, but I can agree that this is a grey area.
You're exactly right - unless I tell the older folk "it's from Apple.. You know, the iPod company", they're not going to know. And when the iPod came out, it's was similar "it's called an iPod and Apple, you know, they made the Macintosh about 20 years ago, they made this. You can put 1000 songs on it..".
If this 'education' is not performed, then they'll never know. I've seen it with my own eyes.
The problem is that it seems nobody actually benefits from reading patents when implementing ideas. First, if you read a patent you can be found liable for willful infringement, which can triple the damages. Second, patents are intentionally written to reveal as little information as possible. Drug patents in particular often do not explain a reproducible method for creating the drug.
Weren't the guys that Apple bought to get multitouch "little"? In a world where such "obvious in retrospect" designs aren't protected, why doesn't Apple just copy their work?
I do agree with you in this regard. True innovations should be patentable and it's been the consistent bashing of the law to extend the scope of what is patentable that comes to the fore here. By fundamentally - having a patent and litigating a patent are hugely different things and that's a big problem. The patent offices around the world have timelines and deadlines - even if they approve a patent which shouldn't be - they rely on the courts to determine whether it is or is not. That's a huge time cost, financial cost and so on - thats the system today. So you go to court - you spend literally millions arguing and you get a decision as to whether or not it's innovative. That's wrong in my mind.
This seems to mostly be the case in software industry where everything moves really fast so nothing seems patent worthy. There's a whole world out there where innovation moves a lot slower and patent protection is crucial.
Was that not the whole point of the patent-system? That there is an incentive in doing/thinking first?
I disagree that patenting was meant only for the small guys. Patenting was meant to make innovation happen and fast. Simple as that. Social welfare policies are designed for the small guy.
In any case how expensive is it to file a patent, or get a job with the company which has the patent and work with them.
The so called small guy you talk about does not give a damn about innovation. He wants to be the next Steve Jobs.
Let's admit it. Money is important for everyone. Apple, Samsung, Small guy, Big guy. Everyone.
What one can discuss is how to collect taxes from people and deploy that to support indie innovators(if may call them so) who want to fly solo.
You mentioned the difference between big and small company.
When Apple had clearly stolen the look and feel of Delicious Library to make iBook. The author was a "small company". He even show some happiness that his work was used by Apple.
The point is, he couldn't have sued Apple. Simply because, actually, a small company could certainly not win over a big one. The big one will use a lot of money to keep the trial as long as possible while continue to steal your stuff. Even if won, it would have last too long to save your business. And you had lost a lot of energy. This remember me the medieval justice were the richer always win.
Actual patent system only give an advantage to big companies.
What if big player start to sue small startups because they used the double-click, the swipe, a wood texture that looks like a library?
I wish you were kidding. In the 1990s I worked on software that had the same "look and feel" of the "delicious library". We had shelves and we put things on them, books, CDs, etc, in our software. This was for a seattle software company- the same city that Wil Shipley lived in when he created delicious library.
So, can I claim that, because he put books on shelves in his software that he stole the idea from us, when we did it 10 years before him?
His claim that Apple "stole" this from him is completely absurd to the point of nonsensical. He couldn't have sued Apple because his claim is nonsense.
Just as my claim that he stole our idea of putting books on shelves is nonsense as well.
The sad thing is, so many people believe this kind of nonsense.
"Hey I put books on shelves in software!" Look how innovative I am!
I stopped reading after "Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces".
Clearly you are very misguided. You are comparing featurephones with smartphones (the ones with screens and stuff). Smartphones existed way before the iPhone.
It makes me extremely sad that the marketing lies of Apple are taken for truth.
Apple may have invented the vendor lock-in, though! :P
I guess you misread my comment. I was criticizing the comparison of feature phones with the iPhone not comparing iPhones with smartphones. It's a big difference.
If the iPhone would have been the first smartphone you could probably call it revolutionary. But you can't. Evolution ok, Better as the competition at the time of release ok. I'll grant you that already. Still a big difference.
The first iPhone didn't even support 3rd party apps (and afaik in the beginning Steve Jobs never intended to support native apps). Other smartphones had native apps for ages, though.
People should just stop to pretend that apple invented phones with big screens, it's ridiculous.
Yep. I was using a Palm Treo smartphone four years before the iPhone came out. A solid phone, the Internet in my pocket, email on the go, and plenty of apps. The Palm app market went back to 1997, when the PalmPilot first came out. So as far as features and utility went, the iPhone looked kinda weak to me at launch.
I think the iPhone's main novelty in the market was that Apple invested heavily in consumer-friendly design and aesthetic appeal, and then they marketed the shit out it. They single-handedly dragged the smart-phone market across the chasm, just like they did with the MP3 player market. Brilliant and gorgeous work. But not in areas that I think are deserving of patent protection except when the R&D drives some deeper technical innovation.
This is a joke, right? Having used three different models of the Palm Treo and the Wince Treo, I can assure you I was desperate to use the iPhone because it just worked. Sure the Treo exceeded the original iphone on many different features, but none of them worked. The software was awful, it crashed all the time, you couldn't receive calls b/c the software would crash, none of the apps worked well, and the internet was completely unusable. It was a total nightmare.
Yes the iphone was shiny and beautiful, but it also worked! This "treo was awesome" straw man floats around alot until I actually ask them about it and then the whitewashed memories come flooding back and people step back and say, you're right, it was awful.
I like how you started this reply with a question and ended it with a statement. You've decided you know better than all other Treo owners and so now you can speak over them and overrule their decisions.
No.
This is not how civil discourse works, and for the record I owned Windows Mobile phones before the iPhone and while they were not as good as the iPhone or the HTC Dream or many competitors, they had rounded corners, a bezel, a rough multitasking framework, apps etc.
They were in every way a proto-iPhone, and the idea that the iPhone did anything but promote smartphones to the average person is hilarious.
I think you're judging pioneers by the standards of later arrivals. It would seem terrible now, but compared to the options then, I was very happy. Internet! In my pocket!
I do think the PalmOS was showing its age at the time, and a bad app or extension could cause a lot of trouble. But having used PalmOS for years, getting things reasonably stable wasn't hard for me. And as a nerd, I'm pretty tolerant of crashes.
So no, it's not a joke. The Treo was a solid nerd smartphone for me.
Yeah fair enough, I just know that I could never get the internet to be useful. The email in my pocket was OK, but the Blackberry did it much better. The Apps were trying, but they just couldn't quite get there. I remember the whole frustration of the experience was because the Treo was so close to being a nice phone and yet literally so far away from being there. I was also an original Handspring user, so very familiar with the PalmOS, but that was another major annoyance - nothing had changed since my Handspring in 2001! Sigh.
Nobody are claiming Apple invented phones with big screens.
But you have to be pretty blind to not see that iPhone was a revolution in the smartphone market, which had barely seen any user interface innovation in 10 years prior to that.
I'm pretty sure this was a patent infringement lawsuit, so the statement that the "iPhone was a revolution" is irrelevant. Apple won a claim against Samsung for mimicking "bounce back" behavior among other patents.
Hopefully pull-to-refresh isn't patented. I'm not about to look either lest I be found willfully infringing.
>Apple won a claim against Samsung for mimicking "bounce back" behavior
False. Patents don't cover features. Patents cover inventions. Apple won against samsung for copying apple's solution for how to implement a feature. Not for having that feature.
This misrepresentation trivializes the nature of the patents and is ideologically driven. Don't fall for it.
Yeah initially it wasnt made to support 3rd party apps he expected everyone to innovate on the web. That's why they concentrated so much on making Safari great. All the developers wanted native apps and eventually it brought the app store to life.
> Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.
The iphone was not a smartphone when it was released. It lacked the ability to install ANY third party software. It was essentially a very snazzy feature phone.
Its success did not come due to its smartphone credentials, which are still heavily inferior to its competition. It's wholly owned to its design and usability.
...not to mention Jobs with his extreme willingness to control everything, was initially against any third party apps. His vision was: you buy this device, here are the set of app, go and have fun. thats it. Its only after Cydia getting traction he changed his mind...
> Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR
Even if that were true, the problem for me is Apple didn't patent the iPhone. They patented tiny little implementation details, like pinch-to-zoom and slide-to-unlock. The iPhone was revolutionary not because of rounded rectangles and a regular grid of icons. It was revolutionary because it was a phone that people actually enjoyed using. Did pinch-to-zoom and whatnot play a role in that? Possibly, but this whole case hinged on a handful of tiny implementation details and that's what I'm disappointed about.
It's like blocking the sale of a car because someone had a patent on having the indicator paddles on the steering column. Are there other places to put the indicator paddle? Sure, but it's only a tiny detail in a hugely complex system.
Having said that, I'm happy Samsung got done for the trade-dress stuff, because that was pretty obviously blatant copying.
Im with you. The jury has spoken and found Samsung guilty, but the actual legal details seem random and should not be anybody's property.
People often compare it to the Tv market or the car market. Yes, all TVs look alike. They are all ugly. Yes all cars look the same: like shiny bling to impress an ape. I dont consider the lack of choice in design in those markets a good thing.
I dont like patents, but i would love for products in all categories to look more unique. Maybe Apple should have won because of the tradedress. But not because of the patents.
You misunderstand the nature of patents. Patents cover inventions, which are non-obvious methods to solve problems. This is not giving apple the exclusive right to "pinch to zoom" or "slide to unlock" but the methods for implementing those features.
Apple also has a great deal of very fundamental patents with regard to the unique way for reading touch screens that they invented. This does not mean only Apple can have touch interfaces, but the method they invented for implementing them, however, they do have patents on.
The reason this trial was about these lesser patents and trade dress was the same as the reason it was over products that are no longer on the shelves-- the legal system moves very slow. The "big gun" patents hadn't yet been granted at the time Apple started getting sued.
I don't think I've misunderstood anything. I'm not saying patents do not work like this, I'm saying they should not - its my opinion that the way the system currently works is broken and it should not have been possible to get a patent on trivial features.
Also, I'm curious to know which are the "big gun" patents you're referring to. Does this mean Apple will be able to sue Samsung again for even more?
> Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart.
What?
No, we weren't.
I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine. Apple just added shiny icons and took away the keyboard and stylus. BFD.
If you can not see the difference in the touchscreen UI between the Wizard (or any other pre-iPhone device) and the iPhone, you have to be blind.
Until the iPhone, touch-screen phones were slow, clunky and unresponsive. They had shitty resistive screens that were a total pain to use. (LG actually released a capacitive phone before the iPhone, but the software was the same shit we had for ages so it didn't change a thing). Even simple things like lists were scrolled by aiming for a 2px wide scrollbar and dragging it.
But then the iPhone came along with smooth and fluid graphics and animations, actually innovative and fun touch gestures like simple flicks to scroll through lists (and a 60fps smooth animation while doing so), pinch-to-zoom and so on. The experience was actually enjoyable.
The same thing happened with the iPad. Back in the early 2000's we had "tablets" with a downsized desktop OS (Windows XP). Total shit for a touch-screen device.
Even after the iPhone some competitors failed to realize what made it good. Nokia's touch screen abominations were just sad - and they're still releasing some terrible Symbian devices like the new PureView 808. The Verge's review summarizes Symbian's problems pretty well:
> THE SYMBIAN EFFECT: WHEN GREAT HARDWARE IS RENDERED USELESS BY TERRIBLE SOFTWARE
> Actions like scrolling or pinch-to-zoom feel like requests you’re filing with a clerk somewhere in a bureaucratic dystopia — to be carried out at some indeterminate time in the future. Completing this slow-motion train wreck is the only thing worse than unresponsive operation: a complete crash of the entire phone.
Apple needs to stop with their bullshit litigation but they truly did push the industry forward with touch devices. It isn't a coincidence that touch screen phones exploded after the iPhone and that people actually started caring about tablets after the iPad.
It seems like you're walking back the claims of the guy I responded to for him: "Oh, well, okay, Apple didn't have the first touchscreen phone, but they had the first good one."
Well, I don't even agree with you on that.
I got five years out of my "unenjoyable" HTC smartphone. I could tether it to my laptop without forking over extra money. I could run whatever apps were available (which is more than could be said for the iPhone on launch day, because there weren't any). I had a full keyboard, a web browser that supported SSL, a music player, and Pocket PuTTY -- should I have given a shit about smooth scrolling?
I also got many years out of my old Nokia smartphone (which on paper could do more than the first iPhone). However, I immediately understood what a revolution the iPhone UI was when it launched.
Lucky for Apple that most competitors had key people who thought exactly like you do for a good while after the iPhone launched - why give a shit about smooth scrolling and polished, intuitive interfaces?
I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine
No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them.
Give credit where it's due, for Pete's sake. It is a fact that prior to the iPhone, cell phones sucked ass. It is also a fact that granting Apple a twenty-year legal monopoly on trivial "innovations" will hurt consumers as much as it will Apple's competitors.
> No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them.
This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already.
Apple is a marketing powerhouse. They are brilliant at it. They hook you emotionally. They convince you that they created some device specifically for you. They really make you believe that it is changing your life. That it is revolutionary. They even help you rationalize flaws. (iPhone drops cals? Oh, that's just stupid AT&T's fault.)
That's how they sell 100s of millions of devices. The devices are also quite slick, but you have to concede that slickness alone is not what drives Apple's profits. The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering.
This is a lot like saying to a friend who sees $100 on the ground that it can't really be $100, otherwise someone would have picked it up already.
(Shrug) A $100 bill lying on the ground will be picked up very quickly, by the original owner if no one else. That means that if you see $100 on the ground, chances are that it's not real. It might be a $1 or $10 bill that you've mistaken at first for $100. It might be counterfeit or play money. It might be someone playing the old "glue some cash to the pavement and laugh at/film people trying to pick it up" game. The chances that someone has actually misplaced a $100 bill in public, and that you are the first to come upon it, are very low indeed.
They convince you that they created some device specifically for you.
I don't know about you, but if the engineers don't do their job well, the marketers have no chance of making me believe that. Otherwise my house would be full of shiny gad.... wait, uh, OK, moving on to the next point....
The marketing budget numbers came out during this trial I believe, and they were staggering.
Larger than the marketing spend across the entire Android ecosystem?
The fact is that there are plenty of tech companies who spend more on marketing than Apple does, and who often have better ads, as well. Each of those companies has something in common: they sell less stuff than Apple does. Therefore, your dismissal of Apple as a "marketing" company, while not necessarily wrong, must be incomplete.
> The chances that someone has actually misplaced a $100 bill in public, and that you are the first to come upon it, are very low indeed.
It's impressive how you try and own the very fallacy you're using. It doesn't change the result but gives the superficial impression that you've addressed the criticism.
> The fact is that there are plenty of tech companies who spend more on marketing than Apple does, and who often have better ads, as well. Each of those companies has something in common: they sell less stuff than Apple does. Therefore, your dismissal of Apple as a "marketing" company, while not necessarily wrong, must be incomplete.
Citation needed. Apple advertise their products on UK TV to a much higher rate than any other smartphone. I've only ever seen brief SGS3 and N7 adverts, I see an iPad or iPhone advert every other break.
Stop making assertions and demanding they're right. You are not.
Windows CE 'Pocket PC' handhelds had retracting soft keyboards 10+ years ago.
Handspring Treos were dedicated touchscreen-based phone-PDA hybrids not much later.
PalmOS had grids of icons for its screens from day one.
Apple's primary innovation wasn't technical, it was marketing. They tied a few pre-existing ideas together slightly better, made them more shiny and used the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field to convince the world it was a never-before-seen quantum leap.
Look at the recurring pattern in this thread and elsewhere.
Apple fanatic: Apple deserves a 20 year government enforced monopoly because they did it first. Everyone else stole it, and are thieves, who deserve to pay.
Member of the reality-based consensus: small portable computers existed before the iPad/iPhone and every individual part that you could name (or patent) had been done before by others. Concrete factual example A, B, C...
<sound of crunching mental gears and cognitive dissonance defences engaging>
Apple fanatic: But Apple did it better and make more money! Therefore it doesn't matter who did it first. People who build on the innovations of others and provide them to consumers are what is important here.
You could spend all day trying to get them to face up to their conflicting logic, but they'll resist with all their might.
Yeah! There's nothing new in the iPhone, that Bell didn't demonstrate over a century ago!
The reality is, you guys are ideologically driven- you want to get google off the hook for stealing Apples inventions, so you pretend like the patents cover features rather than implementations.
> The reality is, you guys are ideologically driven- you want to get google off the hook for stealing Apples inventions, so you pretend like the patents cover features rather than implementations.
This is Samsung vs Apple. Not Google vs Apple. Don't be so arrogant and blind.
Since this is essentially Apple vs. the rest of the industry, how can you claim those supporting the industry are the ones that are ideologically driven?
But you bolster my point: it's clearly Apple on one side. Who is on the other side in order for the anti-bad-patent crowd to be labelled collectively as "ideologically driven"?
All the phones which are blatant knock offs of the iPhone. This obviously started with the Android OS and Eric Schmidt on the Apple board , then spread to other forms of copying. Samsung is the most egrigrious example. This is very plain to see for the average man on the street who knows nothing about patents. Even something like Windows Mobile with its tiles (and tiny Market share), people can see at least it's trying to do it's own thing.
Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone.
I think that those "innovations" seem simple now in hindsight, but why didn't any of the companies previously making smart phones or PDAs (Palm, Windows CE, HP, Compaq, Dell, etc) come up with something that not only the hardcore nerds would actually want to use?
I really don't think it was just marketing. Apple made a smartphone that almost everyone could pick up and enjoy using.
I definitely see both sides to this story. It sucks that Apple is killing fair (and unfair) competition but it also sucks that Samsung can just sit there and blatantly copy Apple's innovations. There needs to be a balance.
This is the best quote I've seen about the verdict:
"Samsung only found itself in trouble with the products that copied liberally from Apple. It did not help their case that they had a hundred page document describing what to copy nor the fact that Google went to them and said "do not copy Apple that blatantly"."
> Those prior things you speak of were absolutely terrible. I had all those devices and they sucked compared to the iPhone.
One of the reasons they sucked, was because they had to...
They were done 2, 5, 10, 20 years before the iPhone, iPad, etc came out... When we had CPUs, screens, drives, etc, that were inferior and could not handle the same load or work that modern hardware does.
No, they didn't have to. The CPU speeds, storage and screens existed years before the iPhone launched. The iPhone did have a capacitive touch screen, but that wasn't exactly new, bleeding edge technology.
Three years earlier in 2005, the N770 had a bigger higher DPI screen than the iPhone, HTC had phones with the same CPU speed.
But none of those devices had software specially made for finger touch with a capacitive screen. They didn't suck because the technology didn't exist, they sucked because other companies didn't see further ahead than the existing, navigation button / stylus driven interfaces that had existed for 10 years prior.
If you need further proof, just look at the time it has taken Nokia, RIM and others to respond to the iPhone. It took _years_. If technology was the limiting factor, you'd think they would be just as aware of technological developments as Apple was, and have similar devices to the iPhone lined up and ready to go by 2007?
Then I wonder why other companies hasn't realized this and hired the same marketing company as Apple uses? If marketing is all (or mostly all) there is, why can't other companies easily replicate Apples profit margins?
Why didn't Apple just rebrand a Symbian or Maemo device and put an Apple logo on it, if marketing is the main deal? (Or better yet, why not just relaunch the Newton GUI?)
You don't really believe the HTC Wizard was "perfectly fine" do you?
I went through so many Windows Mobile phones until I finally realized that the joke was on me. The user experience, the battery life, the apps, the bugs, the limitations imposed on operating system data and indeces, and the hardware were all horrific. I can't extract anything good from that experience, let alone say that any of those devices were "perfectly fine."
If you think "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" is a reasonable thing to patent so that nobody except Apple can use it on a smartphone, then you would have also had have no problem if:
- Someone patented "tabbed browsing" on a desktop computer[1] and nobody could sell a browser with tabs on a desktop platform
- Someone patented the pull-down list-select control on a desktop computer, and now everyone writing a GUI for the desktop platform would have to come up with their own variation of a list-select control that is sufficiently different from the patented one.
I could come up with many more similar examples, but I'm not at all sure how/whether the above two hit the mark as an analogy for the trick Apple just pulled (because I find all three situations absurd).
Hm, now this makes me wonder, Ableton Live has this truly brilliant way of navigating a waveform/timeline effortlessly to anywhere in both large and tiny zoom scales, it's incredibly efficient and quite intuitive, and I've (so far) never seen any audio editing software that has something quite like it. I wonder if they patented it? It is way more innovative and non-obvious than the "pinch-to-zoom" that Apple grabbed. Also there are quite a number of different but quite obvious ways to navigate a waveform on the same input devices (desktop+mouse, usually) unlike "pinch-to-zoom", which is really the most obvious gesture for zooming on a touch-display.
Because I was thinking of maybe one day coding up a very simple waveform editor, and I wouldn't be satisfied until I at least tried to implement that mode of navigation. Of course as long as I don't sell it, I'm safe from patents right?
[1] just adding that because as far as I'm aware these software/design patents only work because they're coupled to a specific piece of hardware (in the US, that is. for now, thankfully it works a bit differently in the EU)
Addition from what I've read further down the thread, it appears that the patent is about the way Apple implemented pinch-to-zoom, not the feature of having pinch-to-zoom as a gesture for zooming in general.
So that would be where maybe my analogy breaks down. However:
Can someone maybe explain me/us what is exactly so unique and non-obvious about the way they implemented it, then? And yes I did read the patent, or at least an excerpt of it that appeared to explain roughly how any decent programmer would implement such a thing, given an hour to think it over and an OS/GUI API that is vaguely object-oriented and event-based.
I did read that part.
Does anyone have the non-obvious part handy? (for the pinch-to-zoom specifically, as I just want to focus on one thing, this conversation is convoluted enough as it is)
If you think "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" is a reasonable thing to patent so that nobody except Apple can use it on a smartphone
I agree that this would be absurd, but I think it kind of misses the point of the case. Samsung pretty clearly copied Apple in a "look and feel" way that goes beyond the particular collection of patents. The patents in the case are just the instruments that Apple used to punish the copying.
There are all sorts of other phones that technically infringe on Apple's patents (and vice-versa), but Apple doesn't seem interested in taking the offensive on these. I think Apple's position is much more about the spirit of Samsung's copying rather than defending any particular technical patent violation. But in order to bring a case, you have to pick out some particular violations rather than argue some abstract notion of "copying the spirit" of the iPhone.
No it's pretty clear that among other things, Samsung is paying damages for violating the "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" patent. It is also very clearly a bounded part of the claim: if it didn't hold, the rest might still, and vice versa. Assuming your justice system somewhat works, that really should mean that Samsung is in fact guilty of violating this patent.
But so far nobody has really explained what this actually means. You're all dancing around the question.
It's very simple: what is the non-absurd way in which Samsung violated the pinch-to-zoom patent in particular? And please be specific, if you're about to use the word "implementation", I'd like to know what you understand by that term. This is not "Explain like I'm 5".
You've mis-understood my comment. It probably wasn't clear enough. I'm talking about Apple's motivation to bring the case in the first place. It wasn't because of individual technical violations of patents -- lots of other phones violate the patents and Apple hasn't sued. It was the spirit and totality of the copying. But once you decide to sue, you have to pick out the particular patents that will be the legal basis for the suit.
I'm not trying to argue that the patents should have been grated, or that they are a good thing. I'm just saying that they were the particular tools that Apple used to punish a form of copying that went beyond the patents in question.
Will somebody please explain what this means. Does this mean Apple can now sue someone who uses pinch-to-zoom on a touch screen? In other words can Apple now just sue for using pinch-to-zoom without having to build a huge case like it did in this one?
You can't patent the feature "pinch-to-zoom" you can only patent an invention of a method to implement that feature. Thus, samsung could have implemented the feature if they had done it their own way.
For example, Jeff Han demonstrated a similar feature, but his system uses cameras to take pictures of your hands.
Thus both he and Apple could have patented their inventions for implementing this feature.
The idea that these patents cover the rights to use features is misinformation designed to make them look trivial.
Of course they seem absurd- they are made to look absurd to you to get you to oppose patents.
And they are doing this by lying to you about what the patents cover.
Fine. I got that. The patent, however, describes the most obvious and straight forward algorithm to implement pinch-to-zoom on a touch-screen.
Of course you can't (officially) patent algorithms either (unless they're sufficiently technical, like MP3 and LZW).
It seems what you're avoiding to state clearly, is what exactly you believe this patent does cover, then. What is it?
Is it that Samsung shouldn't have used a touch screen on a smartphone if they also wanted to implement pinch-to-zoom? Because that's still absurd.
Really, I asked an honest question, and all you say is that's not what the patent covers and it's disinformation--well I was asking wasn't I? So enlighten us, what is the non-trivial bit that the patent covers??
I did answer your question. Nobody can patent "pinch to zoom" such that nobody else can use it. The question comes from a misunderstanding of the situation and the patent.
I've met this method of arguing before and consider it a trap. "I think its this, prove me wrong!" In my experience, no amount of research on my part will meet the burden of your opinion.
If you want to argue that the claim is trivial, please, feel free to do the research and quote the patent yourself. Your speculation about what the patent covers is not compelling.
Constantly on this page-- and it appears that this has happened 50-100 times, people have asserted that the patent covers the "right" to use the feature and not the invention.
In fact, the entire basis of the anti-patent movement is grounded in that falsehood.
Thank you for acknowledging that it is false, that was my only issue (because debating specific patents applicability is far more technical of a discussion than you can have in an ideologically driven site like this.)
I've read the patent and while you are technically correct, the effect of the patent is to grant them a monopoly on the feature pinch-to-zoom on a smartphone with a touch interface.
The end result is that no one else can implement pinch to zoom on a smart phone.
The patent is also overly broad in that it covers all multi-touch touch screen devices. So that whether I use an infrared overlay or a capacitive screen it is still covered.
No one else can implement pinch to zoom, so what? Is pinching the only way, or even the best way to zoom? It may seem like it is the best and most obvious way right now but that is only because Apple popularized it and made it ubiquitous. In the future someone may (gasp) innovate and come up with a better solution, that would in hindsight seem even more obvious.
I'm not sure about you, but I've seen a fascinating display of apologizing for the patent system. People have been staunchly repeating what it should do as opposed to what is actually happening in practice.
I've also watched a series of curious arguments revolving around the assertion that patent somehow protect small business which are innovation; as if big companies won't dredge up incredibly expensive patents from purchased portfolios to force licence agreements.
I short, I've learned that the average software & design patent proponent really is as disingenuous and intellectually bankrupt as I have suspected... at least this venue.
Then if its not innovative - show me the prior art ? There is none - so it's innovative under law - regardless of whether I agree or not. Amazon patented an innovative process unthought of at the time - the fact you apply retrospectivity to it now and look at it as ridiculous does nothing to prove it was not innovative back in 1998. If you thought of this process - would you be happy not to charge Amazon if you patented it ? Lets assume you didn't patent it and now its used by everyone on the planet - would you sit back and think "I wish I had of patented this so I could make millions" ? Again, they're the questions you need to ask because in my view it's a capitalist question over and above hating patent rights. If you didn't choose to patent it and someone took advantage of you - then in every country but America - they would have the rights (as has happened before). America relies on first to invent - but its a big ask and its being abolished in changes passed by congress to fall in line with first-to-file.
In the case of one-click, it's first important to note that in addition to prior art, a patent must also pass the obviousness test. One-click does not. You may not be a developer, I don't know, but I know any developer here could implement one-click in a day.
Patents are not intended to be a lottery rewarding insight. Patents protect development effort. One-click fails that test.
But in terms of prior art, Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly backed BountyQuest in 2001 as a forum for researching prior art for patents. They couldn't monetize it, so it shut down in 2003 - but not before O'Reilly received what he calls a "killer piece of prior art" on the one-click patent, which he has on his bookshelf in case "Amazon loses its senses and sues someone". [http://openp2p.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_10...]
The point here is not that your example is wrong. Where you go wrong is assuming that a patent granted on software is anything like a useful mechanism to support innovation.
But again - "i know any developer her could implement one-click in a day" and indeed a huge number of inventions could be implemented in a day. But you are again applying retrospecitivity (at least in my mind) - you need to remove that. Just because something is simple - doesnt mean it is not innovative. You contend that simply because something is simple that therefore it fails the test of obviousness - but that is not true and it's right that it's not true.
The test is asking whether the invention is an adequate distance beyond or above the state of the art. The state of the art at the time had no idea of such a simple one-click method - if it did - why wasn't it invented ? The fact it can be implemented so easily is irrelevant to fundamental idea that its innovative, non-obvious and unique. The best ideas are usually the ones no one see's and yes I am a front-end dev so I deal with more interaction components than anything.
Patents do not protect development effort - they protect novel, non-obvious and useful concept's. If they protected development effort - it would be a requirement to actually develop the idea and there is no such requirement and indeed many inventions wouldn't be possible to protect if such a requirement existed - that is, you must fully develop the invention before being granted protection. You're contention that because something is simple infers that its not patentable is incorrect in my mind.
However, I think I don't "need to lose" my opinion that innovation consists of more than saying "put a grid of buttons on a larger screen than most phones" or even "click one link to get to an order screen". You're welcome to your view, although I question your ability to understand what innovation is. I don't issue arrogant ultimata that you "need" to lose your attitude. I just think you'll fail if you live your life that way.
And I totally do agree with you that some patents are totally absurd - but I reject your notion I don't understand what innovation is. The problem is - innovation as a concept and innovative step under law are two completely segregated idea's. The language and their use are unfortunately bipolar.
My point is - the unfortunate way that patent law currently works is - you are a doomed if you have something innovative that is patentable - not to patent it because you are most likely going to invest a huge level of resources developing it only to have someone copy it later without anything to fall back on. You might not agree with the patent system, you might hate the way it currently works (and I agree with this notion) but you are stuck with it and you aren't protecting your business from an intellectual property stand point - or providing adequate shareholder return if you don't seek to protect it.
You will do hundreds or thousands of hours developing, fixing and perfecting what could be an amazing idea - you will (maybe) get lots of fresh VC investment and take money from your parents, friends and family all who believe in you - only to push it to market and have someone copy it in a flash and reproduce it without question. What to do then ?
Granting a monopoly on insights does not benefit society. Granting a monopoly on non-obvious inventions in return for the knowledge to replicate it does benefit society. Pharmaceuticals take years and millions of dollars to develop. Pinch-to-zoom took a moment of insight and a day of development work to prototype.
Apple's victory in this case is a negative for society.
> Just because something is simple - doesnt mean it is not innovative.
Just because something is innovative doesn't mean it isn't inevitable.
I believe capacitive touchscreen interfaces like the iphone's were inevitable. In fact, pinch to zoom was widely demoed before the iphone's launch. That doesn't invalidate the patent, but it does invalidate the idea that without apple it wouldn't have been invented.
Should the first on a market that was going to arise anyway get the monopoly rights on that market? If we were talking about a 5 year patent I could begrudgingly accept it, but to see the touchscreen device market chained to apple's whims for two decades cannot be anything but bad for the customer.
No, i think they should be abolished, not reformed, at least in the case of software. While they may benefit the megacorps like apple, they seem to be only doing harm to the industry as a whole.
By the way, patents don't cover implementations, they cover methods. A method can be so generic that it covers all possible implementations.
Specifically, apple's 915 patent seems to cover two things: determining whether you're in scroll or zoom mode based on the number of discrete inputs on the screen, and also while zooming rubberbanding the content if zoomed out too much. The second claim is something you could replace with some other solution (and samsung did that in a software update), but the first one seems generic enough that it covers all sensible implementations of the concept.
You're overly-focused on the existence of prior art. Simply being the first to do something shouldn't automatically give you the right to prevent anyone else from doing it. That philosophy, applied consistently, would lead to ridiculousness.
Because that is what patent law is focused on. And yes - that's exactly why is ISNT applied consistently because only things worth patenting are filed. If you think you have a billion dollar idea (and you may have) - and no one has thought of it - are you suggesting you simply tell the world and expect everyone to play nice ? The only way to prove something is unique is if nothing is available in the public domain or nothing is filed before hand. I'm in no way suggesting the patent system is great (read above) - but removing it entirely like this article suggests is also wrong.
Yes, but so what if I have a "billion dollar" idea? An idea is merely a thought inside the mind. Just because an idea can be used to make money shouldn't give me (or anyone else) the right to own it. If you don't want others having access to your idea, then keep it to yourself. Thomas Jefferson put it far better than I ever could:
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than
all others of exclusive property, it is the action of
the thinking power called an idea, which an individual
may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself
into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot
dispossess himself of it.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over
the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man,
and improvement of his condition, seems to have been
peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she
made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without
lessening their density in any point, and like the air in
which we breathe, move, and have our physical being,
incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
I like to think of it like this: At some point in the past, two ancient humans were sitting in the rain. One of them -- let's call him CavemanA -- was smart enough to construct a shelter. That certainly would have been a unique and valuable idea at the time. But do you really think that CavemanA should then have the power to tell CavemanB that he's not allowed to build a shelter?
Ideas are not property. Allowing people to own them is extremely harmful, and should only be done to prevent even more harmful situations from arising. We certainly shouldn't give someone ownership of an idea for no other reason than to reward them for having it first.
a) the society doesn't benefit
b) then you do nothing with it
c) then you don't commercialise it for gain
d) if you don't protect it - you get crushed by everyone else who does
and so on and so on. Indeed, Jefferson stated
"Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility"
Discouraging commericalisation of unique ideas - discourages those who are capitalist and want to move society forward. If every had no protection of their ideas - then all good ideas would be copied and the incentive to produce new ideas would be reduced as a result - or rather everyone remains secret and tries to produce entire products by themselves - again argubly reducing innovation. As I stated in my first post
"The problems with the patent industry are patents abused by companies who have absolutely no interest in developing them but rather trolling them to simply extract money from other companies. Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls. If you dont actively use it as it is meant to be - you have nothing. The requirements and the search of prior art should be greater and longer - to ensure patents are truly innovative and this should not be the role of the courts (due to expense, time and so on within the legal system)"
The argument with the cavemen is a primitive example. My response - Caveman B would most likely build it or kill Caveman A to build it. Which extrapolated to the protection of ideas in modern society may very well occur - competitor A and competitor B want to succeed more than each other and so on. If Caveman A is stronger than Caveman B - then he may very well ask for fruit to borrow his design - Caveman B gives him something of value to borrow his unique design - the other alternative.
Idea's should be able to be commercially protected. You suggest that by no one having a right to commercialise them that society would be better off - what is then the point of innovating and trying to essentially fulfil the capitalist dream of commercialising inventions to profitability if everyone is freely copying everyone else's ideas ? It results in no competitive advantages to some degree. The desire to be innovative and drive society forward is closely coupled with the profitability and commercialisation attached. That's not to say that all inventions require profitability - but most people seeking to protect their inventions are seeking to do so to ensure they maximize the potential of their idea's from a commercialisation standpoint. If anyone was free to copy anyone's truly awesome idea - that doesn't reward or provide additional incentive for people to innovate per my post below - what you get instead is the Samwer brothers who just outright cloned everything.
I think you are missing his point. His point is not that patents should not exist, it is that patents are not protection of ideas. They are protection for inventions, as in, the actual (used to be physical) functional embodiments of an idea.
If you allow someone to patent cotton gins just because they thought that they sounded swell and wrote the idea down, you've seriously hindered any kind of market at all. Your idea is worthless without an embodiment, and no one else can make anything until your patent expires.
If you allow someone to patent all cotton gins based on their single implementation one, you again have poisoned future implementations -- perhaps better and more efficient ones with completely different physical forms -- just because they belong to the idea class of "cotton separating machines".
The point is a very important one: ideas are not property. We can go a little further and say all IP is not property either. You cannot be deprived of it (short of a lead pipe), but you can be deprived of your granted right to profit from it, for a little while at least. That's the motivation you speak of, and that's the only reason patents exist at all, at least in the US.
In October, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rejected 21 of the 26 claims of Amazon's famous patent after an Auckland patent enthusiast, Peter Calveley, produced evidence of prior art.
Nope. The patent should be granted only if it is "not obvious to a skilled practitioner skilled in the art", not just if nobody published the same exact thing before. 1-click WAS obvious in 1998 to any skilled practitioner who knew about cookies.
Again, this patent has been litigated over and over and over - so it has been deemed not to be obvious to a person skilled in the art at the time of filing relevant to the claims. You can't state "it WAS obvious" - because literally millions has been spent on PROVING it wasn't. Even if some of the claims have been subsequently rejected - there are still components that are patentable.
You're talking about the US. The patent was never granted in the first place here in the EU. So yes, I can state that it WAS obvious - at least in Europe.
And as a result Europe produces the Samwer brothers - who just copy everything from the United States and open it in Europe. I'm not arguing that patent law is perfect (per my first post) but rather that it does have a function and the original article conveys the view its entirely pointless. EU patent law has its problems as well and its a long post to discuss it - but without any protection you just get outright copies (Airbnb, Stripe and so on and so on) and that does nothing for innovation.
It's funny to have to state this on a site where a common mantra is that "execution matters":
If US entrepreneurs suck at serving a global market (and they do - failing even with covering Canada and Mexico for years, their direct neighbors), someone else is bound to fill the niche.
Instead of whining about the Samwers, how about expanding as soon as possible?
Either there's money to be had abroad (then go and get it) or there's not (then why aren't Samwers bankrupt by now, at least thrice?).
I totally agree with you that execution does matter. But the Samwer's don't execute - they outright copy. From reverse engineering, to out right cloning the CSS style sheets and design UI's which is totally wrong. That's not innovation in any sense and I wholeheartedly disagree if you are defending the cloning of a product completely.
I'm not "whining" about the Samwers - I am bringing them into the larger context of this debate. That is - with patent protection - their outright clones would not exist. You draw a completely different imputation by comparing it to business strategy of expanding faster and cloning a product. I am not against, in any sense, taking an idea (groupon) and making it work in a different part of the world - as long as it adds something to it - a different UI and so on.
The Samwers don't add that and that's what is detestable. If your startup worked hard, built a product with a great UI that is commented upon and then a competitor clones it outright in a different market - are you suggesting you wouldn't be pissed ? Because that's exactly what the Samwers do. And sometimes it's not so easy to just "expand as soon as possible" - payments is a whole massive legal headache (in the case of stripe). Verification systems, financial approval and so on and so on per country and many others. Plus, expanding quickly involves local offices, larger teams, greater strategic planning, more investment capital which then dilutes existing people more and so on and so on. So it's not a simple matter of "expand as quickly as possible" but sometimes that's just not feasible.
What they bring to the table: experience in foreign markets (all that legal headache, market research, contacts).
They probably "should" do that by offering this as a service to promising US startups. But who would pay for that an even remotely comparable amount of $$$ than what they get now?
Are you serious? The Samwer brothers don't do anything different from thousands of US startups and big companies that try to imitate new ideas that have success in the market. How many venture capitalists in the US finance exactly that kind of ventures?
The only difference is that they evidently found a good formula to do it with repeated successes by focusing on early localization on European (and especially German) market, and so became famous.
By the way, I'm in favor of patents in general, but with very stringent non-obviousness requirements. IIRC the USPTO changed its attitude not so many years ago here, going from a "reject as much as possible" one to a "accept as much as possible" one.
This attitude frankly disgusts me. The legal system is all kinds of screwed up and its verdicts don't necessarily have any relation to reality. It's an intellectual cop-out: I don't have to actually put thought into the issue, because a bunch of expensive lawyers already did, and I can just parrot them!
> Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart.
No one brings this up, but all of those phones looked and behaved the same as well. Presumable the first inventor of said phone style could have patented everything and disallowed anyone else to make a dumb phone. This is what the author is speaking to; the notion that an inventor, if with enough resources, can legally own the only logical way to do a particular thing. And if armed with enough of those, can legally own an industry. You don't have to be a lawyer to see there is something wrong with that.
"before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR"
Some of us may have been, but technically speaking that's not true. Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Nokia all had high end devices available with large touch screens prior to Apple's iPhone release. What Apple offered (that was revolutionary) was an easy way for users of their device to purchase content. They achieved this since they required users to have an iTunes account when provisioning their device; and they got away with that because they already had many of the users in iTunes already.
Apple definitely made advances to large screen smartphones (ex: their touch screen was far better than all other offerings at the time, and remains superior to most alternative devices); but to say that it was the iPhone alone (a piece of hardware) that revolutionized the mobile industry shadows integral aspects of the legal and historical argument.
You should try reading that patent sometime before you claim it isn't reasonable.
It is profoundly dishonest to characterize patents using a trivial phrase like "one-click" and then pretend like that also means that the patent is itself trivial.
You think Barnes and Noble copied the novel implementation of one-click, as disclosed by the patent, and didn't use bog standard database and cookie techniques?
You cannot implement "one-click" using "bog standard database and cookie techniques".
Your idea of what this patent covers is incorrect. It is not a patent on the feature of "press a button to make a purchase and skip the checkout process" or "have a cookie so we know who you are".
I'll bite - what parts of the patent can't be done with bog-standard techniques? I took a look and it seems obvious in retrospect, though so many things do.
You continue to innovate. You do a better job at understanding your customer's needs and fulfilling them. You do a better job at marketing, positioning, and advertising. You give better customer service. There's tons of ways to compete, other than raw product uniqueness.
According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".
Meh. A better product is not a sustainable competitive advantage anyway. Better to have a product "arms race" where everybody is forced to "innovate or die", IMO.
>>You continue to innovate. You do a better job at understanding your customer's needs and fulfilling them. You do a better job at marketing, positioning, and advertising. You give better customer service. There's tons of ways to compete, other than raw product uniqueness.
How exactly do you do a better job at marketing, positioning, advertising, customer service, etc. as a small business? The implication of being a small business is that you are resource-constrained and cannot do those things as well as the big players can, which is why you need patent protection for your innovations.
The implication of being a small business is that you are resource-constrained and cannot do those things as well as the big players can
I disagree with this implication. Being small just means you have to use the resources that you do have, to greater effect. And a small business has a lot of advantages in it's own way... you can typically learn faster, react faster, give customers more personal attention, and you can pursue niches that would be too small for a larger player to focus on.
which is why you need patent protection for your innovations.
Right, because if Apple decides to use technology created by Enraged Camel Software, Inc. you're going to be able to afford the legal fight with them, even if you do have a patent?
And never mind the money you wasted getting a patent in the first place. Depending on who you believe, it can routinely cost somewhere north of $50,000 just to get a patent. What else could a small company / startup do with $50,000?
And never mind that your startup can easily be attacked by $RANDOM_BIGCORP for "violating" some submarine patent that you never knew about, if you step on their toes. IBM alone has so many freaking patents, I'd bet they could construct a reasonable enough patent lawsuit against nearly any new startup that emerges, if they felt like it. And even if they lost in the end, they'd bankrupt the startup in the process.
I just don't think patents (and software patents in particular) do any good for startups / entrepreneurs. Actually, I think they are actively harmful; especially when the USPTO is granting these ridiculously overbroad patents for trivially obvious ideas.
The Jury system in the US is actually well suited deciding complex moral questions and too much fine print hinders more than it heps, which was evident in this case.
To me, instead of a patent office there should be a central online register to archive jury-understandable photos and descriptions or ideally videos of the stuff you do simply to have a validated reference of when you thought of it.
And then patent/IP Law may simply should read soething like this:
It is ok to base any creative work on the work of others as long as the result is something new and great in it´s own right.
It´s not ok to copy the work of others without significantly improving it simply for making money.
Done. Plain Language.
Everything else, the moral right or wrong would be left to a Jury with guidance from a Judge.
Which they basically did in the Apple case. All that patent BS aside, I guess they descided on the basic morale question and started the paperwork.
> The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy
No it wasn't. Why does this misconception exist? The point of patents is to open up trade secrets for the benefit of society and advancement of the sciences. We don't allow patents to encourage inventors or make sure they can profit, that is the price we pay to get their knowledge, it is not the goal, just the means.
If you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ?
Been there.
Me and 2 other people invented a product that hadn't existed before and created an entire lexicon for it. Then jokers at a larger company duplicated our product. The manual and website had been at least rewritten but the similarities to our stuff were obvious.
Eventually we found evidence of typos in the internals of our product showing up in their UI. That was when we got a lawyer. We significantly slowed down their product launch and probably got a few managers fired.
It took a few years for our patent to be issued, which finally got them to fuck off. I would have gladly traded a much shorter term on our patent for a faster issuance. Those years felt like decades.
(We didn't appeal to the Internet because the Internet was a much much different creature back then. A corporate blog was unheard of. And it could have backfired: we had one loose cannon employee in our own company who went around a conference telling everyone how that company had ripped us off; the next year at the same conference everyone remembered the story but many people mis-remembered who had stolen from whom. Which is why we tried to handle things with the legal system instead of by trying to tell everyone what assholes they were. Although there is a Texas company that is now complete poison to have on your resume at any company I work for.)
Most innovations are not patentable. Most notably are most business models.
Think of Groupon's business model. There's nothing specifically innovative about it: forced email list, 1 product per day, discounts. But, put together it formed a successful business model. Had they not thought of it and tested it in the marketplace all their copy-cat competitors probably would not exist today either.
At some stage someone someone invented department stores. Someone hypothesized that yuppie americans would like to eat sushi. Someone thought that doing massages in full view in malls would create a new market of people who wouldn't have gone through the book-in-advance, go behind a heavy curtain, 1 hour minimum normally associated with the trade. In Australia I would guess that this last one tripled (or more) the massage therapy market.
It's hard to talk about patents without slipping into the legalize definitions of important concepts like 'non-trivial' but I think a common sense definition is 'wouldn't have been invented otherwise.' A lot of these innovations are genuinely nontrivial by that definition.
They weren't developed in r&d labs but they are all genuinely innovative. They didn't spend huge sums on r&d but someone did the economic cousin of spending, they risked (usually personally) a lot testing them in the market. Much or most of the profits eventually went to copycats. Without the innovator most would not have existed today. They still got invented. I doubt that patenting would increase their rate of invention. I'm sure that patenting would have harmed consumers.
I'm not saying this as a general refutation of patents. I don't know what the correct laws are. I think though that any patent laws are always going to leave us with huge ugly deckfulls of by-catch. Mostly skate & sunfish. But occasionally a walrus, whale or dugong that the crew will not want others to know about.
> Then the magical aspect of patent law called "prior art" would come into play and it wouldn't be patentable.
I have difficulty taking the "prior art" system seriously. It's especially unbelievable with software patents (there are so many things where different patents exists on the same technology), but it leaks over into the whole patent system.
"Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls."
Not really. It will simply create a new class of startup pitches. "We have this idea. Fund us now and we will return to you with a MVPFP - "Minimally Viable Product For Patent". Big companies of the world will still fund it.
> then someone simply copies everything you have done
Copyright law prevents direct copying. If someone wanted to make an iphone clone without building on google's effort, they would have to spend hundreds of millions on software deelopment. There is no "simply" when it comes to copying technologies, unless the technology is truly trivial.
Before the iPhone I was using the Sony Ericsson P800 and the Nokia Communicator E95. Both had big screens. The iPhone was not the first smart phone with a big screen.
You give them far too much credit. Apple happened to be first in implementing an obvious conclusion in the evolution of computing: combining a true operating system with the features of a PDA and adding a radio. Many people saw this coming a decade earlier; I was one of them.
The reason it happened when it did had to do with the hard work of the scientists and engineers who kept shrinking and creating ever more powerful computing technology, not with the guy who happened to allow his engineers to pursue this obvious conclusion. Steve Jobs was a visionary only when compared to other CEO's, not when compared to the scientists and engineers that really make things happen.
"Obvious" is a relative term. What is obvious to an adult may not be obvious to a 2-year-old. Likewise, to many engineers the iPhone was obvious. To many of the CEO's heading large cell phone companies? Not so obvious.
Many people like to talk up things like the iPhone as "betting the company", maybe rather than being idiots, these cell phone CEOs realised that the easiest way to make money was to milk their mostly captive audience for every cent they could? Why risk something new? And why does every narrative about the iPhone have to involve everyone else being idiots and Steve Jobs and (via some associative magical thinking) iPhone owners being so clever and tasteful. It's all a bit transparent.
If the iPhone was obvious to many engineers, why did none of them develop a similar product? Why did Google's Android team develop an operating system that resembled a Blackberry, only to transition to something that closer resembled an iPhone after the iPhone's launch?
Usually engineers don't get to decide where major resources are applied. That's the call of the increasingly non-technically savvy CEO. (HP is typical of this trend -- founded by engineers who were the cause of its greatness, over time degrading and being run by MBA's instead).
"Why did Google's Android team develop an operating system that resembled a Blackberry"
Irrelevant. The trend toward a more powerful OS as computing resources increased was inevitable. Somebody happened to get there first, and they deserve a pat on the back for winning that race, but they should not get all the credit. People who came before who actually pushed the technology to the limit deserve most of the credit; all Apple did was exploit it at an opportune time.
Engineers don't often build great products on their own. You also need great industrial design, great user interface design etc. In some ways I can relate to your view - as a software engineer myself I often fall into the trap of thinking everything I do is 'obvious' and that any other right thinking engineer would have probably made the same decisions. For any one decision this might even be true, but for large, complex systems it certainly isn't. Everything is obvious with hindsight, as they say.
Your certainty that the innovations brought to the table by the original iPhone were inevitable needs to be justified I'm afraid. Of course it's true that there are many hardware components in all modern smartphones for which the development of which had nothing to do with Apple. However as with the original Mac, to dismiss Apple's contribution is rather to miss the point.
I don't dismiss Apple's contribution. On the contrary, I think Apple dismisses the contributions of scientists and engineers that allowed them to build their iPhone. They want to take all the credit, when in fact, only a relatively minuscule amount of credit properly goes to Apple. Do they deserve this minuscule credit? Sure. I don't dismiss that. But the contribution by those who created the technology that go into the iPhone is far greater.
It's as if someone created the most cool looking web page on the planet, and then wanted to claim they invented the Internet. That's how I see Apple. They merely rearranged existing technology in a nifty way, they didn't create all of it. They deserve credit for what they did, not more.
No, I don't think Apple is claiming to have invented lcd displays, multitouch, capacitive touch screens, solid state storage, 3G or any of the other core technologies used in an iPhone. I don't know why you think they are.
They're claiming that they introduced what has now become the new standard way of interacting with a mobile device, and are seeking to protect aspects of that design from another large corporation that seeks to profit by emulating their work. I'm mystified as to why people find this surprising or worthy of criticism.
Right. But Amazon was wise. They could have seized major portions of the software patent landscape early on, they thought about going down the path Apple is on and they decided against it. In contrast to Cook's statements here, Bezos basically said software patents are not our future and other companies should follow our lead.
If you truly understod the patent system you'd realise it's a lot less "cut and dry" than you perceive it to be. Patent law with all its wonderful intricacies that many spend careers learning can get you to an issued patent. But an issued patent can't guarantee you anything, except the right to sue alleged infringers. It gives you no "right to a monopoly" only a right to sue. It gives you no right to manufacture or sell anything. Someone else might sue you you, regardless of your patent. That's not the patent office's problem.
Your issued patent is only as good as it holds up in litigation. And patent litigation is more or less a crap shoot. With high stakes.
The only way to determine the "validity" of a patent claim is to litigate it. And Federal Circuit decisions are not exactly "consistent" so as to be "predictable", to say the least. The end result is patent litigation is extraordinarily expensive and is to be to be feared, even when the patent claims being asserted are garbage.
The issue is not with the patent system in general. The issue is with how Apple is using the system.
There is nothing inherently wrong with patents or intellectal property.
The problem is with companies like Apple who think it is all some kind of game.
Again, the problem is not IP. IP is just rules.
The problem is Apple, specifically the people who run the company. The problem is the actions they take.
When nerds on the web discuss IP, unfortunately it ends up being employed as the proverbial "straw man". Nerds ignore the actions of Apple and instead debate IP. But IP is not a person, real or imaginary. IP makes no decisions. IP is just a concept. The decisions and the evil being done here are by _people_. Patent law (or any law) does not mandate that anyone has to behave like an a-hole. That is a decision Apple makes, not the drafters of patent laws.
But Apple thinks that just because they can afford to dump millions into legal fees, month after month, year after year, it gives them the justification to make life miserable for everyone else (forcing them to spend the same amounts or be forced out of the game).
Apple behaves like an a-hole. And everyone has to mimic them.
IP is not going to disappear. It's only going to grow. The reforms will have to change how it can be used.
"These are not patents on innovation, they’re patents on simple ideas and features that you didn’t even think of first but you were the first to patent."
Then the magical aspect of patent law called "prior art" would come into play and it wouldn't be patentable. Yet it is - and yet despite all of Samsungs insistences and millions (no doubt) spent on prior art research - nothing has been shown prior to the date of filing that anything existed. It's no different than Amazon's One-click.
It would be interesting - if you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ? According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".
The problems with the patent industry are patents abused by companies who have absolutely no interest in developing them but rather trolling them to simply extract money from other companies. Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls. If you dont actively use it as it is meant to be - you have nothing. The requirements and the search of prior art should be greater and longer - to ensure patents are truly innovative and this should not be the role of the courts (due to expense, time and so on within the legal system)
The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy, with an idea against the onslaught of bigger companies just copying them outright and giving them no chance. You state "gone are the days of Steve Wozniak" and indeed "gone would be the days of apple" long ago - because he just wanted everyone to have everything and thats not how you run any business.
I agree that patent law needs reform - but I totally disagree that your somewhat misconstrued article that we should simply destroy patents all together. It should destroy them if they are not being actively used - but a company trying to protect its innovations in not something that I'm against. If you had a startup and a patentable innovation - it would be ridiculous to assume that you would be willing to forgo millions/billions in revenue for some abstract concept of "a greater good". America is a capitalist society and therefore you are fighting that as a concept - not the patent industry. I know my post will get down-voted but it's a reality of business and running a business - you either file for protection or you don't and get copied.