US patents can't be enforced outside of the USA. Why not just ignore US market and go on with the product in the rest of the world?
US market is kinda big.
Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
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Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#12I don't get it, isn't licensing the whole point of software patents.. sharing IP with the world and receiving royalties in return ? So how can Apple refuse to license the patent to HTC ?
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#13I really think Apple needs to take a page from Google's book here and adopt the 'don't be evil' philosophy.
This is very disappointing to me because I see Apple like a tennis player who can tell you where he is going to hit the ball, yet still beat you there every time. I think they should welcome the competition and view copycats with pride. You don't get it right all the time.
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#14US patents can't be enforced outside of the USA. Why not just ignore US market and go on with the product in the rest of the world?
US market is kinda big.
Not only big, the biggest one. But given increase in costs (MS tax, now Apple tax, tomorrow who knows) at some point it could be more cost effective for HTC to stop paying anyone and just not sell in the states. WO patents are much harder to get and very expensive to keep, so no big problem there.
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#15"The ruling is scary for competition because it could ultimately lead to the ban of all HTC Android devices and, to take things to the extreme, the ban of all Google Android phones and tablets." Yawn Sensationalist, at best. The article goes on to quote everyone's favorite authority on the matter, Florian Mueller. Have we had enough of this tripe yet?
As much as one can dislike the guy's drivel. There is some truth to his statements as well. It does not bear repeating that so many patents describe mathematical truths, trivialities, and common sense, that it is hard to make a product that does not violate a patent. Also, banning a product is one of the possible outcomes of a patent violation (besides working around the patent, or settling). Wouldn't it be nicer if…
I've lived in countries where copyright and patents were not enforced. One country didn't even have a copyright law until this century. I've seen the results of your theory, and it's not pretty.
> Wouldn't it be nicer if everyone just competes on quality and price?
No.
To be worth while, investment in R&D needs to be recouped. If cloning finished products is legal, the clone makers don't need to recoup R&D, so can undercut the price of the inventor while (since it's a clone, perhaps even produced by the same factory) matching quality.
Also bad, such as with electronics, the consumer sometimes can't tell if the clone is the same quality or not until months later when inferior parts begin to fail (especially low quality capacitors in electronics, which have a tendency to look exactly the same right up until they burst). Sometimes, as happened to Akai in the country where I lived, the brand takes the reputation hit for the problems from the copyists who were selling the copies at a price so close to the original the buyer couldn't tell whether they got an original or copy.
(A countermeasure to this is an invention so ahead of the market the production process is unique, and the inventor somehow manages to lock up 100% of manufacturing capability and capacity itself. Such inventions are relatively rare.)
> doesn't 'discovery' of some technique give a time-advantage already?
No. With JIT manufacturing, clones hit the streets sometimes before the original. Not to mention, in your world, the incentive to steal product prototypes would go through the roof, letting the lesser priced clones hit the streets during the original marketing push.
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#16Someone mentioned that the patents are from 1994 and 1996. So Apple is winning this battle in the smartphone industry, with something they had way, way before iPhone. How is that fair?
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#17Someone mentioned that the patents are from 1994 and 1996. So Apple is winning this battle in the smartphone industry, with something they had way, way before iPhone. How is that fair?
"Development of the Apple Newton platform started in 1987 and officially ended on February 27, 1998."[1] "HTC was founded in 1997 by Cher Wang, HT Cho, and Peter Chou."[2]
Apple's been investing in mobile usability (e.g., recognizing and acting on structured data with a tap) for a very long time. That an iPhone has a phone attached to it is arguably a secondary characteristic.
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#18The first patent is described as a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data," which Apple says applies, for example, to tapping a phone number and being prompted options to call or look it up on the web.
So they have basically patented the context menu. How broken can a patent system possibly become before it crashes an entire economy?
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#19I don't get it, isn't licensing the whole point of software patents.. sharing IP with the world and receiving royalties in return ? So how can Apple refuse to license the patent to HTC ?
The purpose of patents is to share the IP with the world, in return for a period of exclusivity. The decision to licence the technology in return for money is entirely down to the patent holder.
Re: Why Apple’s ITC patent victory over HTC Android phones is scary
#20These patent stories get more and more ridiculous by the day. We need a major software patent amnesty event to just wipe the slate clean. Patents were originally for protecting tinkerers and original thinkers from getting their ideas ripped off by some corporation. I love myself too much to read through the meat of the patents but it sure sounds so vague and general to software in general. Any idiot who took CS101 could dream up a parser that auto-recognizes a phone number and make it clickable. I mean scrolling, like really? Do I need written permission from Steve Jobs to implement it on a touch device? So now we wait until year 2050 before we see it on anything other than a iPhone? I wonder who will be winning then, oh right probably Apple because now they cornered all the hologram related patents with their trademark "no touch" interface in iOS 21 and OSX Sea Lion while the rest of the companies were busy getting sued.
We need to rethink software patents. Anything that hampers the next wave of innovation is pure evil. Software, especially UI innovation with all the metaphors drawn from the physical world is nothing like inventing the cotton gin. Sure we need to reward the the innovators but Apple engineers, brilliant though they may be, are intellectual slaves who don't own their own thoughts. Whoever actually came up with these things for Apple isn't retiring early that's for sure.
All this is great but smart companies are going to flock to countries where saner laws prevail or even the wild wild east like China where nothing is safe but at least they can focus on innovation and not second guess the ideas coming from their own engineers brains.