The Tim Cook memo: line by line • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#171

Post by blaines » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

Okay this guy wrote paragraph(s) retorting each individual line in a memo. The author is reading way too much into this. They wrote their opinion, this clearly wasn't a fact finding mission.

I'd probably give this a "C-" for poor format, unbalanced opinionated writing, and it's length (too long).

In the future, it's fine to pick a side, but make a case and defend it with research. Don't ask a series of questions in response to a memo. Questions are unconvincing at best.

"Should your kids be home before 10PM?" vs "Your kids should be home before 10PM"

Hopefully this helps the author improve their writing. I don't even have a Nokia phone, I have no phone. Maybe we'd be friends.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#172

Post by nirvana » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:48 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #142

eftpotrm wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 convi…

They can't hear you. 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 other…

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.

Your dishonesty is shameful.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#173

Post by nirvana » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:50 PM UTC

moe wrote: post #123

timmyd wrote: post #17

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 com…

It's no different than Amazon's One-click. You're not seriously trying to suggest that one-click is a reasonable patent, are you?

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.

I know why you do it- it fits your ideology.

But it doesn't fit reality.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#174

Post by nirvana » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

blaines wrote: post #161

gnaffle wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you disagree, try reading the patent.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#175

Post by nirvana » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

Vivtek wrote: post #69

timmyd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 paten…

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 Bezo…

I don't know any programmer who could implement one click in a day.

You think that it is just "checking out with a single button press", but that's not what the patent covers.

This is the fundamental problem with the anti-patent position. It is based on a lie.

The lie is the claim that patents give the "right" to use "features", like checking out with one click. They do not.

The One-Click patent, for instance, spends a great deal of time talking about fraud.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#176

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #154

csallen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

There is a control group for the impact of patents. It's called software.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#177

Post by nirvana » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #156

timmyd wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

The patent doesn't cover the idea of using pinch to zoom. Patents are not on features or on ideas. They are on implementations.

Thus someone else demoing pinch to zoom using a different implementation is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

You guys are trying to redefine patents in order to argue that they should be "reformed"!

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#178

Post by luriel » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:58 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #154

csallen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 i…

> 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:

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#179

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 2:58 PM UTC

timmyd wrote: post #17

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 com…

So, answer me this:

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)

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#180

Post by nirvana » Sat, Aug 25, 2012, 3:00 PM UTC

zakshay wrote: post #58

So its fine for Samsung to copy Apple? But when Samwer Bros copy - there is a huge uproar. You guys should know how it feels when your products are copied.

I find this contradiction quite curious. I think it is because their position is ideological, not logical.

Samwer is evil. Copying another startups look is evil. Google is good (remember their slogan: "Do no evil." how could they be evil?) Apple is bad- and has been forever. The RIAA and MPAA are evil.

So, sometimes copying is good when google does it, but its bad when the samwers do it, and of course they will trumpet any "Example" of apple doing it no matter how disingenuous or dishonest they have to be.

This is more about their personal feelings towards their brands than any kind of logical consistency.