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The Tim Cook memo: line by line

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#284
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, tho…

Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone. Oh, and Apple's vendor lock-in is still a damn sight better than the telco lock-in it replaced (in the US).

The LG Prada : December 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#286
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…

"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.

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#287
post #141

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. 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…

> 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 o…

"Coke is a trade secret" is a shibboleth.

The real value to Coke is the brand, marketing, advertising, and bottling network.

There are numerous versions of the Coke recipe floating around, and seven open source cola recipes ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink) ).

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#288
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"!

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.

http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915.pdf

Re: The Tim Cook memo: line by line

#289
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cause Android is the rest of the industry?

Samsung is not Android. 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.
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