Obama administration vetos Apple iPhone 4, 3G iPad 2 product ban [pdf]

I'm not sure I'm totally on board with this particular intervention as it seems to smack of the potential of favoritism; I'd have to think about that for a while after learning more about the specific case.

What is extremely encouraging is that this is a sign that the highest levels of government understand that patents don't exist for their own sake and are merely a means to an end. When the desired end result isn't reached, intervention is required. That's hopeful.

I know political discussion on HN is frowned upon by some, but I get amused thinking of hypothetical reaction from the president's opponents. This seems to be an action against regulation of business, but it's the Obama administration, therefore... Communism! Apple is in the tank for Obamacare!

What a joke. So good to see the president is finally tackling the patent abuses, by protecting local trolls from a taste of their very own medicine.

(The justification here being that this ban is not "in the interest of the public". If this was considered in ay other cases, we'd all be paying cents for generics from India instead of thousands of millions for the brand version)

Intervening in one case for an iconic American company is protectionism, not free trade. That would have entailed reforming the patent system for everyone.

This is ominous, what if this is remembered as the equivalent of Smoot-Hawley? Patents are a hell of a lot more complex than tariffs... and at least the ITC is trying to do international coordination here, and Obama has just blatantly undermined them.

Seems to me that in the future, companies are going to withhold some of their patents from FRAND even if they would be potentially more useful as FRAND to continue to use them as a weapon. The potential royalties of many of these FRAND patents seem small compared to the damages from infringement.

In fact, it seems the value of a patent is inversely proportional to it's usefulness. A patent which covers a critical wireless protocol component is worth a few pennies and can't be used to get injunctions, but a patent for some rounded corner button can be used to sue for billions.

If you look at the patent trolling going on, a lot of the cases are for really, obvious, trivialities.

While I don't think one should be able to get bans like this, sooner or later, Apple or Microsoft has to lose a patent case in a painful way so they stop trying to shake down competitors. Mutually assured destruction doesn't work if it's not mutual. This ITC case was the closest they've come to experiencing a real threat of pain.