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Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

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Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#381
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems similar to me. Lots of rounded rect products existed before iPhone. Like say, cassette tapes, vhs tapes, 8track tapes, bars of soap, cans of spam, license plates, sardine cans, etc...

> Lots of rounded rect products existed before iPhone. The design patent is very specific. It isn't about rounded corners in general. Patent (incl. prior art): http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1701443/USD670286S1.pdf How to think about it: https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rec...

Did you read the patent or the article you linked? The patent is very specifically regarding the highlighted region of the patent application, which is (strictly speaking) just a general rounded corner device. Although an IP case would probably hinge on it being a full screen touch device, as well; so "rounded corner phones, tablets, touch interfaces, etc", if you want to be really charitable to the patent + Apple.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#382
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no doubt we will see them attempting to aggressively exercise these in future years to shut down alternatives to Vision Pro in the future. Do you have examples where apple has aggressively used patents offensively like this?

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Litigation_involving_Apple_Inc > March 2010 Apple vs HTC: Apple's suit alleged 20 separate patent infringements relating to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. Steve Jobs exclaimed "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it" The ITC rejected all but one of Apple's claims > July 2008 Apple Inc. vs Psysta…

> sold Intel-based systems with Mac OS X pre-installed and that, in so doing, violated Apple's copyright a

This doesn’t seem at all like a relevant example. Psystar was engaging in for profit piracy patents are secondary here

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#383

All these intellectual property lawsuits look like an economic loss overall. The laws don’t work as intended if they aimed to encourage innovation

The laws are supposed to reward Masimo for their innovation by Apple paying them an appropriate licensing fee. Apple decided to circumvent that by milking them for IP in a feigned acquisition attempt and then headhunting their engineers and are going to be punished financially for not rewarding innovation. The law is working as intended.

> reward Masimo for their innovation

Except there doesn’t seem to be particularly innovative about those patents. Masimo just excepts to be rewarded for filling them..

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, but it sure looks like masimo's "innovation" is filing the patent paperwork for the general concept of how pulse oximeters have always worked, not anything new they invented. filing patents for something you didn't invent is not the law working as intended.

If that was the only innovation, why would Apple go and have several meetings with them and then try to hire their engineers? Sounds like they had something that Apple wanted, and Apple decided not to pay for it. This case is the result, which certainly will be settled at some point.

Well they might have seen the patents and just had meetings because of that.

> with them and then try to hire their engineers

This doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant. Apple was trying to entire a new field so they hired people who already work in it

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all wear-able devices that use light to measure attributes from your blood stream require a license from the holders of this patent? It's really no surprise that businesses don't try to compete with each other in the "free market" and quasi-monopolies reign supreme. Chances are you're going to be seen as eating somebody's lunch somehow if you try to sell anything. I suppose you could argue that it's Apple violatin…

I think there are many problems with the patent system but the way you are describing it is overly broad. There are lots of technical details in this patent that describe a way of doing that. Once the period of exclusivity is up anyone can use that technique freely - but for now other people would have to pay or use an inferior technique that doesn't violate the patent. Arguably there's not a lot of value in every de…

> inventors temporary monopolies on truly new things.

Sure. But this doesn’t seem to be particularly relevant in this case? It’s not really a truly new thing and hardly an invention at all

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws are supposed to reward Masimo for their innovation by Apple paying them an appropriate licensing fee. Apple decided to circumvent that by milking them for IP in a feigned acquisition attempt and then headhunting their engineers and are going to be punished financially for not rewarding innovation. The law is working as intended.

> reward Masimo for their innovation Except there doesn’t seem to be particularly innovative about those patents. Masimo just excepts to be rewarded for filling them..

This seems to be an uninformed opinion. Masimo has been on the cutting edge of pulse-oximetry for decades, and figuring out how to make a low power wrist pulse-oximeter is non-trivial.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#387
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I obviously know it is legal to refuse to license, that's the problem. If your whole argument is "it should be legal to refuse to license a patent", I don't know why you went down the whole "They aren't refusing to license the patent" route.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I haven't made any arguments. I asked you a question.

Sorry, I didn't pay enough attention to usernames. caminante argued that the company is willing to license the patent ("How does this statement reject a willingness to license" etc) and I didn't notice that you're not caminante. My bad.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#388
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some nuance here. I like trademarks which disallow other companies than Apple from selling products called “Apple Watch” or other companies than Samsung from selling “Samsung Galaxy S” series phones. And I like that if I make a piece of music or some art or whatever, some giant company can’t just grab that and use it for profit without making some arrangement with me. But intellectual property goes way too f…

I carefully and intentionally included trademark. And copyright. > I like trademarks which disallow other companies than Apple from selling products called “Apple Watch” or other companies than Samsung from selling “Samsung Galaxy S” series phones. Why? It only serves companies to help them become larger companies. If you think it helps customers understand what they're buying, consider: customers are basically obliv…

I don't know dude, I sometimes know what product I wanna buy and I enjoy that I can more or less trust that among reputable stores, a product carrying the name and logo of the product I wanna buy is the product I wanna buy.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some narrow cases I see the value in patents motivating financial investment in original research. But most of the time this does not apply. Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents. Virtually everything humans create or “disc…

Your LLMs need a reward function -> patents. You are welcome

1) Train an LLM to be a patent judge (should be easy enough).

2) Train another LLM to throw patents at the first LLM and see what sticks.

3) Profit.

Re: Apple to halt Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sales in the US this week

#390
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes companies have poison pill provisions and similar that makes it veeeeery expensive to do a hostile takeover.

Expensive for Apple? This is a $17 billion annual revenue product category for them. Masimo's market cap is $6 billion.

> $17 billion annual revenue

Only a proportion of that is net income

> market cap is $6 billion.

Even if > 50% enough stocks are on the market how much do you think Apple would end up paying $12 billion? $16? $20? $25?

How many years would it take them to earn that back?

You can’t really buy companies directly on the stock market, the price will just start going up exponentially.

Also they’d be rewarding patent trolls which creates incentives for other companies to behave the same way so that Apple would acquire them

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