I will never buy an Apple product again.
Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's wrong because Apple isn't simply protecting their IP, they're waging a litigious war against a legitimate competitor in hopes that the courts will give them the edge in the marketplace and not their superior products.
They are using the legal system - an important part of modern business. I can assure you in economies with inefficient or nonexistent legal systems, things get much worse and doing business is next to impossible. Should apple not do this? This is hardball, we're talking billions... and they know they have a limitied window to take advantage of this before they have to continue. They'll make more than the hundred mill…
> Are the patents absurd? Blame the patent system, not Apple for using it.
I think viewpoints differ largely at this point. While I agree that Apple has every right to use any and all legal ways to defend itself and potentially harm competitors; given that everyone is aware of the absurdity of majority of patents, it does seem wrong to use them offensively. There is no law against being douch-stupid-ignorant; laws are not always moral/right - they follow morality only slowly and caters to only the most easiest morality questions. Rationality allows Apple to do whatever it can, only the current morality doesn't.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#53When you work for a company that does this, you owe it to your integrity to resign. The government is too incompetent to fix this mess, and market pressure isn't going to do it either. That leaves us, the actual engineers. It's our job to tell the companies we work for that litigating instead of competing isn't acceptable.
Since you work at Google I am assuming you're going to resign as well ? Because the FRAND abuses originated by Motorola and supported by Google is some of the most disgraceful behaviour seen in the industry since the days of Rambus. You don't participate in the creation of a standard and then turn around and sue companies who adopt those standards in good faith. It undermines the entire industry. If other companies h…
"Because the FRAND abuses originated by Motorola and supported by Google is some of the most disgraceful behaviour seen in the industry since the days of Rambus. You don't participate in the creation of a standard and then turn around and sue companies who adopt those standards in good faith. It undermines the entire industry."
You do if you're grasping at straws to defend yourself against the initial patent aggressors. Can't really blame them.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since you work at Google I am assuming you're going to resign as well ? Because the FRAND abuses originated by Motorola and supported by Google is some of the most disgraceful behaviour seen in the industry since the days of Rambus. You don't participate in the creation of a standard and then turn around and sue companies who adopt those standards in good faith. It undermines the entire industry. If other companies h…
"Because the FRAND abuses originated by Motorola and supported by Google is some of the most disgraceful behaviour seen in the industry since the days of Rambus. You don't participate in the creation of a standard and then turn around and sue companies who adopt those standards in good faith. It undermines the entire industry." You do if you're grasping at straws to defend yourself against the initial patent aggresso…
No you absolutely, unequivocally do not. Under any circumstance.
Because it sets an example where every tiny little contributor to a standard can hold every implementer at ransom. It would be the unravelling of the entire IT industry.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a whole HN thread throwing up prior art about the linkification patent (and also on Reddit). Linkification was being done in the '80s, based on one of the programs that someone managed to scrounge up in the thread, and the '90s as well. No patents issued - people just did it. The fact that these programs were written tells us that software writers innovate regardless of whether patents are issued for their…
Thanks. I have my own negative opinions about software patent novelty, I just wanted to point out that it was somewhat unique on smart phones.
I had a Sony smartphone running some sort of Symbian OS which did just this well before the iphone came out.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I have my own negative opinions about software patent novelty, I just wanted to point out that it was somewhat unique on smart phones.
Suffixing an old idea with "on smart phones" is not innovation, even if you do it first.
I disagree. I think it can be innovation, but find the idea of protecting that innovation ridiculous.
The question of if something is orthogonal to the question of if something deserves protection.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
So apple should be off the hook for innovation once it's released a product and gained a "market position"? I'm sorry but I'm always going to have trouble with the idea of a company resting on its laurels, yet bringing continual revenue in year after year after year because a piece of government paper says that no one else is allowed to do anything remotely resembling what that company is doing since they got there f…
> So apple should be off the hook for innovation once it's released a product and gained a "market position"? I don't see evidence that Apple is resting on their laurels, but I do remember what happened with Mac OS and Windows back in the 80s/early 90s. > "A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data." Last I checked federated search has had a wikipedia article since 2005. Hardly seems like innovation…
It's a one-line description of a patent. I have no idea what it actually covers, do you?
This argument frequently pops up in discussions of some patent troll action.
While patents are always more specific than a one sentence description, when you read the patent claims, the extra bits that make the patent more specific are not the interesting part of the patents. That's why one-sentence descriptions exist; they distill the interesting novel parts of the patent and leave all the other crud out.
More importantly, how are we to know that it's impossible to develop devices with equivalent functionality not covered by patent, functionality that users will accept and will not result in lower marketshare? Companies expose themselves to 3 times the damages if they go looking for patents covering devices they want to make, and find one. "Then they shouldn't release the product then." Really? In the break-neck development cycle of modern handheld devices, it is not possible to challenge a patent that looks invalid before developing the product.
How can such a system hope to function properly?
The entire patent system is broken, and arguing that patents are more complex or specific than the summaries ("one click checkout", "slide to unlock") is true, but irrelevant.
I see prior art for slide to unlock: A door bolt. Apple would argue, and the USPTO and courts would probably agree, that translating the idea from a physical moving bolt to a virtual bar on a touchscreen device is novel and not obvious and therefore it's patentable, but distinctions like that don't seem important to me.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably, forcing other company's to innovate could be a Good thing. Is a rectangle with rounded edges the one and only perfect tablet shape? I don't know, but if everyone just copy's the iPad it's going to take a even longer to find out. The windows tiles may or may not be an advance, but they are clearly not a row of buttons just like the 1st gen iPhone and 2 out of every 3 smart phones that followed.
>The windows tiles may or may not be an advance, but they are clearly not a row of buttons just like the 1st gen iPhone and 2 out of every 3 smart phones that followed. Well I owned three phones back in 2002-2006 which had rows to buttons and were not iPhone. I get that iPhone is a great phone but please give credit where its due. Even BB had rows of button.
I know the iPhone was not the first phone that had icon's like that, however the Black Berry and Windows phone had both buttons and a menu interface. Which IMO is better than the early iPhone style page interface when you have lot's of icons. Apple ended up improving things by adding folders, but I did notice a lot of other phones that IMO copy'd the bad design elements of the early iPhone simply because it was so popular.
Edit: Not that iPhone was the first to use those elements, just that they where copying whatever the leader did. If windows phone starts to win I expect a switch to a lot of 'tile' interfaces.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So apple should be off the hook for innovation once it's released a product and gained a "market position"? I don't see evidence that Apple is resting on their laurels, but I do remember what happened with Mac OS and Windows back in the 80s/early 90s. > "A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data." Last I checked federated search has had a wikipedia article since 2005. Hardly seems like innovation…
It's a one-line description of a patent. I have no idea what it actually covers, do you? This argument frequently pops up in discussions of some patent troll action. While patents are always more specific than a one sentence description, when you read the patent claims, the extra bits that make the patent more specific are not the interesting part of the patents. That's why one-sentence descriptions exist; they disti…
If modeling parts of a touchscreen device after the real world is novel then I deserve about 50 patents.
Re: Judge grants Apple an injunction against the Galaxy Nexus
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, they're trying to prevent Windows 95 all over again.
Preventing Windows 95 would have been great for consumers, because competition is bad.
Actually, it would have been good because competition is good, and Microsoft proceeded to sew up the market as a monopoly for decades, using a slew of underhanded tricks to do so, and grossly undermining the position of the primary innovator who held a far better product. It wasn't until Windows 2K that MS even began to catch up to Apple's work, and then Apple leapfrogged with the NeXT purchase.