The hubris here isn’t simply about patents, it’s about entering the medical devices field. Apple has rolled over a million patents probably.
But the medical industry has lawyers as good as yours and bottomless pockets.
US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
81–90 of 173 posts
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#82Apple loves to bully competitors and suppliers with both patents and app store. I doubt being on the other end of this will make them change their behaviour.
Outside of fights with huge corps like Qualcomm, do you have any examples of Apple going after small companies over to patent infringement?
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#83What no one's mentioned here is: this is an International Trade Commission ruling, not a US court or PTO ruling. So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.
Can we still manufacture electronics here, even if we wanted to? I thought all the expertise and machinery was outsourced a long time ago?
We can manufacture electronics here, though the exact details of the Apple Watch are probably not easy to accommodate. (The manufacturing engineers knew it would be built in China, so they chose parts and processes that are mature there. For example, if the requirement was for all the parts to be made in the US, then it would probably use an Intel chip, since those are made in the US. It probably wouldn't get 2 days of battery life if they used one of those, however.)
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a chance. This is likely Apple exhausting options before it settles into a licensing deal. First you try cease-and-desist, then appeals, then settlement, then import restriction negotiation, etc. Obviously Apple does not want to pay a fee per watch for the technology. They say they're going to try to fix it in software, Masimo says it's a hardware thing. Apparently this whole thing happened because Masimo sta…
It's also happening because after some failed negotiations Apple just straight up started poaching employee talent from Massimo.
This is a good thing. It increases salaries for everyone. If Apple can make more money with your ideas than Massimo, why shouldn't they be allowed to pay you more?
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also happening because after some failed negotiations Apple just straight up started poaching employee talent from Massimo.
This is a good thing. It increases salaries for everyone. If Apple can make more money with your ideas than Massimo, why shouldn't they be allowed to pay you more?
Masimo made investments into R&D. They payed salaries to researchers to create new products and got awarded a patent for that investment. If the employees knew they were onto something big, they should've started a company or negotiated higher salaries before the patent was filed. If you want the reward, you have to take the risk.
Apple sits on heaps of cash and could have done the same.
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do not. Massimo's relevant patents have to do with their signal processing on user-worn devices. Cheap oximeters are clip-ons that only do rudimentary processing with strong beams of light through the fingers. https://www.masimo.com/technology/co-oximetry/set/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en (this is one that was cited by the trade commission.)
Patent laws really are so strange. Two people had an idea in 1989 (over a decade before I was born) and as a result, I am not allowed to build a product using that idea and sell it, even if I independently reached the idea myself. I think in an ideal world, we would have intellectual rights and patents, but for a vastly reduced scope of time. You come up with an amazing breakthrough that will alter the world? Congrat…
Your second paragraph is how patents already work, and you can't patent an idea, only specific inventions. Sometimes patents for ideas slip through the cracks and sometimes patents get extended without a good reason, but these are not problems with the idea of a patent itself.
What you're arguing against is corruption, not patents.
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was no partnership as far as I know. Masimo met with Apple's M&A team, they didn't do a deal, then Apple hired Masimo employees to do it themselves. This complaint of Apple meeting with some company and then stealing their technology is the narrative put forward by every company or VC that meets with Apple and doesn't result in an acquisition. As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, kn…
> As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc. That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!" It's an argument toward the standing of the patent(s?), not a complaint of unfair trade practices.
> That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!"
This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation. So of course you're going to hire them if you can.
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
HTC probably lost out on billions due to this
HTC practically ceased to exist as a consumer facing company in the West due to this. I don't know of any hardware they've produced recently outside of their partnership with Valve on VR, and they're not the face of that relationship.
HTC probably lost the phone game due to Samsung existing more than anything else.
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#89I've seen tons of articles/posts about this recently, but does anyone have any links to any good articles that describe the patent(s) in question, and what the arguments are about (a) whether this patent is truly novel (I've heard tons of "pulse oximetry is decades old" arguments, but nothing about the specifics of these patents) and (b) whether Apple is or isn't infringing on the specific details?
I'm sure this kind of analysis must be out there, but I searched through a couple of posts and lots of comment threads and primarily saw a lot of conjecture but no actual references to what was really under debate.
Re: US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect
#90What no one's mentioned here is: this is an International Trade Commission ruling, not a US court or PTO ruling. So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.
Can we still manufacture electronics here, even if we wanted to? I thought all the expertise and machinery was outsourced a long time ago?
> Can we still manufacture electronics here, even if we wanted to? I thought all the expertise and machinery was outsourced a long time ago?
Yes. There's a bunch of industries that either can't or don't bother manufacturing in China. The majority of the military industrial complex and much of the biotech/medical equipment industry, among many others. The former for natsec reasons and the latter because even after 20 years QC is still a shitshow.
The problem is how spread out the industrial capacity is. In Shenzhen you can walk from the factory to a giant bazaar with every electronic part you could think of available to buy then and there in reel quantities. You can walk to any of hundreds of other factories and talk to the people on the floor to help design parts for their process. When the part is ready, they can courier it over to you within an hour.
The cost of labor doesn't help either but at Apple scale, US companies would figure it out.