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HTC Looking to Strike Deal, Google and Apple Likely to Drive Up Price of Patent Acquisitions
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Revisionist history. Let's look at recent (last few years) Apple products:
1) MBA - rethinking of the laptop, to such a degree that Intel is now creating a whole new product category just to imitate it.
2) iPhone - if you think this didn't redefine the cellphone industry, you're nuts. Almost all smartphones now look and work like the iPhone. It's also had huge impacts on other markets (just ask Nintendo).
3) iPad - every pundit was deriding Apple for not making a netbook - Apple instead attacked the same market with a tablet. They now sell them like hotcakes, and everyone is struggling to catch up.
4) multitouch - not saying they invented it, but they brought it to the mainstream. All their products now support it one way or another, and the OS is increasingly designed around it.
5) airplay - it looks like when OS 5 comes out all you'll need is an iPhone/ipod touch/ipad and an apple tv to do what Nintendo's next generation console can do.
6) iCloud - a rethinking of the cloud (yet to see whether it's successful)
Go back a little further and you have the iTunes store, iPod, etc.
Compare this to APple's early history: Apple ][ after Apple ][, with glacially slow progress. The Mac. Variation after variation of the same mac, in different shaped boxes with more RAM and more bugs. iPod.
Seems to me they've been much more innovative as of late, and we have no idea what else they have up their sleeves (but I have to suspect Apple TV will stop being a hobby at some point).
Yes, the tech industry (mostly Apple) have made a mockery of an already flawed system.
1) ultra thin notebooks were around long before Apple's mba
2) The iphone is not a new product
3) The ipad is not a new product and tablets have been around forever
4) again this is nothing new and Apple didn't invent it although I'm sure they tried to patent it.
5) once again this is nothing new
6) **** the cloud
1976 PC
1984 Mac
2001 iPod
2007 iPhone
2010 iPad
It's been one and a half years since their last major innovation. As you can clearly see, their rate of innovation is actually increasing! And that doesn't include many, many smaller innovations within these product lines. Your expectations are out of touch with reality.
I've always seen there as being two way to run things.
You can either employ brilliant people, and manufacture brilliant items, so that the public want to buy what YOU make as your products are so great.
Or you can be frightened as a company that perhaps others will make better product than you, and you need to find ways to stop them making things.
The latter seems to be the way Apple are thinking now in recent years which is a shame
You can either employ brilliant people, and manufacture brilliant items, so that the public want to buy what YOU make as your products are so great.
Or you can be frightened as a company that perhaps others will make better product than you, and you need to find ways to stop them making things.
The latter seems to be the way Apple are thinking now in recent years which is a shame
I've always seen there as being two way to run things.
You can either employ brilliant people, and manufacture brilliant items, so that the public want to buy what YOU make as your products are so great.
Or you can be frightened as a company that perhaps others will make better product than you, and you need to find ways to stop them making things.
The latter seems to be the way Apple are thinking now in recent years which is a shame
And you base this claim on two or three lawsuits versus large numbers of innovations. Way to try and make the facts fit your point of view.
Do you really think its difficult to copy brilliant ideas? Without the protection of law, Apple's competitors would be able to flood the market before Apple could make a significant percentage of their investment back.
I just hate the way this is escalating now, as it's going to ruin thing for the consumer.
If we'd had all this messing around decades ago, we'd have nothing like the products we enjoy today.
I've no problem with making a trolley with a bracket and patenting that bracket, but Apple seems to want to patent the wheels to stop anyone else making trolleys.
My most strong objection is, it should not be possible to patent something that's just an idea for the future.
You make it, you market it, and you protect it.
You don't employ people to come up with an idea that you can't make, but then protect that idea to stop anyone else being able to make it in the future.
If that is your concern, than Apple shouldn't be your poster boy.
Has Apple sued for anything they haven't implemented? Has Apple attempted to prevent anyone from making "trolley's" (or smartphones)? None of Apple's patents are fundamental to creating a smartphone. You are exaggerating the issues and projecting them on to Apple even though the specifics do no support your claims.
I don't care what precise things apple patent as long as they are not things that in time turn out to be fundamental to that type of product.
As long as it does not harm the public.
I could imagine a scenario where Apple patented the way the grooves were laid down on a vinyl record so only apple records would play back on your Apple record player. We'd not want that.
Or Apple patenting the "H" layout of gears in a manual car. We'd not want that.
That type of stuff.
Proprietary dock connectors and wireless signal formats are something else that hurts the customer.
I don't know if this is true, but say I've bought a Airport Express so I can beam music to my HiFi from my iPhone.
Say my wife buys and Android phone as she likes the look of one, can she also beam her music to our hifi, or I'm guessing that won't work as Apple won't allow it.
So, if this is the case, and I'm just guessing. we the consumer are suffering.
Now you are just saying things at random.
And the meaning of the word suffering has really gone down hill faster than the rise of patent litigation.
If not for the ability to lock people out of using an invention for a limited period of time (i.e. what a patent gives you), there would be no incentive to research things to come up with something new - once Apple (or anyone else) spent all the money to come up with and implement a new idea, competitors could immediately copy it. So Apple would be better off sitting around waiting for MS or Nokia to come up with a great idea and copy it. But, of course, MS and Nokia are also better off sitting around and waiting for someone else to innovate.
This is what patents prevent.
I of course understand it.
But I, like many think that things have got a bit out of hand these days.
God knows what the world would be like now if companies acted in this way, 20, 50, 100 year ago.
We'd have special filling stations for different brand of car.
Radio's that were not allowed to tune into certain frequencies.
Engines that could not use the internal combustion principle.
A million and one things we take for granted that "just work" would not "Just work" if companies acted like they do now many years ago.
As I say, I understand protecting things, to certain degrees, but when companies start claiming things like pressing a button to buy something, then we're going into crazy land.
Apple is constantly applying for (and sometimes getting) some pretty simple and obvious patents that can affect everyone's experience, if withheld from other devices.
The latest one about using different numbers of fingers to scroll areas is a good example. The whole point of multitouch is to allow different numbers of fingers to mean different things. For instance, Google uses two fingers to move in 3D in their Maps program. The idea of using two fingers to scroll a subarea would be one obvious solution to anyone with the need.
Another patent they're trying to get includes using two fingers to simulate a knob turn. Give me a break. The reason others don't apply for such patents is because they are so obvious to anyone skilled in the trade.
Non-method, gesture-only patents like the two above should not be granted... especially since the end result will be to make it harder for users to learn a standardized gesture vocabulary.
Of course there's incentive; software developers research and invent new interface functionality all the time without a thought to stopping anyone else from doing the same. The reason is, software especially relies on learning from and copying others.
But they do that only where doing it is cheap. If massive investment is required, you can bet they'll apply for IP protection. If the costs of development are incremental and the time-for-a-copier-to-get-to-market is just long enough to enable recouping of the expenses, then sure there's incentive. But if you can copy my work the day I put it out there, there's little incentive to do the hard work. Which is probably at least one reason why, frankly, user interfaces aren't all that different than they were 20 years ago.
Wouldn't it be nice if they spent it on innovation, rather than patent purchases and lawsuits?
It seems to me it's a bottomless pit, with Apple and its competitors spending more time and money on acquiring patents for fear of the other side. Wouldn't it be a lot (say, a few billion dollars) cheaper just to sign some kind of patent truce? Naive, I know.
Yep. Blame the courts and Congress.
Frankly, software should not be patentable, and a lot of the patents approved nowadays would not have been approved in years past.
Terrible for innovation and start-ups, but great for established, flush with cash companies and patent attorneys.
If Apple was starting up today, it would have been buried in litigation and strangled long before most of us ever heard of it.
Well, that's really just the beginning, round 1 basically.
Apple recently won a very broad multitouch patent plus the Nortel stuff.
S3 Graphics is peanuts comparatively and a last ditch leverage effort.
To say that Apple has an advantage over HTC now would be an understatement though.
Round 2 will be when Apple files against them on the new patents they got/own.
That "very broad multitouch patent" is not at all what you think. In real life, so far it has only been applied to using two fingers to scroll a subregion on a web page. It wouldn't be a surprise if Motorola adds that to the list of Apple patents they're trying to get overturned.
I don't think anyone here knows much about the Nortel patents. Rumor says they mostly apply to LTE Advanced.
Hold on, he's checking his BlackBerry right now, but he'll get on that lawsuit stuff as soon as he can.
Some of the Nortel stuff is applicable to GSM, HSDPA/HSUPA, and 802.11 (by "applicable to " I mean "someone could try to assert it against").
I think the point is that that doesn't necessarily hold in this case. While the design is unique to each manufacturer, they all include parts from virtually the same suppliers. So their patents and IP is falling in the realm of "this is how to use this" rather than "this is a new piece of custom technology that we invested heavily in." It's the difference between buying an off the shelf noise cancelling chip to include in your SoC along slapping a second microphone in your device and developing your own noise cancelling chip or installing a microphone and doing it entirely in software.
Most of the stuff happening in the handset market is very derivative and slightly evolutionary each time.
But the reason those parts with new technology exist is because of patents. It costs a lot of money to R&D a chip or an LCD screen. And, despite your argument that Apple just buys stuff off the shelf (which isn't really the case except in a few areas), they spend a lot of money on R&D - where do you think that money goes? It ain't just 600 engineers trying to figure out the right shade of black to use.
No, but the originator of those technologies are sufficiently protecting their IPs. That's not the issue here.
At this stage, companies like Apple add the real value by being system integrators, and thus, they reap the highest margins from their creations. That's why it seems petty that they'd take patents out on common solutions that everyone is implementing.
It's a pretty amazing coincidence that these "common solutions that everyone is implementing" only become "common solutions that everyone is implementing" after Apple has implemented them first.