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Google's Top Lawyer: Some Apple Inventions are Commercially Essential, Should Be Made Into Standards
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Apple's rebuttal to Google should be:
Internet search tools are "commercially essential"...but you sure as hell aren't giving Apple, Microsoft, or Yahoo your search algorithms or web crawlers.
Internet search tools are "commercially essential"...but you sure as hell aren't giving Apple, Microsoft, or Yahoo your search algorithms or web crawlers.
You need to switch that around to "many of Apple's patents won't stand up in court, though it's likely some will" if the past is anything to go by. Thus far, Apple's war on the competition hasn't gone well for them on the software patent front.
See, the biggest problem I have with all these patents is that they're not really all that innovative. They all either have prior art, or so obvious an implementation they shouldn't be patented at all. Really, software patents in general are a bad idea, because, by necessity, they lock in the end result rather than just the process.
Like this current patent spat with using multiple databases to search, which I believe is used by Google Now, and has been patented as a part of Spotlight. It doesn't matter that Google probably does it's thing in an entirely different way than Apple's, completely different from their implementation of the idea. All that matters is that Google is searching multiple databases, which can't be done because there's already a software patent for it.
The software patent system isn't fostering innovation, it's outright killing it. Or at least it would be if any software patents managed to hold up in court.
And even worse, Apple isn't well known for licensing their IP. Even though they've licensed tons of patents to make the iPhone, occasionally blatantly copied others, they will not allow any other company access to their patents. It's a "you give to us, and we take. We will not give back" type situation.
Now some of you might argue it's their right to do whatever they want with their IP, but if that's the case, why should they themselves benefit from someone else's hard work and ideas, while denying the entire industry they themselves have culled access to something even remotely resembling one of theirs.
Apple uses their patents not to protect their ideas and benefit from them monetarily, but to stifle and curtail any competition in the market.
From what I can tell the multitouch patent was struck down as well in the US. It was only the slide to unlock patent that was upheld. This isn't just two patents that Google is going after.
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But "Obamanomics University" has much higher ratings than "Tea Party Community College".
Ahh, Tea Party Community College. Where there's one course with a guy point at a board going...
"See this? THIS IS SOCIALISM"!
"What's socialism"?
"I don't know, but by God I'm gonna scream about it".
...then everyone gets an A+ and goes to post on Facebook about wanting to move to Canada because they don't want to live in a country with universal healthcare.
No company should be forced to license their IP. It is their property, after all. Yeah, Apple would prefer that Android didn't infringe than was licensed. So what? They're perfectly to that. Their business model works by providing an unparalleled user experience. It depends on exclusivity, because your user experience won't be unparalleled the moment someone photocopies your UI. That is a perfectly respectable, legally sound business model.
Basically, if Google gets what it wants (and what is says in its letter), competition would cease. Any innovation which becomes popular would be instantly devalued by a multitude of clones.
SEPs are different. The companies holding them made a voluntary agreement when the standard was being created to license them to anyone who asks, without discrimination (precisely to avoid this kind of crap when one company doesn't want to license a competitor because it doesn't rub them the right way).
Apple is asking that SEP holders respect the contracts they've already made.
Google is looking for permission to stop Apple competing with UX, which is a totally unreasonable demand, just because Google can't compete in that area.
Then we would end up with devices that do the exact same thing, and look pretty much exactly the same.
Your example is like socialism. Everyone able to make the same product, pay the same fees and make the same profits.
We live in a capitalist world folks. Like it or not. Monopolies are illegal, but getting as close to it as possible is not. You can't expect any company to spend there capital on research and developement. Create something, then just give it away (even at a price) to others. Remember Mac clones? Jobs ended that. They ate away at real Mac sales. Apple doesn't want ANYONE doing it there way. They have been like that since forever. Apple doesn't share. And I certainly don't want them to start (codec's and web standards, etc aside). I buy Apple products because they work better for me. Their way, as far as I am concerned. Works better. So why as a consumer of there products. Want them to sell there idea's to another company to simply copy? I like that there are other products out there. I don't like that they copy. Come up with your own way of doing things. Maybe I like it better, and buy there products. They are free to do so. If they can't, buy a companies patents (or company), and do it that way. They are free to do so. Like everyone else.
Other software did exist before Apple patented them. So many of the things Apple has patents for now existed on Windows Mobile phones in applications created by random people on the internet or other companies. My god every day I see Apple get a patent for something I had used 5-6 years ago on a Windows Phone let alone a Palm device. Its just out of control.
Apple just feels like since the iPhone revolutionized the smartphone industry, which I agree it did. It made smart phones easy and for the masses. They feel like they own the term smart phone. The problem is they don't. Not even close, they copied so many other devices to get the iPhone where it is today as well. A bunch of copy cats themselves. They stole so many ideas its not even funny.
I can't wait for Apple to take out the iOS5 notification center, so I don't look like I'm biased!
Also, I mean...you know...like it hasn't been explained 10,000 times already in this thread alone, and you've failed to read it for some God knows why reason, Google isn't "photocopying" the UI. The UI for Android is considerably different than iOS. Most of these patent infringements issues aren't even over things you'd normally notice.
Why does this mean Coke should have to make its recipe public? I think it is more like saying Coke should be able to sue Pepsi for making a cola flavored drink.
As far as I know these other companies are spending time to research and develop these things within their own software. It isn't like they are taking lines of code from Apple and copy pasting them into their code.
A lot of these "innovative" ideas were shown in movies as concepts before. I am pretty sure that Minority Report used some sort of pinch to zoom type of thing on their touch screens....so Apple spent hundreds of billions of dollars coming up with a concept for pinch to zoom when it was in movies years before? Ok...
Because a search algorithm took years to develop and code and has a tangible backing. Do you think sliding an icon to unlock something is comparable to the good search engine? Heck I was sliding icons around to unlock things for years in windows applications. Ever hear of an on off switch on a program, slide to the right to turn on, slide to the left to turn off. I feel like that was in visual basic somewhere or in some old video games. Sure apple made it a little different, had to slide it all the way across a touch screen.. but the concept is the same.
Then we would end up with devices that do the exact same thing, and look pretty much exactly the same.
Your example is like socialism. Everyone able to make the same product, pay the same fees and make the same profits.
No it isn't. It isn't at all like Socialism. You'd still have multiple companies competing for your dollar, doing things in different, better ways to try to rise above the competition.
And remember, what these companies are doing isn't wholesale copying each other. It's a similar implementation of a similar idea with similar end results. AND YOU CAN'T PATENT END RESULTS!
Google
So.....how many of THEIR patents is Google willing to give up, or , do they live on a one-way street.
So.....how many of THEIR patents is Google willing to give up, or , do they live on a one-way street.
But Apple doesnt WANT to license the patents for IDevices. That's as silly as expecting Microsoft to Open Source XP and Office 2000 because it's a standard and they don't sell it anymore.
Better yet, let's see what algorithms Google uses (based on open source software), so we can know that they are being truly fair? That's probably more important to society.
It's nothing like that. It's more like "we want to be able to cull results from multiple databases via a software interface, but we can't do that because you've got the patent for it. We'll pay you $500 for the right to it".
Some of you people really, really, really need to read a book or two.
I thought Xerox was going to scrap the GUI anyway.
That would have sucked and wonder where computers would be at this point if they had and Apple and Microsoft didn't pick it up.
Even the voiceover when they show the tablet around the 2:20 mark is incredibly prescient:
- "Tablets will be a whole new class of computer." (yep)
- "They'll weigh under 2 pounds." (iPad: 1.5 lbs)
- "They'll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper." (retina!)
- "They'll be a part of our daily lives..." (yep)
- "We may still use computers to create information, but we'll use the tablet to interact with information." (post PC era)
Well hes wrong anyhow - at least about Apple. Apple gave Xerox lots of money in a mutual agreement (for pre-IPO stock) for in depth access to the PARC STAR system and the guys that designed it (though the way I hear it they werent too happy about it but thats life sometimes). Apple even hired away several Xerox engineers to assist them in making the OS. Of course Xerox PARC never invented the GUI or the mouse, but they did a great job with it without ever selling it.
Jobs saw a lot of potential with the STAR. Xerox sadly was going to abandon it and didnt realize it until Apple commercialized it years later. MS developed Windows after learning about the Mac when they were partnering with Apple. Jobs actually gave MS a lot of their stuff. Thats why they went with the look and feel lawsuit (silly in my book) without patents since their CEO (It wasnt Jobs) that gave MS a ton of rights to the core elements of OSX.
Basically Apple saw what was out there, bought the time of the designers and hired some of them, wrote their own code for a killer OS (at the time) only to have one of the successive CEOs give it all away to MS after Jobs foolishly told them about their next big thing.
I could respond in kind, but it'd be better for me to explain why I think software patents are a bad idea.
See, I think of the patent system as two separate entities. Hardware/physic design patents, and software. Physical design patents are necessary, because they're clear cut, obvious, an strict.
Like, say, Apple invents a way to route circuitry in a specific way through other specific pieces of hardware to save on battery life without any sacrifice to processing power. This is easily patentable. Apple has to show the patent office exactly what they've done in excruciating detail.
...and most importantly, it doesn't give Apple the right to the end result. Google could design a piece of hardware that achieves the same results in an entirely different way, like jigging a wire to the right and routing it through a herdegerder instead of Apple's patented woozit mechanism, and not be infringing on Apple's patent. The end result is the same, but the path there is entirely different.
Then you have software patents. Which are basically people thinking of clever ways to phrase commands to a machine. They're using a preset language to produce results. Because of the specificity of the process of the design, rather than the design itself the end result has to be made a part of the patent. It's not just "we found a clever way to do this", rather "we found a clever way to tell a computer to do this". Why should you get a patent from using an already established language to tell a computer to execute a command? Isn't that what programming languages were invented for? To tell computers to do things?
And then you have UI patents. Sometimes they're justified, sometimes they're completely inane. Like Apple's recent patent on the disappearing scrollbar. That's just...stupid. I can't believe it even passed inspection at the patent office. It's not clever. It's not a completely unprecedented feature of the scrollbar, or even an unheard of feature in the computer world. It's like the dock or Windows taskbar sliding down when not in use...only now for the scroll bar.
Apple knows this, but they went ahead and patented it anyway. Why? Because they're literally trying to patent every single software related thing they can think of, regardless of it's novelty or innovation. If they can think of a neat feature, even one they've seen on another OS previously, they'll patent it if they can, because it's more ammo to be used against the competition later.
What the disappearing scrollbar showed me is that Apple isn't using the patent system, they're abusing it.
Software should only be trademarked and copyrighted. Patenting things like the ability to tell a computer to search multiple databases is like an writer being able to patent an entire genre. It's like a guy going before the court and saying "You see, your honor, my character gets murdered in the first act, with his murder being solved by the climax in the third. Much like my alleged competitor's book, which follows a very similar process to the end. Therefore, he's infringing upon my idea".
Anyway, I'd go more into detail, but it's storming out really bad at the mo, and I want to shut my comp down. But hopefully you can see why I think software patents are bad. They stifle innovation rather than foster it.