Posts by Steve Todd 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Sep 2007
The FTC has already asked the ITC not to issue exclusion orders based on FRAND patents, a call backed up by most of the mobile industry. HTC bought the patents in question from a company who was involved in the standards setting process, but hadn't declared them. On that basis they should either be required to be FRAND or ruled invalid.
Pandora et al exist because they can take a compulsory radio licence. The music companies don't like this, but they have to live with it. If Apple negotiate their own license with the labels it will have no effect on the scope of compulsory licenses and what is allowed to be done with them.
>Even a "crappy trial version of Office" means that a Windows box can edit Word docs out of the box.
It's not a default item that is shipped with Windows, some OEMs do, some don't, and it will stop working. That's hardly a major plus point.
>Really? Handy for email on my better half's ipad.
What are you on about? Out of the box iOS can speak directly to Exchange mail servers. It will also speak to POP and IMAP servers so most normal people's need for email is covered nicely.
>Well, that's nice for you. For those of us who have files on other platforms it would be handy to be able to access them.
So you've narrowed the use case down to f*ckwits who can't be bothered to copy a file from one folder to another on their desktop machine and are now complaining that they have to spend a couple of quid on an app instead?
>If you don't mind having to use the web browser or mail tool built into their print tool. WTF?
You've honestly never used AirPrint have you? HP printers appear as selectable printers direct from within iOS apps. Tell the app to print and out it comes, no emails to be sent, web browsers to be used, drivers to be installed or anything.
>> or you can just enable printer sharing on a desktop Mac, again for free.
>Great. Where can I get these free desktop Macs?
If you're a Mac user then you already have one. If you're a Windows user you can do your own homework and find an AirPrint server for that (and yes, they do exists).
>Windows manages to have a Solitaire game bundled in. As I keep being told by fanbois that Apple is better, where is the bundled Solitaire on an ipad?
So your argument comes down to "any machine that comes without bundled Office and Solitaire is useless", that's a pretty narrow and unenlightened use case you have there. BTW, how many Android devices come bundled with Solitaire?
He said that the Kindle was the better reading device, that the iPad was a better tablet and Androids fall between the two (mostly for the wrong reasons), which seems to be pretty fair comment.
As for what constitutes good battery life on a Kindle, the current generation last for a month on a charge, the new ones double that. Edinburgh to Birmingham is how far? Call it 5 hours of driving, that's not even impressive by Android tablet standards.
You've never bought a Windows PC? Guess what, it doesn't edit Word documents by default (unless it comes with a crappy trial version of Office that will stop working). Does that make Windows bad?
Office compatibility isn't normally the reason why people want a tablet, so Apple settled for leaving that to 3rd parties.
Network shares? Don't need them, got Dropbox for that, and it's free.
Printing to a networked printer? HP printers require no software at all. Other manufacturers have to produce their own apps (which are mostly free, Samsung's certainly is) as HP seem to have a patent on that protocol, or you can just enable printer sharing on a desktop Mac, again for free.
Android free apps don't have adverts in them too? You're pulling my plonker.
With the cost of development compared to the income from the app.
iOS is cheaper to develop for simply because you need less devices to test on. At the same time developers make more money from the Apple App Store (both in sales and advertising), partly because Apple owners buy more apps and partly because they are prepared to spend money (which seems to be an issue for Android owners).
It's pretty simple from the above why a company would want to start with an iOS version of an app and then move it to Android if they feel like it later.
Er, how is a different dock connector going to effect what software it will run? Fragmentation is about that and the many Android versions that developers have to worry about, and to a lesser extent variations in CPU and GPU hardware, not whether said device has a 30 pin connector, mini or micro USB.
40 isn't even trying. I got 49 down votes for having the timmerity to point out that the motor car was patented when it was invented, and that modern cars contain many patented parts. That hasn't lead to lack of competition in the marketplace but the idea seems to drive them insane.
Best as I can figure out it translates as :
RANT, RAGE, I HATE APPLE.
Anyone who buys the iPhone 5 is stupid, I'm going to prove this by buying half a dozen Android phones.
It doesn't answer the question of why you would want half a dozen Android phones or why decently specced devices are little if any cheap than the iPhone.
Part of the defence of each company was that the patents of the other weren't valid for assorted reasons (prior art being the obvious one). The jury had to decide if those arguments were valid or not, but not to consider the philosophical question of patentability. The assumption was that, under the current rules, the patent was grant-able but could be invalidated with the right evidence.
You're not understanding what FRAND is. It's a voluntary commitment by a company involved in the standards setting process. Most standards require that any IP used in the standard must be free or available under FRAND terms so that the owners can't hold the market hostage.
You can't force a company to make its patents FRAND just because a particular technology is popular and lots of people are copying it.
You're really going to have to read wider than Groklaw if you want to understand the Samsung-Apple case properly. The jury DID consider the validity of all of the patents in question (both Apple's and Samsung's) and decided that both sets of patents were valid, but only Apple's patents were infringed. This has been made clear in multiple interviews.
Genius? That obviously is a statement that can't be applied to you.
1) you can engineer your way around pretty well any patent. It requires though and innovation but it can be done.
2) patents expire after a limited time. Even if Benz held all the patents for cars the best he would have had was a 25 year head start on the market. As it was he charged a fairly hefty fee to other manufacturers to use his patents (and yes, Benz DID have patents on his car) and the motor industry seems pretty competitive today (even though there is lots of patented technology in almost any car you care to mention).
You don't just hand the patent office a filled in form that they rubber stamp. The FIRST thing they do is search the patent database to see if the same claims have already been filed. Re-filing your own expired patent would be both stupid beyond imagining and liable to get you arrested for perjury
Here we go again. Those ideas were all patented and are now public domain. Samsung can either wait for that to happen for Apple's patents or engineer their way around them like Google are. Are you trying to say that Samsung employs a bunch of incompetents who are unable to do this?
And more inaccuracies come along on cue. Adobe open-sourced PDF but wanted quite a lot of money to use Display Postscript. Leveraging PDF to do the job of Display Postscript was completely within the rules, and Adobe's fault for making it a positive disadvantage to continue with Display Postscript.
ODBC = Open Database Connectivity, it's a Microsoft standard so even if you ignore the Open bit then Apple have a cross licence. You don't have to use Apple's version (they've stopped shipping it even) but most modern software doesn't try to abstract the SQL engine anyway, preferring the performance of native drivers.
Python? A new version of an OS screwing up a dev environment doesn't imply malice, and newer versions of Python work quite happily.
Once again, Apple are far from perfect, but they contribute some popular widely used components to the open source community, which is more than can be said for a company like Samsung.
Ignoring for a moment the technical inaccuracies (OS X is based on Mach UNIX, Apple paid Xerox for the idea of WIMP interfaces etc), the idea that Apple don't contribute back to the public domain is wrong on two fronts. Firstly they have active PD projects that they contribute to (WebKit, CLANG and OpenCL to name a few), and secondly as Andrew states, any patented method becomes PD when the patent expires.
There are many much worse companies out there, but the idea that someone would attack the sacred cow of an open source project is what seems to have got Richard and people like him all riled up. This carefully ignores the fact that there are big businesses making lots of money off of this project, and in Samsung's case changing it to be MORE like Apple's products. Open source per se isn't under attack, just the idea that it shouldn't follow the same rules as commercial projects when it comes to IP infringement.
You do nothing BUT come up with negative comments about Apple, few of them with any real merrit. Here you are attempting to use a completely different case to prove that the California verdict was unfair or wrong. There IS no such linkage. Now back where you belong.
It was about content synchronisation, which I suspect is Google original code, and Apple's patent was ruled not to be infringed rather than not valid.
Nothing to do with it being in America or not or racial bias (the Japanese aren't fond of the Koreans in case you know nothing if the regional politics). Now pipe down and get back under your bridge.
Apple isn't a member of the DNLA consortium, and vested interests have made that standard an unworkable mess. How are Apple supposed to come along and magically fix it?
Apple have a track record of including their IP in public standards where they think that one is required (h264, OpenCL etc) but the rest of the industry has to agree to it also. If DNLA can't muster the will to sort out what they've got then there's fat chance of getting industry-wide approval, so Apple are doing their own thing.
Ah yes, Groklaw, that highly impartial (read: rabidly partisan in Samsung's favour) organ.
Try watching the full interview that the foreman gave Bloomberg ( http://www.bloomberg.com/video/jury-foreman-discusses-apple-samsung-trial-verdict-ikNjTofgRRecKM4cFXZoZA.html ), from which Groklaw cherry pick in an attempt to prove the verdict wrong. It ain't going to happen.
You were trying to claim that the Apple Store, as the retailer you purchased from, owed you a free two year warranty. O2, the people you actually had the contract with, offered you a replacement, but at a speed you weren't happy with. O2's problem not Apple's. I suspect that the amount of out-of-warranty support that people get is inversely proportional to how aggressive they get at the shop.
Try reading what I wrote. A normal (non design) patent requires a working device. A design patent has to look like the prior art, and the jury said that Samsung's devices for the most part didn't look like Apple's so Star Trek props (which look nothing like either) have no chance of being counted.
You need a real, working device for prior art on a standard patent, and from a design standpoint non of the Star Trek devices were much like an iPad (don't forget that the jury decided that Samsung's wildly over-simplified "rounded rectangle" description wasn't what Apple's design covered).
Patents have a limited lifespan. Anything patented over 25 years ago (20 in some counties, including utility patents in the US) is out of patent. The data detector patents that Apple used against HTC were filed back in 1996, they will expire in 2016.
Other companies can innovate (find their own unique solution to the problem), licence the patent or wait for it to expire when they can use it for free.
Except that OS X isn't BSD, it's Mach Unix with BSD user apps. The whole core OS is still open source and freely downloadable (go look up Darwin). The license that this is based on allows closed source extensions, which is what Apple did with their Coca GUI framework. It's that framework, modified for mobile work in Coca Touch, that is the innovation in mobile phones, unless you are saying that you can't innovate unless you build your own OS from the ground up (which limits the field rather).
Would want to hand a competitor the rights to copy their non-standards essential designs. The high price was Apple saying "we really don't want you to do this" and Samsung's other option was to engineer them out (which Google have for the most part done with stock Android). Samsung went out of their way to infringe here.
@paul Shirley
You're conflating two different issue. Firstly excluded evidence. Under the rules Samsung were late in introducing it and it is perfectly valid for it to be withheld. We're not talking about criminal law here, both parties had plenty of time to do their homework and Samsung didn't suddenly find the F700 in their sock drawer. Apple also had plenty of evidence excluded so no, this didn't show bias and is unlikely to be grounds for a successful appeal.
Secondly your idea of what establishes unreasonable behaviour on the juries part is sadly limited. It has to be pretty extreme before it will be overturned. Saying things like they skipped the written instructions isn't that extreme (they had been given verbal instructions by the judge already), providing that they considered the evidence in an impartial way and gave a finding based on honest opinion then they are probably OK.
Perhaps you don't understand the concept of a patent. A patent holder has the exclusive right to use or license an invention for its life span. Other companies are free to find another way of doing the same thing (Google seem to be doing just fine with this) but Apple's documented solutions are protected by law.
In some circumstances it is useful for a patent to be used by the whole industry to allow interoperability. In that case the owner must commit the patent to be licensed under FRAND terms (Fair, Reasonable And Non Discriminatory) for the rest of the industry to agree to that common use. Apple have patents that are included in industry standards in this way, like h264.
@sabroni - another reading comprehension failure. There were two basic issues at stake in the case. One was physical appearance, Samsung copying Apple's case design and packaging. The jury said for the most part, no Samsung didn't copy this. The other issue was about software behaviour and appearance. Standard Android isn't covered by these claims. Samsung could re-release the offending devices with stock Android and Apple couldn't do a thing about it.
All Samsung had to do to avoid the case completely was to avoid putting features into TouchWiz that were covered by Apple patents. They had to go out of their way to add them. Android either didn't have them or removed them from later versions. I challenge you to find any other big company that would sit still while patented features were being copied by a competitor.
What ARE you yammering about? The existence of touch screens wasn't prior art, what was needed was devices that used gestures that covered the patented work. Pinch to zoom (which Samsung lawyers tried to say was like resizing the borders of a Windows window - that's about 180 degrees from what it is), bounce back when you scroll past the end of a document etc.
Touch screen PCs are, for the most part, dumb ideas. In specialist roles like help kiosks then fine, but spending the whole day reaching out to your screen? I can see EXACTLY why Windows 1.x didn't support it.
A month being paid eff all to listen to lawyers drone on about technicalities made them in no way keen to get the job over and done with.
Unfortunately for Samsung the test is "no reasonable jury" would have made the decision that they did, and judges are loathed to overturn jury decisions. Unless the verdict was grossly unfair and obviously wrong (and a million screaming fanboys doesn't make it so) it will probably stand.
was actually about? Not a lot from the evidence to date.
In a nutshell it was about TouchWiz, Samsung's custom Android skin. The Galaxy Nexus, with stock Android isn't covered. 3 of the 28 devices were also found to infringe Apple's design patents, but the big win was over stuff that Samsung had added to TouchWiz. Killing TouchWiz will have no effect whatsoever on Android, put your paranoid fantasies back in their box.
Yes, compaq had the iPaq long before the iPhone, but it ran Windows CE like many early smart phones which was basically desktop Windows cut to fit with a single point touch sensor. Apple had the Newton before that. Neither are relevant to this case, which is about multi-touch gestures and animation metaphors which are well beyond that kind of tech.
@jbernardo, oh come on, Groklaw has been about as rabidly pro Samsung in this case as it is possible to get. There is no way you can regard them as a neutral source.
Once again, the Forman gains no advantage by finding for Apple. It doesn't make any challenge to his own patent more or less likely to succeed, and he was only one of nine that had to agree that the patent was both valid and infringed. He suggested an approach for their method of deciding this, but the other members had to agree to that and come to the same decision on the result.
I'll agree that there are signs that the jury was getting sick of the whole proceeding and rushed some of the form filling, but the basic finding seems about right to me. The design patents weren't found as broad as Apple's lawyers wanted, the damages were far less than Apple were hoping for but still sizable, non of Samsung's patents were invalidated and the principles of FRAND were left intact. Not a great day for Samsung but there was plenty of evidence of deliberate copying for them to fight against. If they hadn't skinned Android then most of the software claims wouldn't exist, and Google were warning them about infringement with the Galaxy Pad.
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