Gruber, almost alone in a sea of reporting, manages to mention Apple's action here may be related to Nokia's patent suit against Apple.
So rewind a bit, to put this in context:
- Apple accuses HTC of iPhone tech theft (2 March 2010)
- Kodak prompts ITC to consider iPhone ban (18 February 2010)
- Motorola seeks ban on US BlackBerries (26 January 2010)
- Nokia sues Apple, says iPhone infringes ten patents (22 October 2009)
One test for patents' validity is whether the company is enforcing them. With Kodak, Sony, Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and others suing one another as a business-as-usual step in licensing negotiations, the value of Apple's defensive patent portfolio at the licensing negotiation table depends in part on Apple's perceived willingness to stand behind the validity of their portfolio and enforce their patents.
I'd suppose this is a signal to the marketplace not that competitors should create their own original technology, but that if they want to copy, they should license or trade.
Could you point to a reference of patent validity tests which includes enforcement? The three tests, "utility, novelty, and non-obviousness", seem to be the standard ones.
Perhaps you are confusing patent law with trademark law, which does require enforcement?
Very insightful, it shines a different light on the spirit with which these filings were made. One thing that's hard to see in a different light though, is how angry Steve Jobs sounds in his quote.
I have to admit; I find myself agreeing vehemently with Gruber, PG and everyone else Gruber cited. Patents are typically defense weaponry. Your attack weapons are moving fast, innovating and implementing something.
Software patents are broken, and Apple's decision to whip out it's massive portfolio and start smacking people with it stinks of the "We want no phone inspired by the iPhone's design to exist", which (in my mind) isn't what patents are for in the first place - not to mention doing this is just, well, wrong.
The iPhone's concept revolutionized the handheld industry - and sure, if someone blatantly ripped it off, Apple does have a right to go after that company - but the HTC phones are simply "inspired by" - they're not clones, and while they have a lot of "features" which smack of the iphone, they're not replicas.
I'm an avid Mac user, own an iPhone - and I'll probably buy an iPad (still), but I for one want to see this suit fail horribly, or for Apple to withdraw it.
"I'm an avid Mac user, own an iPhone - and I'll probably buy an iPad (still), but I for one want to see this suit fail horribly, or for Apple to withdraw it."
Again, this is the reason why Apple will not change its ways. I wish people who speak out against Apple would back up their words with action.
When Nokia says Apple can't use GSM, or Kodak says Apple can't use picture previews, you just want them to withdraw those too? When they don't withdraw, will you just set your Mac and iPhone on a shelf till their patents expire, or would you rather have Apple jack up the price to cover licensing, or would you rather have Apple defend the products you've paid for?
I don't see this as Apple's "first strike since Apple v. Microsoft". The handheld market went nuts and Apple's been dragged into an existing fray. Cross licensing among competitors has become a kind of CC hedging. Notice that the cross licensing spats involve companies with devices not software, explaining HTC and not Google.
This handheld food fight has been going on a while. Apple got a few mashed potato splats to the face. It finally stood up and popped a tomato at HTC, and the rest of the kids realize it's standing there, now just a little ticked off, tossing a plump juicy red Roma in its throwing hand, with a whole pile more on the table.
“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
You know this whole business of patents, and IP as a whole, is fundamentally flawed in that there is no objective way to decide what is influence and what is blatant copying/theft. The Justice route simply doesn't work. And because patents are public documents, you are basically inviting competitors to modify your inventions.
I can think of two better ways to protect your IP. One is to do what Google does and keep the knowledge of your best stuff to yourself. Up to now nobody can crack their search black box. And two, keep innovating. If you do those 2 things in conjunction, I doubt you'd have to worry about people "stealing" your IP.
I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense.
I completely agree. The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course.
Interestingly, I think this is a big part of why patents were invented in the first place. The idea was to give companies incentive for publishing their methods in detail because doing so benefited the industry as a whole. You show the world how you are doing what you do and you get to control that process for a while but in the end it becomes part of the common practice.
"The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course."
I think you're correct. Now the cards are on the table - I have a feeling if they were to withdraw this, it would hurt the countersuit against Nokia - who could then point at Apple's selective/questionable enforcement.
Has Amazon's enforcing of their one click patent really affected them negatively? Certainly their customers have no idea about the whole ordeal. Have great hackers refused to work there because of it? Would some percentage of hackers refusing to work at a big company like Amazon really make a difference to them? Somehow I doubt it...
I think the same is true of this HTC suit. I'm not sure why everyone is making such a huge deal out of it. The patents probably won't hold up in court, or some of them will and HTC will have to pay Apple N million dollars (like Adobe vs. Macromedia). Everyone will forget about the suit within the year. The only affected people (as one of the Tim Bray quotes suggests) will be the lawyers, who collect their entropy-like tax.
Why would Apple do it if it's truly pointless, you ask? Well, Gruber has a few solid bits of speculation in his penultimate paragraph, any of which might be true, but only Apple knows the real reason.
This is an apples to oranges comparison though because Amazon and Apple do very different things. The thing is that unlike Amazon, Apple is primarily selling a platform. To some real extent, hackers are their competitive edge. (This is somewhat true of Amazon now that they're in cloud services I suppose, but that's still a negligible part of their overall business and has been great PR for them in the hacker community.)
The iPhone before the App Store was either a middling failure or a middling success, depending on your viewpoint, but it certainly wasn't a slam dunk. It was on track to undersell the 10 million projected handsets by the end of the calendar year (about 18 months after launch) even after severe price cuts. See this chart for unit counts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_s...
The green bar marks where apps came in. The app store is most, if not all, of what made it the slam dunk it is today. It's hard to argue that people cared that much about 3G back then, especially AT&T customers.
So alienate the people who make the apps, and you lose a lot of the reason for customers to purchase an iPhone. Hence I'd argue that Apple's image among developers is a lot more important to their success than Amazon's.
It may not have affected Amazon negatively, but it has affected Barnes and Noble customers negatively. They haven't been able to do one-click shopping for over a decade. (I'm assuming B&N are still unable to implement 1-click under the settlement.)
Certainly it's not something that's on a lot of people's minds, but I think it's a mistake to say only the lawyers will be affected.
There are certain levels that people require to not work for a company and though this action may only stray away a few extremists from wanting to work as the amount of ill actions perceived by the public increases the amount of people willing to let those actions slide will steadily decrease.
"Where I disagree with Jonathan is on what’s known as “business-method” patents: one-click ordering, per-employee pricing. I’m having trouble seeing the benefit to society in granting patents on something that could never possibly be done secretly."
That I think should always be the type of reasoning involved. It's not the whole story (some things that couldn't be done in private would still stay uninvited if patents didn't exist) I can't get my head around IP moralising. The bottom line is that patents are intended to be an instrument to encourage innovation to the benefit of society.
I really think there is no sane way out of all this. We tend to act as if there must be some hard definition that will include all novel innovations that wouldn't be worth developing in a patent-less world and exclude those obvious derivative things that would be invented anyway and really need to be freely built upon. There probably isn't such a definition. Even if we do find some complex and inelegant way of mostly accomplishing that it wont last forever.
I’m not opposed to idea of the patent system on general principle (as Stallman, and many others, are).
I'm not aware of RMS claiming that the patent system should be abolished for all fields. I'd love to be corrected on this point, but it's my understanding that Stallman is against software patents only. You can actually read Stallman's own words on the subject in "Free Software, Free Society", Chapter 16. And yes, you can legally download the entire book for free.
I’m not opposed to idea of the patent system on general principle (as Stallman, and many others, are)
I think the context of that quote refers to software patents. In particular, his two preceding Tim Bray quotes are clearly with regards to software patents.
"The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly."
Nokia's N770 was close to this in 2005, and the N800 even closer by 2007. It didn't have phone hardware, but it's not a great stretch for anyone to see that phone hardware would be a useful addition at that point.
I owned one of the first Nokia 770s through their open source developer program, and it was a useful handheld computer but it was no iPhone.
iPhone features that the 770 anticipated well:
- Full-featured web browser.
- On-screen keyboard.
- App development based on a full-featured desktop toolkit adapted to a handheld screen.
Things that make it a strikingly different experience:
- Not a touch interface. The resistive touch screen on the 770 was really only usable with the stylus, and their interface designs reflected this. This didn't really start changing until after the iPhone was released.
- Not actually pocketable. To deliver a full-featured browser, Nokia used a screen with almost twice the area of the iPhone's. They didn't figure out the tricks Apple used to get a near-desktop-class web experience on a truly pocketable screen.
- UI conventions. The original Maemo tablets had a fairly desktop-like interface. Menus, dialogs, a Windows-like task bar. Plenty of hardware buttons. In contrast, the iPhone made a much cleaner break with previous UIs, popularizing things like multitouch gestures and momentum scrolling.
Tocuhscreen PDA's have been around forever, I'm actually a bit disappointed that the above quote appeared in the article.
My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P800 ) which was a touch screen device with a web browser and it was released in 2002! The iPhone was not, at all, revolutionary in that regard. It's merely a really good refinement (multitouch and a flush display) of what came before.
Why can't Apple continue to out-innovate Nexus One and Android instead of suing them?
Reading from the overall situation and his quote, Steve Jobs might feel that the current iPhone UI is 'perfect' as a whole. Apart from nitty-gritty details, he does not see a way to drastically improve it. (That's why he chose it for the iPad UI as well.) So he might figure that the only way to stop competitors from getting too close is to sue them.
"Copying ideas is how progress is made. It’s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal)."
Distinction between ideas and implementations in software? Impossible. In my opinion it is one of the reasons why software patents will always be broken.
Tim Bray cites a pretty good example; compare and contrast one-click shopping with PGP.
One is a broad concept that needs no further explanation in order to be implemented by a seasoned developer — the other is a genius implementation that isn't anywhere near self-explanatory.
Not saying software patents are sometimes good, just saying that there can be a difference between ideas and implementations in software.
[+] [-] Terretta|16 years ago|reply
So rewind a bit, to put this in context:
- Apple accuses HTC of iPhone tech theft (2 March 2010)
- Kodak prompts ITC to consider iPhone ban (18 February 2010)
- Motorola seeks ban on US BlackBerries (26 January 2010)
- Nokia sues Apple, says iPhone infringes ten patents (22 October 2009)
One test for patents' validity is whether the company is enforcing them. With Kodak, Sony, Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and others suing one another as a business-as-usual step in licensing negotiations, the value of Apple's defensive patent portfolio at the licensing negotiation table depends in part on Apple's perceived willingness to stand behind the validity of their portfolio and enforce their patents.
I'd suppose this is a signal to the marketplace not that competitors should create their own original technology, but that if they want to copy, they should license or trade.
[+] [-] DougBTX|16 years ago|reply
Perhaps you are confusing patent law with trademark law, which does require enforcement?
[+] [-] tjogin|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnoller|16 years ago|reply
Software patents are broken, and Apple's decision to whip out it's massive portfolio and start smacking people with it stinks of the "We want no phone inspired by the iPhone's design to exist", which (in my mind) isn't what patents are for in the first place - not to mention doing this is just, well, wrong.
The iPhone's concept revolutionized the handheld industry - and sure, if someone blatantly ripped it off, Apple does have a right to go after that company - but the HTC phones are simply "inspired by" - they're not clones, and while they have a lot of "features" which smack of the iphone, they're not replicas.
I'm an avid Mac user, own an iPhone - and I'll probably buy an iPad (still), but I for one want to see this suit fail horribly, or for Apple to withdraw it.
[+] [-] dannyr|16 years ago|reply
Again, this is the reason why Apple will not change its ways. I wish people who speak out against Apple would back up their words with action.
[+] [-] Terretta|16 years ago|reply
I don't see this as Apple's "first strike since Apple v. Microsoft". The handheld market went nuts and Apple's been dragged into an existing fray. Cross licensing among competitors has become a kind of CC hedging. Notice that the cross licensing spats involve companies with devices not software, explaining HTC and not Google.
This handheld food fight has been going on a while. Apple got a few mashed potato splats to the face. It finally stood up and popped a tomato at HTC, and the rest of the kids realize it's standing there, now just a little ticked off, tossing a plump juicy red Roma in its throwing hand, with a whole pile more on the table.
[+] [-] el_dot|16 years ago|reply
"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
You know this whole business of patents, and IP as a whole, is fundamentally flawed in that there is no objective way to decide what is influence and what is blatant copying/theft. The Justice route simply doesn't work. And because patents are public documents, you are basically inviting competitors to modify your inventions.
I can think of two better ways to protect your IP. One is to do what Google does and keep the knowledge of your best stuff to yourself. Up to now nobody can crack their search black box. And two, keep innovating. If you do those 2 things in conjunction, I doubt you'd have to worry about people "stealing" your IP.
I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense.
I completely agree. The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course.
[+] [-] macrael|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GHFigs|16 years ago|reply
Any suggestions on how to do that with a product as opposed to a service?
[+] [-] jnoller|16 years ago|reply
I think you're correct. Now the cards are on the table - I have a feeling if they were to withdraw this, it would hurt the countersuit against Nokia - who could then point at Apple's selective/questionable enforcement.
[+] [-] bobbyi|16 years ago|reply
And yet Google is potentially pulling out of China due to having its IP stolen.
[+] [-] mrshoe|16 years ago|reply
I think the same is true of this HTC suit. I'm not sure why everyone is making such a huge deal out of it. The patents probably won't hold up in court, or some of them will and HTC will have to pay Apple N million dollars (like Adobe vs. Macromedia). Everyone will forget about the suit within the year. The only affected people (as one of the Tim Bray quotes suggests) will be the lawyers, who collect their entropy-like tax.
Why would Apple do it if it's truly pointless, you ask? Well, Gruber has a few solid bits of speculation in his penultimate paragraph, any of which might be true, but only Apple knows the real reason.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|16 years ago|reply
The iPhone before the App Store was either a middling failure or a middling success, depending on your viewpoint, but it certainly wasn't a slam dunk. It was on track to undersell the 10 million projected handsets by the end of the calendar year (about 18 months after launch) even after severe price cuts. See this chart for unit counts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_s...
The green bar marks where apps came in. The app store is most, if not all, of what made it the slam dunk it is today. It's hard to argue that people cared that much about 3G back then, especially AT&T customers.
So alienate the people who make the apps, and you lose a lot of the reason for customers to purchase an iPhone. Hence I'd argue that Apple's image among developers is a lot more important to their success than Amazon's.
[+] [-] isleyaardvark|16 years ago|reply
Certainly it's not something that's on a lot of people's minds, but I think it's a mistake to say only the lawyers will be affected.
[+] [-] bugs|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netcan|16 years ago|reply
That I think should always be the type of reasoning involved. It's not the whole story (some things that couldn't be done in private would still stay uninvited if patents didn't exist) I can't get my head around IP moralising. The bottom line is that patents are intended to be an instrument to encourage innovation to the benefit of society.
I really think there is no sane way out of all this. We tend to act as if there must be some hard definition that will include all novel innovations that wouldn't be worth developing in a patent-less world and exclude those obvious derivative things that would be invented anyway and really need to be freely built upon. There probably isn't such a definition. Even if we do find some complex and inelegant way of mostly accomplishing that it wont last forever.
Making a morality around that seems absurd.
[+] [-] tsally|16 years ago|reply
I'm not aware of RMS claiming that the patent system should be abolished for all fields. I'd love to be corrected on this point, but it's my understanding that Stallman is against software patents only. You can actually read Stallman's own words on the subject in "Free Software, Free Society", Chapter 16. And yes, you can legally download the entire book for free.
http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/
[+] [-] kqr2|16 years ago|reply
I think the context of that quote refers to software patents. In particular, his two preceding Tim Bray quotes are clearly with regards to software patents.
[+] [-] kinetik|16 years ago|reply
Nokia's N770 was close to this in 2005, and the N800 even closer by 2007. It didn't have phone hardware, but it's not a great stretch for anyone to see that phone hardware would be a useful addition at that point.
[+] [-] mbrubeck|16 years ago|reply
iPhone features that the 770 anticipated well:
- Full-featured web browser.
- On-screen keyboard.
- App development based on a full-featured desktop toolkit adapted to a handheld screen.
Things that make it a strikingly different experience:
- Not a touch interface. The resistive touch screen on the 770 was really only usable with the stylus, and their interface designs reflected this. This didn't really start changing until after the iPhone was released.
- Not actually pocketable. To deliver a full-featured browser, Nokia used a screen with almost twice the area of the iPhone's. They didn't figure out the tricks Apple used to get a near-desktop-class web experience on a truly pocketable screen.
- UI conventions. The original Maemo tablets had a fairly desktop-like interface. Menus, dialogs, a Windows-like task bar. Plenty of hardware buttons. In contrast, the iPhone made a much cleaner break with previous UIs, popularizing things like multitouch gestures and momentum scrolling.
[+] [-] wvenable|16 years ago|reply
My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_P800 ) which was a touch screen device with a web browser and it was released in 2002! The iPhone was not, at all, revolutionary in that regard. It's merely a really good refinement (multitouch and a flush display) of what came before.
[+] [-] nopinsight|16 years ago|reply
Reading from the overall situation and his quote, Steve Jobs might feel that the current iPhone UI is 'perfect' as a whole. Apart from nitty-gritty details, he does not see a way to drastically improve it. (That's why he chose it for the iPad UI as well.) So he might figure that the only way to stop competitors from getting too close is to sue them.
[+] [-] praptak|16 years ago|reply
Distinction between ideas and implementations in software? Impossible. In my opinion it is one of the reasons why software patents will always be broken.
[+] [-] tjogin|16 years ago|reply
One is a broad concept that needs no further explanation in order to be implemented by a seasoned developer — the other is a genius implementation that isn't anywhere near self-explanatory.
Not saying software patents are sometimes good, just saying that there can be a difference between ideas and implementations in software.
[+] [-] sh1mmer|16 years ago|reply
An interesting read.
[+] [-] ssn|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itistoday|16 years ago|reply
I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary.
Oh do say Gruber ol' lad! Your taste is so precisely exquisite.
[+] [-] Willie_Dynamite|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|16 years ago|reply