Google Says Some Apple Inventions Are So Great They Ought to Be Shared

http://allthingsd.com/20120720/google-claims-popularity-has-made-some-apple-patents-de-facto-essentials/

by cooldeal • 14 years ago

32 26 14 years ago

raganesh• 14 years ago

"I actually agree with Google. On that note, I think their search algorithms have become essential for the industry. As much as I've tried switching to Bing or Yahoo, I keep coming back to Google's engine.

Those algorithms should be de facto standards and licensed under FRAND"

Came across the above comment at http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/151423/google-argues-popula...

michaelpinto• 14 years ago

Maybe software patents should only be good for a few years? I think that a current patent is good for twenty, but maybe it's only fair if a patent can last for five years? That might really encourage innovation...

eropple3• 14 years ago

Frankly, and I realize this might be a radical notion (said with tongue firmly in cheek), but I think none years is about right.

Yes, none years sounds good. Shall we go with that? ;)

randomfool• 14 years ago

The algorithms aren't the critical part of Google's engine- it's the signals which help the system learn what you're interested in.

This is why Bing is desperate to get traffic- as long as it's numbers are low then it has significantly fewer signals which cause its ads to underperform.

This is also the source of the 'Bing is copying our results' kerfuffle last year- http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-.... Bing needed more signals, so used the toolbar to get them, inadvertently copying Google.

nilsbunger2• 14 years ago

If google tried to invalidate this based on prior art, or use it to argue for reforming patents, I'd 100% agree.

But if apple has a patent on it because they were the first to invent it, then it became ubiquitous because others copied apple.

To say multitouch gestures like (inch/zoom, and slide-to-unlock are "essential" shows a lack of imagination in what a phone could be. Apple didn't make a fundamental discovery, they just made a cool product feature.

DeepDuh• 14 years ago

IMO there is a fundamental difference between pinch-to-zoom and slide-to-unlock. The pinch gesture

-) has quite a bit of prior art, most notably minority report

-) is similarly self-evident on a multi touch surface as drag-and-drop using a mouse or modifier keys on a keyboard

Meanwhile slide-to-unlock is a simulation of a real world object on a multi touch surface. I'd also argue that it's an idea Apple has clearly introduced with the iPhone with not much prior art.

Conclusion: Those gestures should be analyzed separately when one has to decide whether a design is infringing or not.

fpgeek3• 14 years ago

Neonode N1m

fpgeek3• 14 years ago

Google almost certainly will try to invalidate these patents, using prior art and other arguments, when it comes to a trial (see: Oracle v Google).

Unfortunately, one of the problems with the current patent system is that it isn't in Google's interest to do that before it comes to a trial. The first problem is that using prior art before a trial is legally risky. If you fail to invalidate a patent (and you might fail on a technicality like not documenting the prior art in exactly the way the patent office wants to see it), you don't get to bring up that prior art later. Second, good prior art searches (necessary if you want to have the best chance at a challenge) aren't cheap. They could easily waste their effort on patents that turn out not to be an issue at trial (patents that are relatively easy to work around, become less important because of the way the market evolves, dropped during the legal process because they seem to be relatively weaker claims and so on). The companies suing generally throw lots of patents at the wall to see what will stick. There's no sense in helping them sort that out before you have to.

rachelbythebay2• 14 years ago

I'm sure they wouldn't mind the G diaspora going out and documenting all of the Secret Sauce at great length, then. After all, the things which prop up all of that web searching, web indexing, and all of that "original stuff" inside is pretty great. So, come on, share them.

"Indeed, many of the same interoperability benefits that the FTC and others have touted in the SSO context also occur when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. "

I mean, that is, before those people get hired by Facebook or whatever and then make a newer version of the same thing and open source it. What happens when the secret sauce isn't secret any more, and the people who made it have moved on?

beedogs2• 14 years ago

What happens when the secret sauce isn't secret any more, and the people who made it have moved on?

Sun Microsystems happens: a decade of stagnation followed by a quick and brutal collapse.

rachelbythebay2• 14 years ago

Fair enough. I like using SGI as an example, especially given that G moved into their campus right there. There are still a few reminders of that which came before, like the plaque in the park, and until a few years ago, a list of conference room names: superscalar, pipeline, etc.

I understand that SGI had a whole wing of building 40 set up for customer demos. G turned it into a bunch of interview rooms named after programming languages. Well, that is, until 2011.

Apparently it's been turned into a huge customer demo room again if my mol^H^H^Hsources are to believed. There's a lot of eye rolling any time I ask about it.

fpgeek3• 14 years ago

Your analogy is broken on many levels.

No one is alleging that anyone hired Apple employees to learn iPhone and iPad secrets (which is what the Google diaspora documenting the Secret Sauce would be) or stole Apple's trade secrets in other ways. For that matter, no one is even alleging that anyone reverse-engineered an iPhone in these cases (even though that is generally legal). That was obviously not required to reproduce the behavior as issue (e.g. universal search, slide-to-unlock, phone number and other "data detection).

Instead, at most, we're talking about someone looking at the external behavior of an iPhone (something publicly available for Google's search engine) and trying to incorporate parts of that behavior they found useful. In many cases, we're not even talking about that. After all "universal search" is the Android analog of Google Desktop Search, released a couple of months before Apple applied for the patent (Oct 2004 vs Dec 2004), plenty of smartphones detected phone numbers before anyone outside Apple had seen an iPhone, slide-to-unlock was anticipated by Neonode and so on.

For Google's behavior to be analogous to Apple's, they'd have to be suing someone for copying Google Instant, the way they surface interesting links from a search result, copying Android's Intents (I think they're actually collaborating with Mozilla and others on a copy) or something like that. Last I heard, they're not doing anything like that.

gringomorcego• 14 years ago

Does anyone really think about how our grandchildren will look at these patent issues today?

'Tell us again about the dark times when people were scared to share algorithms and concepts!'

jinushaun• 14 years ago

I'm with Google on this one. Imagine if someone patented the checkbox/toggle button. Now imagine all the crazy ux/UI companies would have to invent to get around the patent. It's pure lunacy. I've seen this first hand, where the product development team is more focused on not violating software patents than designing the best possible user experience. It's "not invented here" syndrome to the n-th degree. If consumers already know how to interact with something a particular way, why are we trying to make them bend another backwards to do it another more awkward way.

antidoh2• 14 years ago

"Imagine if someone patented the checkbox/toggle button."

Do you think it's not? My assumption is that that specific thing is patented, and is either expired or the owners don't enforce it or don't know they own it, or, that there is a broader patent whose owner may eventually decide to enforce in the context of a checkbox or similar thing.

malandrew• 14 years ago

Patents and standards are at odds with each other. We needs only to look at the war that has held back a common video format for the web for proof. The mpeg vs ogg kerfuffle is irrefutable proof that consumers are hurt when a patent is the basis of a standard. In domains where a standard is necessary, no patents should be granted. The economic incentive to innovate is still there because the common parts all people to be part of a larger ecosystem of devices, which is essentially a market to profit from.

Google Says Some Apple Inventions Are So Great They Ought to Be Shared

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