Apple's Secrets Revealed During Trial

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443687504577567421840745452.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories

by grellas • 14 years ago

102 95 14 years ago

online.wsj.com

[ In cross-examination, Mr. Forstall said Eddy Cue, now head of Apple's Internet services efforts, had used a 7-inch Samsung tablet for a time, and sent an email to Chief Executive Tim Cook that he believed "there will be a 7-inch market and we should do one." ]

Sounds like everybody came up with similar, unprotectable stuff, with great inspiration from each other. Not guilty. Next case!

mtgx• 14 years ago

Exactly. That's how competition is born. Sure you shouldn't be able to copy a product to a point where it's very easy to confuse the 2, but anything besides that should be allowed. "Similar" products are how markets are built. Competition by default means that one company's product is more similar than different to another company's product, in a given market for a certain type of product. And the differences are just "competitive advantages".

jsz02• 14 years ago

For what it's worth Apple isn't claiming any exclusive rights over devices based merely on their screen size alone.

chmars• 14 years ago

Isn't a trial supposed to be public anyway?

Sure, most trials are only de facto public since most of the public cannot access trials and only court decisions get published. If Apple really wanted to avoid to disclose these 'secrets', it could have filed a respective motion AFAIK.

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Mr. Forstall said he invented a patent for double-tapping on Web pages because as he had been using a prototype of the iPhone to surf the web, he realized he was spending a lot of time pinching and zooming the page to fit text perfectly on the screen.

"I realized I have this incredibly powerful device, why can't it figure out the right size for me?" he said. So, he challenged his team to make the software automatically size the text into the center of the screen when he double-tapped around a webpage."

This is why we're in such a sad state with regard to software patents. This guy genuinely believes that he "invented" something. And that it should be patentable.

Of course, anybody who has actually built anything knows that what he actually did was "decide how something should work". You do this dozens of times when putting out a new product, and it's not in any way a big deal. Certainly not something you should call "inventing", and absolutely not something that you should consider patenting.

It's just one of thousands of design decisions you make. It's just sad to watch people who don't understand that making things worse for everybody.

StavrosK• 14 years ago

Maybe we should define "invention" in terms of "design decision". An invention should be something that requires no fewer than three hundred design decisions to create.

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

They're already unable to handle other subjective requirements like "non trivial" and still struggle with the slightly objective "prior art". I don't think adding new subjective definitions would help.

In my opinion the biggest problem with patents is that it's impossible to put the theory in practice no matter how great the theory is. On paper, patenting only non-trivial ideas sounds good. On practice that rule simply doesn't exist because it's impossible to define objectively.

batista4• 14 years ago

>Of course, anybody who has actually built anything knows that what he actually did was "decide how something should work". You do this dozens of times when putting out a new product, and it's not in any way a big deal.

Sounds like a very useful feature to me, and something that competitors or previous products did not had.

And "deciding how something should work" sounds like a perfectly good description of an _invention_.

cma• 14 years ago

Anyone that has implemented something like that knows implementation and execution is the really hard part.

natrius5• 14 years ago

Is "the progress of science and useful arts" promoted by granting monopolies over such things? That is, would Apple have chosen not to create the iPhone without patents like this? I think not.

jsz02• 14 years ago

I think double-tap-to-zoom is a perfect example of something that should be patentable. It's a huge improvement over existing systems that often used a zoom box you would position with cursor keys. To work properly it has to take into account the major design elements on a web page and make intelligent choices based on the user's tap target. Web browsing before double-tap-to-zoom and multi-touch zoom was a nightmare. These two features reinvented web browsing on small displays. This was clearly one of the killer features of the original iPhone.

pwg• 14 years ago

> To work properly it has to take into account the major design elements on a web page and make intelligent choices based on the user's tap target.

And that is what should be patentable, if anything at all should be patentable. The algorithm to account for design elements and make intelligent choices.

Not "tap twice to zoom".

pessimizer3• 14 years ago

I have serious trouble figuring out any possible difficulties in implementing this. Text is already in a bounding box. Zoom to the width of that box, and give it a little margin to make it look pretty.

It's not like zoom hadn't been implemented, or they had to reflow anything.

majormajor• 14 years ago

My old Symbian phone in 2006 had an intelligent zoom, either in the built-in browser or in Opera Mobile. May have just been the latter. You didn't tap to activate it, you moved a little box, but it smart-sized the column you selected to fill the screen.

So is changing the mechanism to a double-tap when implementing it on a device with a touchscreen worth patenting?

And that's the thing about software. It's so easy to make, compared to designing/manufacturing something physical, that there are thousands of programs out there that you've probably never used, doing who knows what, and yet people are expected to know if something's novel and patentable?

kenster07• 14 years ago

I'm sure you also believe the UX in any given video game should be patentable, and video games need to license each other for the effect of tapping buttons here or yanking joysticks there in order to even build their own.

forrestthewoods• 14 years ago

I couldn't possibly disagree more.

Technology has and continues to advance at ridiculous pace. Many software developments are dependent on hardware. Until the hardware exists no one can even try to solve the problem. I don't want a company which has first access to hardware to automatically get all the software patents that derive from it.

Google is hard at work on their glasses. Lots of companies are. The hardware isn't there yet. We're getting there though. Eventually someone is going to have hardware that enables all kinds of cool things to be done that have never been done before. Our culture / society / economy doesn't need to compound their reward of being first with a 20 year exclusive.

cacois• 14 years ago

"it has to take into account the major design elements on a web page and make intelligent choices based on the user's tap target"

That's fine, so patent the _specific algorithm_ used to make that decision. Implementations are fine to patent, IMHO. Broad concepts, such as "it should zoom in when I tap twice" are not.

tvon• 14 years ago

> You do this dozens of times when putting out a new product, and it's not in any way a big deal.

The sum of these design decisions make the product, they are the most important aspect the project.

anamax4• 14 years ago

There are two kinds of inventions.

(1) Providing a solution to a known problem.

(2) Figuring out that something is a problem and providing a solution.

I'd argue that (2) is more valuable than (1) as there are likely to be other solutions in the case of (1) so the payoff is relatively small.

Figuring out that a problem exists and solving it is far more valuable.

Yes, I know that most of us work on (1), but surely our self-interest is irrlevant.

angersock4• 14 years ago

You've made (2) a superset of (1) here.

The fact is, he identified a problem and then handed it off to others to solve. Any of us could've identified that problem, and most of us could've implemented the solution after a bit of work.

Especially in a group environment (dev listserv, public forums, etc.) we expect to have users that can identify problems and others that can solve them. Adding patents and claiming "Invention!" for incremental improvements is harming progress.

goatslacker2• 14 years ago

Completely agree, the implementation should be protected by copyright but not the idea itself.

adrianwaj• 14 years ago

So if you had the idea to create an open roof "sunroof" in a car, the way the roof opens mechanically should be protected by copyright, not the fact that you are putting a rectangular hole above drivers' heads for more light and air? Could the shade slide be protected too?

NHQ• 14 years ago

A Patent for "tapping on something to make it do something".

Who owns the patents for tool use and fire brandishing?

brokenparser2• 14 years ago

My Chromebook can't cope with this site, does anyone have a link to the printable version (or a pastebin)?

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

Interesting, what exactly happens in your chromebook?

Anyway, pastebinned:

http://pastebin.com/Ff2vQWRh

brokenparser2• 14 years ago

>what exactly happens in your chromebook?

Parallel processors running perpendicular today.

>Anyway, pastebinned:

Thanks!

xentronium• 14 years ago

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044368750457756... — print version

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.... — text cache

dspig• 14 years ago

My iPod Touch too. I guess it would finish loading eventually but I don't see why it's taking so long.

acqq• 14 years ago

Find the Opera Mini App, try the page with it. What you're getting is some Opera servers processing the page to minimize the stress on your CPU. The best thing you can have on the mobile.

vacri• 14 years ago

Mr. Forstall also told the court that his team consisted of 1,000 people who directly reported to him.

This smells like utter bullshit. This isn't a shipyard, but designers and engineers - and they're all direct reports?

dave1619• 14 years ago

I'd be interested in what the reporting structure under Forstall really is like. Jobs said Apple is run like a startup. But 1000 direct reports does seem unrealistic.

silvestrov• 14 years ago

Does team imply that they must be direct reports and not have a single layer of managers? With a single layer, each manager (including Forstall) would have just 34 people to manage directly. That's somewhat the same as a teacher handling a big high school class.

jmduke2• 14 years ago

Team might not imply that, but:

1,000 people who directly reported to him

certainly does.

dataminer2• 14 years ago

Does anyone know why the judge didn't allow "inspired by Sony" evidence?

bpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

Probably because it's hard to prove, it can become a big and arguably irrelevant distraction, and it opens up the possibility for an endless line of "this was inspired by that" from both sides. It's not too difficult to argue that everything was inspired by everything else all the way back to the stone age. The crux of this case is the question of whether Samsung has been copying Apple. Whether Apple copied someone else is arguably irrelevant. Sony can sue Apple themselves if they really think that's true.

I do understand that Apple may very well have lifted ideas from Sony and others and I have to admit that it is a valid argument. I'm only speculating as to why the judge decided not to admit the "inspired by Sony" evidence. In my eyes I can see my reasoning as being realistic though I'm not sure if it's right or wrong.

As an aside, and really, beyond the scope of the law, if you look at this from a human perspective and ignore the black and white aspects of the law, I think it's pretty obvious that Samsung has been imitating Apple's designs. Forget who worked on touch screens first and forget who first created a brick style phone with the same kind of interface because I really think that's irrelevant. Lots of phones look and function like the iPhone and the iPhone looks and functions like lots of other phones but what's really important here are the details of the design and not the generalities. If you look at Samsung's phones that came out after the iPhone you see what seems to be an attempt to piggyback off the iPhones success and maybe even confuse consumers into buying the wrong phone or making them think, as they often do, "it's basically the same thing". The minor details of Samsung's phones and tablets like the middle "home" button, the radius of the corners, the thickness, and even their packaging are so similar that if you took the logos off the phones and/or boxes its easy for even an informed consumer to mistake the two from ten feet away. I've seen tons of touchscreen phones both close up ans far away and most of the time it's not difficult at all to tell an iPhone apart from the others despite the similarities they all share (that's even without my glasses on). But if you take the Samsung phones and tablets in question and compare only those then it's quite easy to not be able to tell the difference until you're actually close enough to hold it up to your face. Legally, that's probably not important but practically that's the real issue. Even if Samsung had come out with touchscreen phones in a style like the iPhone ten years before Apple it shouldn't matter because Samsung began making what really look like clones of the iPhone only after Apple put the iPhone out.

I know if I argued this in court I'd be on shaky ground but I'm not arguing the legalities. I'm looking at this through the eyes of a real person. Touch screens, sing button or multi-button, rounded corners, etc. don't matter. When you see a copy of something else, you know it. I think whether Apple wins or loses the case it doesn't matter nor will it settle the argument. People who have seen the phones and tablets in question all know and see what happened and with so many touchscreen devices out there that are obviously very easy to differentiate from the iDevices, it can't be a coincidence that two companies were working on designs so similar right down to the tiniest details at around the same time. I think Occam's Razor applies here. The simplest explanation is that lots of companies were working on similar designs around the same time but when Apple's took off Samsung purposely started designing their devices to look like Apple's to piggy-back off their success. The result? Moms who always buy the wrong thing bought a Samsung phone or tablet as Christmas gifts because "they're basically the same thing, right?" and Apple sued Samsung.

dataminer2• 14 years ago

Thanks, that's probably the best description I have come across about this case.

abecedarius2• 14 years ago

I don't know, I've had people refer to my Asus Transformer as my "iPad". This criterion doesn't seem very sensitive (although yes, the iPad must have influenced Asus).

fpgeek4• 14 years ago

And looking at this from the eyes of another real person:

At various times over the past several years, Apple has sued Nokia, HTC, Motorola and Samsung, plus several smaller companies over a wide variety of smartphones and tablets using many of the same design and user interface patents. This isn't about Apple being offended by copying. This is about Apple using the legal system to attack their competition. Note that many of the patents involved (like "data detection" and "universal search") date back to Macintosh user interface features from years (sometimes more than a decade) before the iPhone.

Sadly, I expect the judge wouldn't allow it, but I'd love to see the Samsung lawyer show the jury the whole gallery of devices (from all vendors) that Apple has sued over using these patents. That would make what is going on much clearer.

reneherse2• 14 years ago

My guess is that it's too confusing for a layperson to parse that it is not actually a Sony design. Given a lot of the reader commentary that I've seen on various tech sites and newspapers, folks seem to have difficulty understanding that the design was actually created by someone at Apple.

cremnob• 14 years ago

The design was based on what a Sony designer said in an interview. Apple mocked up the design based on a vision. In any case they were able to show they had an earlier design from a year before that looks like the current iPhone.

technosmurf• 14 years ago

Samsung wanted to fortify the claim that Apple "copied" from Sony. (The evidence was dismissed because of procedural reasons.)

However, the main problem with this story is that the "copied" design is for a Sony Walkman, not a mobile phone. Also, the Sony-inspired design submitted by Shin Nishibori, an Apple industrial designer, was just one of many prototypes that didn't make the final cut.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/08/01/the-sony-device-samsu...

http://www.itreviews.com/hardware/audio-video-players/sony-w...

rimantas• 14 years ago

And Sony was inspired by iPod. This whole story was blown out.

Dn_Ab• 14 years ago

Is there anyone approaching the patent problem from another angle? Say by trying to productize research on prior art discovery? Or anything that would help patent officers become more productive (as in any of: do more without loss in quality in equal time or the same with increased quality in equal time or do more better in less time)?

Sure a human will vastly outperform the state of the art algorithm on any one patent but when talking about thousands of applications week in week out and increasing, some kind of automation to filter the cruft would be useful. Surely as bad as things are now, the worst that could happen is no effect? Would certainly be a better application of machine learning than classifying the mood of movie ratings or calculating social media "klout".

fpgeek4• 14 years ago

There are companies that do prior art searches (usually, but not always associated with existing legal practices, I believe).

As for the patent office being more productive... At least on the subject of prior art, they don't want to be. After all, they're paid by the patent.

coliveira• 14 years ago

They are most probably not giving away any important secrets that were previously unknown. This is a calculated move, and Apple at some level believes that most of what is being released is either (1) known by the competitors or (2) irrelevant for the future generations of their products.

mikecane4• 14 years ago

I want to know who came up with the Anchor Points idea for Copy/Paste. I had an idea like that back when I was using PalmOS. Whenever I needed to copy stuff that flowed past a single screen, it was hell trying to do that. I'd invariably under or over-shoot. Had I been able to set a start point and move to an end point and have it all selected, that would have been marvelous. I wish I had done a post about it way back when. I would have been Prior Art.

nitrogen3• 14 years ago

That's how X terminal emulators work. You click with the left mouse at the start point, click with the right mouse at the end point. Not so different.

mikecane4• 14 years ago

Never used X or emacs (I know, shocking, right?), so did not know they also did that.

psykotic• 14 years ago

Emacs works the same way. You set an anchor (the mark) and the region implicitly spans the text between the anchor and the cursor (the point). This kind of stateful approach (as opposed to a stateless alternative such as holding down shift while sweeping out a selection) has several advantages even when using a keyboard and mouse. E.g. you can set the mark and then do a search or any other action that might modify the point.

rootisdead• 14 years ago

Double tap to Zoom patent? Lol, that sounds completely pathetic. I thought about that by myself in a couple of days after starting to browse the web with a mobile that wasn't from apple. Now i understand why it's so easy to create virtual monopolies. You don't have to be particularly smart, just the first average joe to come up with a simple idea, then just stifle natural progress with dumb laws to make some guys rich. In not a too distant future, people will look back at this society and be genuinely mesmerized at how retarded people were.

Apple's Secrets Revealed During Trial

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