The Tim Cook memo: line by line

http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/tim-cook-memo-line-by-line/

by plinkplonk • 14 years ago

334 298 14 years ago

jacquesmattheij.com

pclark• 14 years ago

I think it's bullshit that Apple did this for money.

checker6593• 14 years ago

Why? Because Apple already has all the money it will ever need. Think again.

onedev• 14 years ago

You think Apple cares about a measly $1b?

Think about it, the company itself is worth 600+ billion dollars.

They did this more out of principal and to defend their products than anything else.

danmaz748• 14 years ago

They didn't it to get $1b from Samsung. They did it to stop anybody else to compete with the iPhone, and so be able to make even more money.

DiabloD32• 14 years ago

Why would the company be worth $600b? I haven't seen them do anything that I can't buy from another company cheaper, or in some cases, years before Apple "invented" it (ex: the iPad was a decade late to the tablet market).

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but what is it that Apple can actually sell me that no one else can?

vesky• 14 years ago

You're forgetting the impact this will have on it's stock, already reaching records highs since the decision was announced. So if you think it a "measly $1b" you're horribly mistaken. How about a "measly" tens of billions in overall stock growth over the next months?

taligent• 14 years ago

All this blog post is one person's misunderstanding of patent and copyright law. Jacques would have been better served trying to understand what trade dress means and why Apple's UI patents were about the implementation and not the idea.

After all the idea of "how to let the user know they have reached the top of the scroll view" can be implemented many ways. Apples is one way. LG, Samsung and HTC all have different ways.

checker6593• 14 years ago

You know, you're missing the whole point here. Patenting a Human Computer Interaction 'pattern' is absurd no matter how you put it. Enough said.

swombat2• 14 years ago

Patenting a single one is absurd.

Protecting the hundreds of design decisions that go into making a product look and feel a certain way, against people who are willing to just basically make a copycat product that does everything the same way - that's not so absurd.

I think Samsung lost not because of one specific patent, but because of the overwhelming number of points on which they copied Apple.

JohnsonB• 14 years ago

He pretty much didn't misunderstand anything about patents or copyright law in the post. And regardless, his overall point is correct: Apple is being a bully through abusing the flawed patent system for selfish, even short-sighted gain.

antninja• 14 years ago

How to let the user know something is a design idea not an implementation idea.

danmaz748• 14 years ago

"All this blog post is one person's misunderstanding of patent and copyright law": If you refer to the current patent laws in the USA, then you're probably right. But I think that laws that grant the possibility to give anybody a 20 years monopoly on something like "double tap to zoom" (or "1-click purchase") are completely against the original spirit of patent laws, very stupid, and, most importantly, pose a severe risk of slowing down innovation almost to a halt.

I just hope that this madness will not come to the EU too (eg the 1-click patent was never granted here).

FaceKicker• 14 years ago

Is it possible that there's in some sense a unique "global optimum" of UI and/or aesthetic design (as opposed to just a bunch of equally good but very different designs), at least as far as is possible under the constraints of available technology and resources at any given time? I would guess probably not for aesthetics (too subjective), but it's reasonable IMO in at least some very minimal cases of UI design - e.g., the idea of using some kind of touchpad gesture to scroll on a laptop. If so, maybe that optimum should be considered a "public good" that no single entity should be allowed to monopolize (or, they could be allowed to monopolize it only for a certain period of time like in the pharmaceutical industry and/or forced to license it for a reasonable fee) - otherwise for all of eternity it's illegal for any other company to use the "best possible UI" in their competing product, and in the meantime the company that filed a patent for it could have stopped developing their product entirely.

Less abstractly, I think the author's point about the standardized "UI" for cars is a good one - society is better off, not worse off, as a result of companies copying each other in the auto industry. If you can drive one car you can drive them all (well...except for the automatic/manual thing). You don't need to spend three days relearning how to drive every time you rent a car. In the same way, society benefits a LOT from familiar UI design across different software companies - e.g., anyone who has ever used any mainstream desktop OS in the past 15 years or so can pretty quickly figure out the basics of any other mainstream desktop OS - they all have programs partitioned into "windows", have a "desktop" with "icons", etc. These UI elements all seem trivially obvious to us precisely because of copying, but there are certainly alternatives to all of them.

mdonahoe2• 14 years ago

It's harder to accidentally kill people with my cell phone than with a car. Regulation leads to standardization.

onli• 14 years ago

>Apple's UI patents were about the implementation and not the idea

You can't patent an implementation

timkeller• 14 years ago

Phew. That's a little over-wrought.

Surely Apple has a responsibility to defend its patents and innovations?

We ("rabid Apple fan[s]") need a strong and successful Android to ensure some balance in this next generation of computing. We need a successful Android to keep Apple on their toes.

Google has figured out how to innovate with Android. Ice-cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean feature a unique and notable user interface.

Samsung, on the other hand, designed 'TouchWhiz' to imitate parts of the iOS look-and-feel in order to mislead customers.

checker6593• 14 years ago

None of the companies are saints. However, the software patent idea is so absurd it makes my blood boil with anger.

But, of course, Apple has the rights (and responsibility) to defend it's patents no matter how baseless / crazy they are.

fkdjs3• 14 years ago

"Pinch to zoom" is an innovation?

Motorola recently sued Apple, and one of the patents covers siri's audible voice prompt, so Apple will have to innovate around that. Also, media playback resume among several devices is Google's innovation. Apple will have to innovate around that. And that's just the beginning. None of them are FRAND, which means higher penalties and bans.

I agree, companies have a responsibility to defend their innovations.

ricardobeat3• 14 years ago

Pinch to zoom was unheard of on any device (mobile or not) at the time of iPhone's launch. Not surprising considering no one had multi-touch screens either.

chrisrhoden• 14 years ago

Except that since there is a pending suit over the Galaxy Nexus, and this suit found that the Nexus S is infringing of all of the same patents, both ICS and Jelly Bean (stock, no TouchWhiz) are non-unique user interfaces. They've been found to blatantly copy iOS. Stock Android, including the most recent version, has been found to violate the patents in this case.

Think about that.

zmmmmm2• 14 years ago

> Surely Apple has a responsibility to defend its patents and innovations?

People love to say this kind of thing. "They had to defend their property!". No they didn't.

Throughout the 2000's we had an orthodoxy that all these seemingly obvious and bogus patents being filed by huge companies were OK because they were for "defensive" purposes. In other words, the very premise for why most of these patents were not vociferously protested against was the fact that the companies were not going to exercise them aggressively. Now that the stockpile has been accumulated we have people like you saying "Well, it's not their fault, since they have the patents they have to defend them!". Again - no, they don't.

cageface6• 14 years ago

I think this is an excellent occasion to relink PG's essay on Apple's behavior from 2009:

http://www.paulgraham.com/apple.html

Maybe Apple thinks they can afford to play bull in the china chop of developer opinion right now but I'm sure I'm not the only developer that felt a little sick to his stomach firing up Xcode today. I plan to put iOS and Apple in my rear view mirror.

zakshay2• 14 years ago

Hindsight, I don't agree with a lot of things in that essay. Its mostly hard lined towards software development point of views.

jyap• 14 years ago

Wow, you're going to also take down your current iOS apps from the App Store as well?

cageface6• 14 years ago

I think so. I'm trying to decide what's best for my customers. Since I don't plan to update them anymore I think it's best if I stop selling them.

However, I do want to make sure that I get at least one more update out there to take care of any issues that might arise from the iOS 6 transition so I'll probably wait until I'm sure there's nothing serious there.

cageface6• 14 years ago

I should also add that this is just the last straw for me. I've been feeling increasingly uncomfortable about Apple's policies since they (temporarily) banned all languages but Obj-C from their platform.

I've just had enough of their controlling, paternalistic attitude. It was one thing when they were the scrappy underdog but the idea that I need the OK of the richest company in the world to install software on my (mobile) computer just suddenly seems equally laughable and creepy to me.

justinh• 14 years ago

Is your argument that because Apple is now successful, that their walled garden approach is now flawed?

I don't follow the line of reasoning there.

nirvana18• 14 years ago

The idea that you need Apple's permission to install software on your mobile computer is false. You can install whatever software you want, via multiple methods. Out of the box you can install apps built using web technologies downloaded directly from the web.

Apple controls what goes into the store because they want to protect users from apps that steal information. iOS does not have the malware problem that android does as a result.

Javascript does not have the ability to do this, and so Apple will let you install wahtever app you want, directly from the safari browser.

It is not apple's fault that this has not proven as popular in the makretplace as the appstore-- but they had this feature in from day one, a year before the appstore even shipped.

luriel2• 14 years ago

> It was one thing when they were the scrappy underdog but the idea that I need the OK of the richest company in the world to install software on my (mobile) computer just suddenly seems equally laughable and creepy to me.

It astounds me the kind of stuff Apple gets away with this days that Microsoft could have never dreamed of doing in the 90's.

Can anyone imagine if Microsoft had required its approval of applications like Netscape before allowing Windows users to install them?

Can anyone imagine if Microsoft had sued BeOS or RedHat for infringement of patents as trivial as pinch-to-zoom?

uvTwitch2• 14 years ago

That apple are a bunch of assholes should have been no surprise to anybody in 2009; the obscenely smug image which they've cultivated through their marketing has always reeked of a company which is shiny on the outside, and rotten in it's core.

bpatrianakos• 14 years ago

I'm exactly the opposite. I don't have any strong feelings about patents but I'm fully aware that they're abused. That said, it was plain to me that Samsung was wrong and really did copy Apple. However, even if I thought Apple was plainly wrong which I have many times in the past I wouldn't think twice about buying their products and developer for their OS. I don't develop or buy Apple's products because of their corporate behavior. I do so for two reasons:

1. Apple products are the best in quality, design, and utility for me.

2. Their platform is hugely profitable and I want in on the action.

For me, it's simple economics. But I also tend to be an oddball around here. I'm one of the few who sees the benefits of copyright and I also believe patents have a completely valid place in society. What I think really sets me apart in these views is that I'm not a hard liner about any of them and from what I've seen on HN for the past 3 years, most people here (at least the ones who comment on these issues) are. I know about the dark side of patents, their abuse, and I'm right on the same page as others when they come out against abuse of the patent system. I also see some of the insanity surrounding copyright too. But you have to consider all the information in order to make an informed decision. Because of this I'm not one of those who decides to boycott all things made by company X because of their actions or position (could be one or a history of them) on issue Y.

I don't understand why people such as yourself take to boycotting every time something like this happens. I truly don't, and I'm not trying to be snarky or dickish at all so please don't read it that way. What I see in this case is standard Apple behavior and coincidentally they just happen to be right on this. If this abandoning of Apple really is about the lawsuit then why didn't you jump ship from the start instead of waiting for the ruling? And if this really is about the patent system then why is everyone making it about Apple? Apple is using the tools at its disposal to protect itself and in other cases simply make sure they stay ridiculously profitable. Apple didn't invent the patent system. If anger belongs anywhere it should be directed toward the system not the user of the system.

thomasf14• 14 years ago

It´s very clear that it´s been a personal mission by Steve Jobs who felt it´s wrong.

I´m personally quite conflicted in this case: Apple has a point that Samsung was copying them. Pure copying, not using elements of it and turning it into something new.

On the other side, the ways of protection with patents of tiny bits of it is silly and broken. They are trivial and regard the overall design and should not be allowed.

Famously the Mac itself is based upon the work of Xerox Parc. To the credit of Apple and Steve Jobs they put in a lot of work, made many concepts useable and re-developed the mouse to actually make a consumer product out of it.

For me the morale right or wrong is the following:

make it your own: While heavily using concepts existing prior, you´ll re-combine them into something way better than the thing you copy: That´s ok for me, it has creative value.

copy: You simply dumbly copy things line-by-line without even understanding the basic concepts of why something is great and throw it on the market at a lower prive: That´s wrong and ripping of the creative work of others.

Samsung to me falls quite clearly into the copy category. I doubt that they have a deep understanding of UX design and the subtleties what actually made the iPhone great and delighted the users.

robin_reala• 14 years ago

While lots of MacOS was taken from Xerox’s work it wasn't’t copied, it was licensed.

thomasf14• 14 years ago

Right. They managed to get a licence from Xerox to the astonishment of many of the guys working in Xerox PARC.

What´s your take on the morals of this?

delllapssuck2• 14 years ago

This is a consumer. Do the opinions of consumers matter?

All that matters to Apple is sales. Do they care what consumers say about them on the web? Silence the nonbelievers!

Consumers do not need to understand patent law to make purchase decisions. But most consumers know what lawsuits are, especially ones that make a mockery of the justice system.

It's possible many consumers really don't care if they're buying Apple or Samsung. If they did care, if they only wanted Apple products, then Apple wouldn't need to sue other manufacturers, would they?

arn• 14 years ago

But it wasn't (all) about the money. It was personal.

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/20/from-steve-jobs-biograph...

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

With that in mind, the email reads far more genuine than the blog post implies.

mappu• 14 years ago

It's interesting to consider what it might take for an actual war to occur.

Samsung makes up a non-trivial share of the entire South Korean economy, one fifth of the country's exports and employing roughly one of every thirty people - if overnight they were barred from selling products internationally, at what point does the state intervene?

Macha• 14 years ago

Samsung also makes a hell of a lot more than phones. 1 in 30 people in Korea mig be employed by Samsung, but they're not all making phones, and they're not all going to be affected by this decision. Even if Samsung was forced to abandon mobile phones altogether, it's big enough to weather it out.

robbiep• 14 years ago

Imagine an apple battle tank. Would it whale on a samsung tank? Or Drone? Or would Samsung need to down an apple drone then reverse engineer it before they had equality in the war?

timmyd10• 14 years ago

Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart.

"These are not patents on innovation, they’re patents on simple ideas and features that you didn’t even think of first but you were the first to patent."

Then the magical aspect of patent law called "prior art" would come into play and it wouldn't be patentable. Yet it is - and yet despite all of Samsungs insistences and millions (no doubt) spent on prior art research - nothing has been shown prior to the date of filing that anything existed. It's no different than Amazon's One-click.

It would be interesting - if you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ? According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".

The problems with the patent industry are patents abused by companies who have absolutely no interest in developing them but rather trolling them to simply extract money from other companies. Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls. If you dont actively use it as it is meant to be - you have nothing. The requirements and the search of prior art should be greater and longer - to ensure patents are truly innovative and this should not be the role of the courts (due to expense, time and so on within the legal system)

The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy, with an idea against the onslaught of bigger companies just copying them outright and giving them no chance. You state "gone are the days of Steve Wozniak" and indeed "gone would be the days of apple" long ago - because he just wanted everyone to have everything and thats not how you run any business.

I agree that patent law needs reform - but I totally disagree that your somewhat misconstrued article that we should simply destroy patents all together. It should destroy them if they are not being actively used - but a company trying to protect its innovations in not something that I'm against. If you had a startup and a patentable innovation - it would be ridiculous to assume that you would be willing to forgo millions/billions in revenue for some abstract concept of "a greater good". America is a capitalist society and therefore you are fighting that as a concept - not the patent industry. I know my post will get down-voted but it's a reality of business and running a business - you either file for protection or you don't and get copied.

danmaz748• 14 years ago

"It's no different than Amazon's One-click." exactly: It is just as outrageous as 1-click.

timmyd10• 14 years ago

Then if its not innovative - show me the prior art ? There is none - so it's innovative under law - regardless of whether I agree or not. Amazon patented an innovative process unthought of at the time - the fact you apply retrospectivity to it now and look at it as ridiculous does nothing to prove it was not innovative back in 1998. If you thought of this process - would you be happy not to charge Amazon if you patented it ? Lets assume you didn't patent it and now its used by everyone on the planet - would you sit back and think "I wish I had of patented this so I could make millions" ? Again, they're the questions you need to ask because in my view it's a capitalist question over and above hating patent rights. If you didn't choose to patent it and someone took advantage of you - then in every country but America - they would have the rights (as has happened before). America relies on first to invent - but its a big ask and its being abolished in changes passed by congress to fall in line with first-to-file.

csallen3• 14 years ago

Just because something makes you money doesn't mean it's inherently good or useful, and it doesn't mean it should be protected by law. Every time a company's competitors catch up to it, and every time technology makes a company's business model obsolete, they turn to the law to try to wipe the competition/technology out of existence. And, quite frankly, it's bullshit.

You're right, the entire basis of patents was to protect the little guys. But nowadays the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 200 years, the big guys have wielded their influence to change the system to their benefit. And now they abuse patents to crush anything that threatens their leadership position, whether that's a little guy trying to innovate or another big guy trying to play catch up.

Either way, the consumer loses, and for what? Innovation certainly isn't any better off.

timmyd10• 14 years ago

I do agree with you in this regard. True innovations should be patentable and it's been the consistent bashing of the law to extend the scope of what is patentable that comes to the fore here. By fundamentally - having a patent and litigating a patent are hugely different things and that's a big problem. The patent offices around the world have timelines and deadlines - even if they approve a patent which shouldn't be - they rely on the courts to determine whether it is or is not. That's a huge time cost, financial cost and so on - thats the system today. So you go to court - you spend literally millions arguing and you get a decision as to whether or not it's innovative. That's wrong in my mind.

writetoalok• 14 years ago

> Just because something makes you money doesn't mean it's inherently good or useful, and it doesn't mean it should be protected by law.

Are we talking about patentable innovations, or something else? A lot of patentable innovations do not make anything, a lot things which are not patentable make boat load of bucks. Your comment seem to have clouded this distinction.

It seems to me that you are questioning the basis of government granted monopoly. But this grant is not on the basis of money generation, but on innovation and benefits to the society by disclosure.

Imagine if someone discovered and invented a principle and device for unlimited cheap source of energy. If he kept it to himself, it may definitely help him to unknown riches. And possibly the secret could die with him. But if he shared his secret sauce, then all of us in the society will benefit a lot. Patents are a means to that end. What do you think?

soup10• 14 years ago

This seems to mostly be the case in software industry where everything moves really fast so nothing seems patent worthy. There's a whole world out there where innovation moves a lot slower and patent protection is crucial.

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

> Either way, the consumer loses, and for what?

If you take the lawsuit for what it is, namely that only Apple can have pinch-to-zoom et.al, yes the consumer loses.

But if this lawsuit makes vendors keep a little more distance between each other, I'm all for it. As a consumer, I'd rather have a wide array of choices rather than one cash cow and its copycats, and I'd argue that this is what most people would understand as innovation. (And this is the opposite of innovation: http://allthingsd.com/20120807/samsungs-2010-report-on-how-i...)

twoodfin• 14 years ago

Weren't the guys that Apple bought to get multitouch "little"? In a world where such "obvious in retrospect" designs aren't protected, why doesn't Apple just copy their work?

ryanwaggoner• 14 years ago

Either way, the consumer loses, and for what? Innovation certainly isn't any better off.

You have no way of knowing whether this is true. Patents could come with a host of disadvantages and drags on innovation and still be a net positive for innovation. There's just no way to know without a control group.

As long as we're throwing out opinions, I find it very hard to believe that the patent system, broken though it is, is anything other than a HUGE net positive for innovation. I'm talking about the patent system across all industries, but I suspect the same would be true for the tech industry specifically. Companies across many industries regularly spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to develop products that are primarily protected by patents. If we did away with patents, many of those investments would no longer be made, and the rest would be as shrouded in secrecy as possible. And secrecy is a patent that potentially never expires.

tronronin• 14 years ago

Was that not the whole point of the patent-system? That there is an incentive in doing/thinking first?

I disagree that patenting was meant only for the small guys. Patenting was meant to make innovation happen and fast. Simple as that. Social welfare policies are designed for the small guy.

In any case how expensive is it to file a patent, or get a job with the company which has the patent and work with them.

The so called small guy you talk about does not give a damn about innovation. He wants to be the next Steve Jobs.

Let's admit it. Money is important for everyone. Apple, Samsung, Small guy, Big guy. Everyone.

What one can discuss is how to collect taxes from people and deploy that to support indie innovators(if may call them so) who want to fly solo.

thomasf14• 14 years ago

The Jury system in the US is actually well suited deciding complex moral questions and too much fine print hinders more than it heps, which was evident in this case.

To me, instead of a patent office there should be a central online register to archive jury-understandable photos and descriptions or ideally videos of the stuff you do simply to have a validated reference of when you thought of it.

And then patent/IP Law may simply should read soething like this: It is ok to base any creative work on the work of others as long as the result is something new and great in it´s own right.

It´s not ok to copy the work of others without significantly improving it simply for making money.

Done. Plain Language.

Everything else, the moral right or wrong would be left to a Jury with guidance from a Judge.

Which they basically did in the Apple case. All that patent BS aside, I guess they descided on the basic morale question and started the paperwork.

yogsototh• 14 years ago

You mentioned the difference between big and small company.

When Apple had clearly stolen the look and feel of Delicious Library to make iBook. The author was a "small company". He even show some happiness that his work was used by Apple.

The point is, he couldn't have sued Apple. Simply because, actually, a small company could certainly not win over a big one. The big one will use a lot of money to keep the trial as long as possible while continue to steal your stuff. Even if won, it would have last too long to save your business. And you had lost a lot of energy. This remember me the medieval justice were the richer always win.

Actual patent system only give an advantage to big companies. What if big player start to sue small startups because they used the double-click, the swipe, a wood texture that looks like a library?

raverbashing4• 14 years ago

Funny

Apple bought the "coverflow" look from a small company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverflow

nirvana18• 14 years ago

I wish you were kidding. In the 1990s I worked on software that had the same "look and feel" of the "delicious library". We had shelves and we put things on them, books, CDs, etc, in our software. This was for a seattle software company- the same city that Wil Shipley lived in when he created delicious library.

So, can I claim that, because he put books on shelves in his software that he stole the idea from us, when we did it 10 years before him?

His claim that Apple "stole" this from him is completely absurd to the point of nonsensical. He couldn't have sued Apple because his claim is nonsense.

Just as my claim that he stole our idea of putting books on shelves is nonsense as well.

The sad thing is, so many people believe this kind of nonsense.

"Hey I put books on shelves in software!" Look how innovative I am!

To compare this to patents is beyond reaching.

beedogs2• 14 years ago

> Hmm - i really dont agree with this. Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR. Apple frankly blew the industry apart.

What?

No, we weren't.

I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine. Apple just added shiny icons and took away the keyboard and stylus. BFD.

capkutay2• 14 years ago

Apple just added shiny icons and took away the keyboard and stylus. BFD.

I actually think that is a BFD. If it had a keyboard, the whole idea of dynamic UI's would not exist.

Would anyone think that angry birds is cool if we had to play it with arrow buttons on the keyboard?

CamperBob23• 14 years ago

I had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) a year and a half before the iPhone was introduced and it was perfectly fine

No, it was not "perfectly fine." Otherwise they would have sold a hundred million of them.

Give credit where it's due, for Pete's sake. It is a fact that prior to the iPhone, cell phones sucked ass. It is also a fact that granting Apple a twenty-year legal monopoly on trivial "innovations" will hurt consumers as much as it will Apple's competitors.

veeti• 14 years ago

If you can not see the difference in the touchscreen UI between the Wizard (or any other pre-iPhone device) and the iPhone, you have to be blind.

Until the iPhone, touch-screen phones were slow, clunky and unresponsive. They had shitty resistive screens that were a total pain to use. (LG actually released a capacitive phone before the iPhone, but the software was the same shit we had for ages so it didn't change a thing). Even simple things like lists were scrolled by aiming for a 2px wide scrollbar and dragging it.

But then the iPhone came along with smooth and fluid graphics and animations, actually innovative and fun touch gestures like simple flicks to scroll through lists (and a 60fps smooth animation while doing so), pinch-to-zoom and so on. The experience was actually enjoyable.

The same thing happened with the iPad. Back in the early 2000's we had "tablets" with a downsized desktop OS (Windows XP). Total shit for a touch-screen device.

Even after the iPhone some competitors failed to realize what made it good. Nokia's touch screen abominations were just sad - and they're still releasing some terrible Symbian devices like the new PureView 808. The Verge's review summarizes Symbian's problems pretty well:

> THE SYMBIAN EFFECT: WHEN GREAT HARDWARE IS RENDERED USELESS BY TERRIBLE SOFTWARE

> Actions like scrolling or pinch-to-zoom feel like requests you’re filing with a clerk somewhere in a bureaucratic dystopia — to be carried out at some indeterminate time in the future. Completing this slow-motion train wreck is the only thing worse than unresponsive operation: a complete crash of the entire phone.

Apple needs to stop with their bullshit litigation but they truly did push the industry forward with touch devices. It isn't a coincidence that touch screen phones exploded after the iPhone and that people actually started caring about tablets after the iPad.

magoon• 14 years ago

You don't really believe the HTC Wizard was "perfectly fine" do you?

I went through so many Windows Mobile phones until I finally realized that the joke was on me. The user experience, the battery life, the apps, the bugs, the limitations imposed on operating system data and indeces, and the hardware were all horrific. I can't extract anything good from that experience, let alone say that any of those devices were "perfectly fine."

buster3• 14 years ago

I stopped reading after "Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces".

Clearly you are very misguided. You are comparing featurephones with smartphones (the ones with screens and stuff). Smartphones existed way before the iPhone.

It makes me extremely sad that the marketing lies of Apple are taken for truth.

Apple may have invented the vendor lock-in, though! :P

sjwright• 14 years ago

Name one pre-iPhone smartphone that you'd be willing to pit against the iPhone.

Oh, and Apple's vendor lock-in is still a damn sight better than the telco lock-in it replaced (in the US).

netcan• 14 years ago

Most innovations are not patentable. Most notably are most business models.

Think of Groupon's business model. There's nothing specifically innovative about it: forced email list, 1 product per day, discounts. But, put together it formed a successful business model. Had they not thought of it and tested it in the marketplace all their copy-cat competitors probably would not exist today either.

At some stage someone someone invented department stores. Someone hypothesized that yuppie americans would like to eat sushi. Someone thought that doing massages in full view in malls would create a new market of people who wouldn't have gone through the book-in-advance, go behind a heavy curtain, 1 hour minimum normally associated with the trade. In Australia I would guess that this last one tripled (or more) the massage therapy market.

It's hard to talk about patents without slipping into the legalize definitions of important concepts like 'non-trivial' but I think a common sense definition is 'wouldn't have been invented otherwise.' A lot of these innovations are genuinely nontrivial by that definition.

They weren't developed in r&d labs but they are all genuinely innovative. They didn't spend huge sums on r&d but someone did the economic cousin of spending, they risked (usually personally) a lot testing them in the market. Much or most of the profits eventually went to copycats. Without the innovator most would not have existed today. They still got invented. I doubt that patenting would increase their rate of invention. I'm sure that patenting would have harmed consumers.

I'm not saying this as a general refutation of patents. I don't know what the correct laws are. I think though that any patent laws are always going to leave us with huge ugly deckfulls of by-catch. Mostly skate & sunfish. But occasionally a walrus, whale or dugong that the crew will not want others to know about.

bjxrn• 14 years ago

> Then the magical aspect of patent law called "prior art" would come into play and it wouldn't be patentable.

I have difficulty taking the "prior art" system seriously. It's especially unbelievable with software patents (there are so many things where different patents exists on the same technology), but it leaks over into the whole patent system.

codeka2• 14 years ago

> Apple revolutionised the industry - before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR

Even if that were true, the problem for me is Apple didn't patent the iPhone. They patented tiny little implementation details, like pinch-to-zoom and slide-to-unlock. The iPhone was revolutionary not because of rounded rectangles and a regular grid of icons. It was revolutionary because it was a phone that people actually enjoyed using. Did pinch-to-zoom and whatnot play a role in that? Possibly, but this whole case hinged on a handful of tiny implementation details and that's what I'm disappointed about.

It's like blocking the sale of a car because someone had a patent on having the indicator paddles on the steering column. Are there other places to put the indicator paddle? Sure, but it's only a tiny detail in a hugely complex system.

Having said that, I'm happy Samsung got done for the trade-dress stuff, because that was pretty obviously blatant copying.

ralfn• 14 years ago

Im with you. The jury has spoken and found Samsung guilty, but the actual legal details seem random and should not be anybody's property.

People often compare it to the Tv market or the car market. Yes, all TVs look alike. They are all ugly. Yes all cars look the same: like shiny bling to impress an ape. I dont consider the lack of choice in design in those markets a good thing.

I dont like patents, but i would love for products in all categories to look more unique. Maybe Apple should have won because of the tradedress. But not because of the patents.

nirvana18• 14 years ago

You misunderstand the nature of patents. Patents cover inventions, which are non-obvious methods to solve problems. This is not giving apple the exclusive right to "pinch to zoom" or "slide to unlock" but the methods for implementing those features.

Apple also has a great deal of very fundamental patents with regard to the unique way for reading touch screens that they invented. This does not mean only Apple can have touch interfaces, but the method they invented for implementing them, however, they do have patents on.

The reason this trial was about these lesser patents and trade dress was the same as the reason it was over products that are no longer on the shelves-- the legal system moves very slow. The "big gun" patents hadn't yet been granted at the time Apple started getting sued.

sofuture• 14 years ago

eponysterical

moe2• 14 years ago

It's no different than Amazon's One-click.

You're not seriously trying to suggest that one-click is a reasonable patent, are you?

nirvana18• 14 years ago

You should try reading that patent sometime before you claim it isn't reasonable.

It is profoundly dishonest to characterize patents using a trivial phrase like "one-click" and then pretend like that also means that the patent is itself trivial.

I know why you do it- it fits your ideology.

But it doesn't fit reality.

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

No one brings this up, but all of those phones looked and behaved the same as well. Presumable the first inventor of said phone style could have patented everything and disallowed anyone else to make a dumb phone. This is what the author is speaking to; the notion that an inventor, if with enough resources, can legally own the only logical way to do a particular thing. And if armed with enough of those, can legally own an industry. You don't have to be a lawyer to see there is something wrong with that.

imperialWicket• 14 years ago

"before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR"

Some of us may have been, but technically speaking that's not true. Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Nokia all had high end devices available with large touch screens prior to Apple's iPhone release. What Apple offered (that was revolutionary) was an easy way for users of their device to purchase content. They achieved this since they required users to have an iTunes account when provisioning their device; and they got away with that because they already had many of the users in iTunes already.

Apple definitely made advances to large screen smartphones (ex: their touch screen was far better than all other offerings at the time, and remains superior to most alternative devices); but to say that it was the iPhone alone (a piece of hardware) that revolutionized the mobile industry shadows integral aspects of the legal and historical argument.

Tichy• 14 years ago

"before the iPhone we were using tiny screens with Nokia SMS interfaces or Motorla RAZR."

Unless you had a Palm Pilot or a PocketPC. Stopped reading your essay after that.

gnaritas• 14 years ago

> The entire basis of patents was essentially trying to protect the little guy

No it wasn't. Why does this misconception exist? The point of patents is to open up trade secrets for the benefit of society and advancement of the sciences. We don't allow patents to encourage inventors or make sure they can profit, that is the price we pay to get their knowledge, it is not the goal, just the means.

tripzilch7• 14 years ago

So, answer me this:

If you think "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" is a reasonable thing to patent so that nobody except Apple can use it on a smartphone, then you would have also had have no problem if:

- Someone patented "tabbed browsing" on a desktop computer[1] and nobody could sell a browser with tabs on a desktop platform

- Someone patented the pull-down list-select control on a desktop computer, and now everyone writing a GUI for the desktop platform would have to come up with their own variation of a list-select control that is sufficiently different from the patented one.

I could come up with many more similar examples, but I'm not at all sure how/whether the above two hit the mark as an analogy for the trick Apple just pulled (because I find all three situations absurd).

Hm, now this makes me wonder, Ableton Live has this truly brilliant way of navigating a waveform/timeline effortlessly to anywhere in both large and tiny zoom scales, it's incredibly efficient and quite intuitive, and I've (so far) never seen any audio editing software that has something quite like it. I wonder if they patented it? It is way more innovative and non-obvious than the "pinch-to-zoom" that Apple grabbed. Also there are quite a number of different but quite obvious ways to navigate a waveform on the same input devices (desktop+mouse, usually) unlike "pinch-to-zoom", which is really the most obvious gesture for zooming on a touch-display.

Because I was thinking of maybe one day coding up a very simple waveform editor, and I wouldn't be satisfied until I at least tried to implement that mode of navigation. Of course as long as I don't sell it, I'm safe from patents right?

[1] just adding that because as far as I'm aware these software/design patents only work because they're coupled to a specific piece of hardware (in the US, that is. for now, thankfully it works a bit differently in the EU)

nirvana18• 14 years ago

You can't patent the feature "pinch-to-zoom" you can only patent an invention of a method to implement that feature. Thus, samsung could have implemented the feature if they had done it their own way.

For example, Jeff Han demonstrated a similar feature, but his system uses cameras to take pictures of your hands.

Thus both he and Apple could have patented their inventions for implementing this feature.

The idea that these patents cover the rights to use features is misinformation designed to make them look trivial.

Of course they seem absurd- they are made to look absurd to you to get you to oppose patents.

And they are doing this by lying to you about what the patents cover.

tripzilch7• 14 years ago

Addition from what I've read further down the thread, it appears that the patent is about the way Apple implemented pinch-to-zoom, not the feature of having pinch-to-zoom as a gesture for zooming in general.

So that would be where maybe my analogy breaks down. However:

Can someone maybe explain me/us what is exactly so unique and non-obvious about the way they implemented it, then? And yes I did read the patent, or at least an excerpt of it that appeared to explain roughly how any decent programmer would implement such a thing, given an hour to think it over and an OS/GUI API that is vaguely object-oriented and event-based.

I did read that part.

Does anyone have the non-obvious part handy? (for the pinch-to-zoom specifically, as I just want to focus on one thing, this conversation is convoluted enough as it is)

k2enemy2• 14 years ago

If you think "pinch-to-zoom on a mobile device with touch screen" is a reasonable thing to patent so that nobody except Apple can use it on a smartphone

I agree that this would be absurd, but I think it kind of misses the point of the case. Samsung pretty clearly copied Apple in a "look and feel" way that goes beyond the particular collection of patents. The patents in the case are just the instruments that Apple used to punish the copying.

There are all sorts of other phones that technically infringe on Apple's patents (and vice-versa), but Apple doesn't seem interested in taking the offensive on these. I think Apple's position is much more about the spirit of Samsung's copying rather than defending any particular technical patent violation. But in order to bring a case, you have to pick out some particular violations rather than argue some abstract notion of "copying the spirit" of the iPhone.

wissler4• 14 years ago

"Apple revolutionised the industry"

You give them far too much credit. Apple happened to be first in implementing an obvious conclusion in the evolution of computing: combining a true operating system with the features of a PDA and adding a radio. Many people saw this coming a decade earlier; I was one of them.

The reason it happened when it did had to do with the hard work of the scientists and engineers who kept shrinking and creating ever more powerful computing technology, not with the guy who happened to allow his engineers to pursue this obvious conclusion. Steve Jobs was a visionary only when compared to other CEO's, not when compared to the scientists and engineers that really make things happen.

nirvana18• 14 years ago

There was nothing obvious about the iPhone, otherwise Apple's competitors, who had been in the phone industry for years, would have done it already.

Hell, they and much of the "experts" spent the 6 months between announcement and shipping of the iPhone claiming it was going to be a total failure.

So, not only was it not obvious, even after it had been revealed, people claimed that it was a bad idea and would be a failure.

mindcrime2• 14 years ago

You're a small business - what do you do now?

You continue to innovate. You do a better job at understanding your customer's needs and fulfilling them. You do a better job at marketing, positioning, and advertising. You give better customer service. There's tons of ways to compete, other than raw product uniqueness.

According to your article you sit back and say "oh thats totally ok because thats innovation and I'm happy that everyone has copied me and destroyed my advantage".

Meh. A better product is not a sustainable competitive advantage anyway. Better to have a product "arms race" where everybody is forced to "innovate or die", IMO.

enraged_camel2• 14 years ago

>>You continue to innovate. You do a better job at understanding your customer's needs and fulfilling them. You do a better job at marketing, positioning, and advertising. You give better customer service. There's tons of ways to compete, other than raw product uniqueness.

How exactly do you do a better job at marketing, positioning, advertising, customer service, etc. as a small business? The implication of being a small business is that you are resource-constrained and cannot do those things as well as the big players can, which is why you need patent protection for your innovations.

danielweber2• 14 years ago

If you invented something, you spent ten-of-thousands on patents, you spent huge amounts of capital in developing a product - you launch it to much positive press and then someone simply copies everything you have done. You're a small business - what do you do now ?

Been there.

Me and 2 other people invented a product that hadn't existed before and created an entire lexicon for it. Then jokers at a larger company duplicated our product. The manual and website had been at least rewritten but the similarities to our stuff were obvious.

Eventually we found evidence of typos in the internals of our product showing up in their UI. That was when we got a lawyer. We significantly slowed down their product launch and probably got a few managers fired.

It took a few years for our patent to be issued, which finally got them to fuck off. I would have gladly traded a much shorter term on our patent for a faster issuance. Those years felt like decades.

(We didn't appeal to the Internet because the Internet was a much much different creature back then. A corporate blog was unheard of. And it could have backfired: we had one loose cannon employee in our own company who went around a conference telling everyone how that company had ripped us off; the next year at the same conference everyone remembered the story but many people mis-remembered who had stolen from whom. Which is why we tried to handle things with the legal system instead of by trying to tell everyone what assholes they were. Although there is a Texas company that is now complete poison to have on your resume at any company I work for.)

biafra• 14 years ago

Before the iPhone I was using the Sony Ericsson P800 and the Nokia Communicator E95. Both had big screens. The iPhone was not the first smart phone with a big screen.

radicalbyte• 14 years ago

Erm, I was using an Orange-branded HTC with a big touch screen and mobile internet long before the iPhone came along.

That was actually much more functional than the iPhone, but harder to use (required a stylus) and in comparison with the iPhone it was ugly.

That Windows Mobile device replaced a Nokia phone and an a Palm V (with internet).

At the same time my colleague on Helpdesk were using Microsoft Tablet PCs running XP to do everything (for two hours).

delllapssuck2• 14 years ago

"It's no different than Amazon's one-click."

Right. But Amazon was wise. They could have seized major portions of the software patent landscape early on, they thought about going down the path Apple is on and they decided against it. In contrast to Cook's statements here, Bezos basically said software patents are not our future and other companies should follow our lead.

If you truly understod the patent system you'd realise it's a lot less "cut and dry" than you perceive it to be. Patent law with all its wonderful intricacies that many spend careers learning can get you to an issued patent. But an issued patent can't guarantee you anything, except the right to sue alleged infringers. It gives you no "right to a monopoly" only a right to sue. It gives you no right to manufacture or sell anything. Someone else might sue you you, regardless of your patent. That's not the patent office's problem.

Your issued patent is only as good as it holds up in litigation. And patent litigation is more or less a crap shoot. With high stakes.

The only way to determine the "validity" of a patent claim is to litigate it. And Federal Circuit decisions are not exactly "consistent" so as to be "predictable", to say the least. The end result is patent litigation is extraordinarily expensive and is to be to be feared, even when the patent claims being asserted are garbage.

The issue is not with the patent system in general. The issue is with how Apple is using the system.

There is nothing inherently wrong with patents or intellectal property.

The problem is with companies like Apple who think it is all some kind of game.

Again, the problem is not IP. IP is just rules.

The problem is Apple, specifically the people who run the company. The problem is the actions they take.

When nerds on the web discuss IP, unfortunately it ends up being employed as the proverbial "straw man". Nerds ignore the actions of Apple and instead debate IP. But IP is not a person, real or imaginary. IP makes no decisions. IP is just a concept. The decisions and the evil being done here are by _people_. Patent law (or any law) does not mandate that anyone has to behave like an a-hole. That is a decision Apple makes, not the drafters of patent laws.

But Apple thinks that just because they can afford to dump millions into legal fees, month after month, year after year, it gives them the justification to make life miserable for everyone else (forcing them to spend the same amounts or be forced out of the game).

Apple behaves like an a-hole. And everyone has to mimic them.

IP is not going to disappear. It's only going to grow. The reforms will have to change how it can be used.

dotmanish• 14 years ago

"Hence the reason the law should be reformed to attach patentable rights to have a enforceable requirement to actually 'use' the patent - thus destroying the majority of trolls."

Not really. It will simply create a new class of startup pitches. "We have this idea. Fund us now and we will return to you with a MVPFP - "Minimally Viable Product For Patent". Big companies of the world will still fund it.

Joeri5• 14 years ago

> then someone simply copies everything you have done

Copyright law prevents direct copying. If someone wanted to make an iphone clone without building on google's effort, they would have to spend hundreds of millions on software deelopment. There is no "simply" when it comes to copying technologies, unless the technology is truly trivial.

djt• 14 years ago

I think Steve said it best himself:

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/7/2011/11/230bfc...

Companies have an obligation to their shareholders and their staff to protect themselves. A lot of big companies have come out against the current Patent Laws, but at the same time are fighting tooth and nail to protect themselves because that is the current legal environment that they are operating in right now.

PS. Jacques, the "freemium" and "consulting" links on your personal website are dead links

magicalist2• 14 years ago

If that's real, that's really just an example of the asinine (and petty) side of Steve Jobs I choose to forget now that he's dead.

Imagine Gabe Newell's version of that email.

gearoidoc• 14 years ago

I wish I could back in time and convince Steve Jobs not to do the iPhone and (Butterfly Effect style) return to present day and see what phones were like.

I'm guessing we'd be viewing the web scrolling up and down on a Blackberry's nipple :D

pgeorgi3• 14 years ago

Unlikely that there's a difference. It wasn't Apple (or Steve Jobs Himself[tm]) that invented the capacitive touch screen and made it available in large quantities (ie. mainstream compatible).

There were prototypes at many (probably all) mobile vendors exploring the capabilities unlocked by that technology. Apple "merely" was boldest - but then they hadn't to consider how a new HCI impacts the brand, since they had no old mobile HCI that mattered.

Things might lag half a year or so due to this, but someone, somewhere would have kicked off the "touch revolution" in about the same time without Apple. Maybe even RIM or Nokia.

Funnily, Android/Google was in a similar position as Apple, in about the same time (new market to enter, knowing the old style mobile HCI and touch, having prototypes for both) - and they seemed to prefer the old style for now.

In a world without iPhone they probably would have waited for one of the big guys to introduce touch, and then followed quickly. Google wasn't as confident about pushing an unproven HCI onto users as Apple was.

raverbashing4• 14 years ago

"but then they hadn't to consider how a new HCI impacts the brand, since they had no old mobile HCI that mattered."

And that's the BS that Apple ignores and that it makes them go forward.

They should consider how shipping crappy products impacts their brand (are you listening Motorola)

There is a reason I don't even look at the prices for Motorola products anymore.

"Funnily, Android/Google was in a similar position as Apple, ... and they seemed to prefer the old style for now."

That's what happens when you only have engineers making decisions.

wklauss• 14 years ago

Capacitive screens were already used by one terminal, I think an LG phone. But the iPhone put something different in the market: multitouch and gestures. Some things like slide to unlock or pinch to zoom seem trivial now but they weren't really product of the normal evolution of phone interfaces. Locking the screen was done with a hardware button because it was deemed safer, zoom was double tapping in the part of the image you wanted to magnify.

Had the iPhone not been introduced I doubt small little details like these would have changed at all, and there are tons of these small subtleties in the current smartphone OSs.

Nicole060• 14 years ago

Apple didn't invent touchscreens but..

I've seen two of the pre-iPhone touchscreen OSes without a sliding keyboard or anything like that and they both sucked hard. I owned a LG Prada and knew someone who owned a Samsung F490. They were both terrible, I would've rather had a classic phone than a Prada and my friend who owned the Samsung F490 handed it down to his daughter and replaced it with a classic phone. Lots of people thought that smartphones with touchscreen would behave like the iPhone in its ads except that it was far from the case.

I don't think anyone but Apple could've kicked off the touch revolution. RIM and Nokia ? they only switched course after the iPhone. Nokia's stayed in the comfort zone with Symbian for far too long and didn't have any innovative OS for smartphones and RIM was making candybar, fat and ugly phones with basically just one target audience : people who constantly use email. As long as most people use cases of mobile internet came from email software, RIM wouldn't have felt the need to innovate at all.

The iPhone was really the first touchscreen phone I ever felt comfortable to use. People who made the comparison to the Prada when they were saying that Apple didn't innovate obviously never touched a Prada. It's one of the shittiest phones I've ever used, and phones with keyboards were much better than this. The tactile feel of the touchscreen wasn't good, it lacked precision and the whole interface was programmed in mobile flash. It lacked any advanced feature and couldn't install apps outside of J2ME crap, unlike Windows Mobile. It didn't even have a real web browser.

It's been proven with the new Windows Phones, and new BB os, that you don't need to copy Apple to make good touchscreen OSes. I can understand the anger Apple felt with some Android vendors, and it is true that Samsung even changed the stock Android icons on some of their phones to match more closely the look of the iPhone (WHAT exactly is wrong with the stock android UI ? for god's sake, don't mess with something that already works great). Samsung is renowned for being copycats, and not just in the mobile phone market. The trial itself revealed that they were targeting Nokia before they changed course to target Apple. But almost all of their electronic division consists of nothing more than being shitty copycats. Their digital cameras aren't anything to brag and Samsung was so late to the DSLR market (mostly hybrids in their case.. uh) that I can't understand why one would ever consider them seriously. Their whole home appliance division consists of nothing but copying other products, they never made anything worth a look.

EricDeb• 14 years ago

How about simply having shorter tech patents? I feel having a patent length of 5 years would absolve these problems quickly. The tech industry moves too fast for 14 or 20 year patents...

danmaz748• 14 years ago

It would alredy be much better. But it's never going to happen imho.

raverbashing4• 14 years ago

Agreed, and another thing

Make patents unsellable.

lancewiggs• 14 years ago

And how about compulsory licensing after, say, 2 years, at reasonable terms, subject to arbitration and penalties for excessive demands.

The patent system needs to be fixed globally. Current international trade agreements are going in the wrong direction, driven by the USA negotiators who are ultimately driven by Disney, MPAA and so on.

The rest of te world would dearly like to see US citizens get involved - the TPP is a good place to start.

tcbawo2• 14 years ago

I have an idea of creating an Intellectual Property tax (similar to property taxes) based on an assessed value of the licence. You would pay yearly to maintain a patent. Or, you could enter it into the public domain.

danielweber2• 14 years ago

Given that it takes about 3 years for patents to be issued now, that 5 year window is comical.

However, if you could get a software patent in, say, 6 months, then that 5 year window would make a lot more sense.

dogan• 14 years ago

Software patents don't make sense, but copying something bit by bit also makes no sense. It is one thing use good ideas as inspiration and another thing to just copy something recklessly.

rrrene• 14 years ago

While many of the OP's claims seem genuinely true, it saddens me to see how mad he becomes halfway through, after rightfully assessing facts, like the obvious flaws behind some the Apple patents.

But what started as a well presented and valid argument essentially became an unresortfull, self righteous Apple-Bashing that culmulates in "But as proud as you [Tim Cook] are, as disgusted I am. [...] Today, values have won and I hope the whole world listens. Your values have won, mine have lost, [...]"

zakshay2• 14 years ago

So its fine for Samsung to copy Apple? But when Samwer Bros copy - there is a huge uproar.

You guys should know how it feels when your products are copied.

nirvana18• 14 years ago

I find this contradiction quite curious. I think it is because their position is ideological, not logical.

Samwer is evil. Copying another startups look is evil. Google is good (remember their slogan: "Do no evil." how could they be evil?) Apple is bad- and has been forever. The RIAA and MPAA are evil.

So, sometimes copying is good when google does it, but its bad when the samwers do it, and of course they will trumpet any "Example" of apple doing it no matter how disingenuous or dishonest they have to be.

This is more about their personal feelings towards their brands than any kind of logical consistency.

jeltz• 14 years ago

Well, it is partially also that there are many people with different opinions. You seem to assume that most people here hold all the views expressed by the entire community.

epo• 14 years ago

Ridiculous fandroid carping by Jaques. Samsung copied Apple feature for feature, the only difference they added was inferior workmanship. If all Samsung wanted to do was copy Apple then they should have licensed Apple's patents.

aristidb2• 14 years ago

A "fandroid" who uses a Nokia dumb phone. Yeah right.

thomasilk3• 14 years ago

Almost every single founder would go crazy if someone copied their interface or device design in the same way. Yes the same people that are now claiming that Apple is a threat to innovation.

The jury's decision is the best thing that could've happened to the industry in the long term.

I hope we don't really need to discuss the fact that Smsg's devices and Android at least started as clones.

thomasilk3• 14 years ago

My comment in another HN Thread:

Is it good for the industry in the short term? I'd say No. Is it the best thing that could have happened to the tech industry in the long term? Yes, I think so. Android and most devices started as a direct response to iOS. All the major players saw that iOS was disrupting the market and there was no time left to invent something on their own, so they simply built a clone. From a business point of view the right decision, Microsoft invented a new UI and new devices with Nokia, but it seems they failed, since they were late to the market and to succeed they would have needed a really disruptive idea themselves. Google had the team and skills to invent something that could disrupt iOS, but they decided to copy it instead and in the process wasted all the brain power of the team that probably has the best chance of finding the next paradigm. What a waste of talent to use all those great people for building a clone.

jwr• 14 years ago

Exactly. I find it amazing that people suddenly start applying a different set of rules once it's about Apple.

If I was a startup founder who designed and developed the iPhone, and then saw the blatant rip-off by Samsung, I would go nuts with rage. And HN would likely rage with me. But hey, it's Apple, so no bullying, and anyone is allowed to copy whatever they do, right?

Also, I view this whole trial as "a way" for Apple to get at Samsung. Patents were a tool here, not the end goal. We all know the patent system is broken and obsolete, but since it exists, it is a tool that Apple could use. Note that no one seems to dispute that Samsung copied Apple designs, people just complain about the use of patents. I think that is a very one-sided view. Samsung blatantly copied (and continues to do so) Apple designs and they deserve to be punished — that Apple used patents is something I'd consider secondary.

thomasilk3• 14 years ago

It's a question of intent not of rounded corners. Smsg and Android had the clear intent to copy Apple, so there should be no discussion about their guilt.

I totally agree on your view on patents.

jahewson• 14 years ago

Don't shoot the messenger. If you don't like the way the patent system works, then criticise the system, but don't criticise a company for making use of it. The 800lb gorilla in the room is patent reform, not Apple. They certainly don't need the money. Given the discovery that went into this case, claims like "Apple didn't even invent it" seem rather far-fetched.

zmmmmm2• 14 years ago

> If you don't like the way the patent system works, then criticise the system, but don't criticise a company for making use of it

So when and how exactly are we supposed to complain? In a vacuum? When nothing bad is happening, just start writing letters about how awful the patent system is and hope somebody listens? Do you honestly think that would ever work? It's a ludicrous proposition.

If you want change, you have to illustrate why that change is needed. You do that by highlighting demonstrably problematic cases, and by showing that the parties involved are behaving in a fashion that is contrary to the public interest, yet legal, and thus changes to the laws are needed. That is how it works. If anybody thinks the patent system needs reform then this is exactly when they should put their effort into complaining, and they should absolutely be criticizing Apple for their actions. It is not just appropriate - it's the only way change will get achieved.

wamatt• 14 years ago

Uggh, it's getting pretty tricky to work through the moral ambiguity of all this.

Probably because it's 3am and I'm tired, but wouldn't it be nice for a change, to let someone else convince us that "Apple == good" and "Samsung == Bad", or vice versa? But no, reality has to go and be all grey and complex. :p

marcamillion• 14 years ago

Wow Jacques, I usually love your posts and your comments here are valuable - but I think you are so off the mark with this post.

For starters, the reality is that Apple's revenue streams are quite diversified and their product portfolio is very strong. From iMac, to iTunes to iPods/iPhones/iPads.

So the notion that Apple would launch into litigation "just for the money" seems misguided, at the least - if only for the fact that if they lost the suit, there could be significant ramifications for their sales (e.g. an injunction against selling any of the products in the suit for X period of time, etc.). With sales and revenues growing as much as they are, a wrongly filed lawsuit can be even more risky than rewarding.

For a company as wealthy (and innovative) as Apple, there are more considerations than just protecting market share and trying to extract patent rent from competitors as a revenue stream.

There are many other companies that come out with many features in their products that Apple doesn't sue. See Windows, Safari vs Chrome, iPod vs Zune, Adobe Premiere vs Final Cut Pro, most "ultrabooks" vs Macbook Air, etc.

The issue here is that Samsung, HTC, et al. essentially have done what many companies in China have done. They acted like a hardware manufacturing partner - then using the inside knowledge they gained of the intimate architecture of the products, they reverse engineered them and competed directly.

That's like you hiring a web developer to build your startup - and both of you build it to traction, and once you take all the risk and prove the market, (s)he leaves and builds a direct competitor using his insider knowledge.

It's the most insiduous kind of 'IP stealing' that you can get.

If you had that done to you, and your ex-developer (in fact, he is still managing your codebase) is making a ton of money off of your ideas and IP in your market, I am sure you would be pissed too.

The money is just sprinkling on top.

Also, I think it is hard to argue that Apple doesn't pour their hearts into what they do. That's why they are the most valuable company on the planet and will continue to be for years to come. It's because of the rate at which they innovate.

Not the rate at which they copy.

So cut them some slack, and walk a mile in their shoes.

eyevariety• 14 years ago

Really well said- for all of Jacques great posts, this opinion piece isn't well supported and doesn't go very deep considering its length.

cwisecarver• 14 years ago

Sucks that this post is so far down. It's the only piece of content on the page so far that doesn't seem like a biased, drunken tirade, including the OP.

ForrestN• 14 years ago

This is absurd and frustrating. Apple is not responsible for the broken patent system.

Apple is a public company. If Apple decided to hold itself to a set of standards more stringent than its competitors, it would be hampering itself and acting against the interests of its shareholders. Complain about, and work to fix, the system. Don't expect Apple to fix it by ceding the rights it currently has to its competitors. Especially when, as a company, Apple genuinely seems to believe that the blatant copying of iOS in Android is unethical.

Also, you know Samsung has filed similar suits around the world, and in no way is opting out of the patent system, right? Buying a Samsung as a fuck-you to patent law is a joke. They aren't working to fix the problem. They're just losing.

nikic• 14 years ago

Just because you can, doesn't mean that you have to. Look at Google. That's a nice company, which keeps the patent trolling down.

silvestrov• 14 years ago

Oh, so now that Google has bought Motorola, they've stopped Motorola suing Apple?

jopt• 14 years ago

Right. Just because you can doesn't mean you have to, but it does mean you can.

This is little more than a new round of the CSR debate.

I find it hard to fault Apple for cashing in on the ridiculous legal system.

capkutay2• 14 years ago

Apple genuinely seems to believe that the blatant copying of iOS in Android is unethical.

Its unethical because the Android - iOS relationship can be narrowed down to one person...Eric Schmidt. He sat on the board of Apple, absorbed the process of Apple getting into the smart phone market, then emulated it at Google while he was CEO there. Although to be fair, Android innovates in some areas where iOS does not explore (running the JVM on smartphones).

mjhagen• 14 years ago

In this case, no. It was a case against Samsung, not Google. And was about Samsung's hardware and their own implementation of Android.

printer2• 14 years ago

Would you ever think about patenting a double touch interaction when you were the first to implement a double click action on a touchscreen? I think these things are so obvious I would even be ashamed to call them my innovation.

wangweij• 14 years ago

If you think it's obvious, Have you ever tried to double click the screen or pinch an image on your old Palm Pilot hoping the size would change?

srinathvj• 14 years ago

This is total abuse of patents and copyrights! Of course, the obvious way to do things should never be patent-able in the first place!! Someone definitely needs to re-look @ how patenting works... I think the rules have obviously become archaic... and not useful anymore. Another example of this is the Indian Judiciary... completely meaningless laws and rules all over the place. A law book to govern a nation should ideally not be over 150 Pages, but now we have one which is like 5,000 pages and its completely meaningless!! Dawh!!!

irreverentbits• 14 years ago

I can't help but feel as if all of the claims made regarding "real innovation" in this post grossly undervalue the strides Apple has made in UI/UX and overall product design in favor of elevating more immediately self-evident technical advances.

The strength of Apple's innovation has always been in delivering complete, cohesive products. In that regard, user interface details and interactions which seem trivial technically are hardly trivial in terms of user experience.

As a competitive entity, there's no reason for Apple not to leverage every technique at its disposal to ensure its competitive viability - and one of these techniques is using patent litigation to prevent competitors from carbon-copying its innovations.

Moral and ethical arguments should be made with regard to the integrity of the patent system itself, not a single corporation's lawful use of that system. Decrying Apple's behavior either speaks to hopeless naiveté regarding the nature of competition, or self-congratulatory moral posturing.

aristidb2• 14 years ago

There's a nice video series about why the primitive moral idea "stealing is wrong" wreaks havoc in the world of ideas:

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/

mchanson• 14 years ago

How can we make these threads not be like comp.sys.mac.advocacy?

pjscott2• 14 years ago

Wait for ten years. If that doesn't work, twenty. In that much time, something is bound to change.

(This may sound impractical, but it's the approach I'm taking. And, hey, it already worked for discussions involving Microsoft.)

jaebrown• 14 years ago

Your argument is really off base. Like most, it seems that you're biased on this issue. There are clearly a couple of things most people have an issue with in this case and all are no reason to be mad at Apple.

1. Design - It has been stated over and over by people that Apple shouldn't be able to patent hardware and software design; which is why these same people believe they lost their trial against Microsoft in the 90s. I believe Apple lost that trial because they waited to late and by that time; which was years in, people had a hard time believing the novelty of a computer UI was something to copy but rather a standard to implement. This is why Apple since Jobs return in 97, has made it their mission to put design first and foremost. They have built the company since 97 on design because it's the one thing, that truly distinguishes a product upon appearance. This is why that went after Samsung early, as they didn't want to give people time to infuse the two.

No, Apple did not win the right to have a rectangle. Clearly Palm, Blackberry and a couple other smartphone makers from earlier in the 2000s have been doing this but Apple did win because Samsung blatantly copied the look and feel of their rectangle.

2. Innovation - If anything, this verdict will spur innovation in the smartphone space. I personally can't wait to start seeing different UIs and hardware models. After the iPhone in 2007, everything has pretty much looked the same. It has really become boring. I applauded Microsoft for what they did with Windows Phone/Mobile from a UI perspective. It shows the possibilities when you think outside the box and try to innovate and now their Windows OS is going in the same direction. We don't know the possibilities with hardware because no one has taken the risk to introduce some truly different or revolutionary, since 2007.

Look what FrogDesign has done with the UI of Android, that no other OEM has even attempted to do. http://www.frogdesign.com/work/sharp-aquos.html

3. Patents - The Patent System is clearly broken and needs change; which is why there is a bill on the Senate floor right now for that. I personally don't agree with software patents but I'm in huge favor of design and utility patents. Those are the patents that don't stifle innovation and force companies to be creative and innovative when building their products. Companies should definitely have to license patents that infringe on these two, as these are the areas where the most and hardest work is done because these are the areas that are most transparent to the consumer.

For all the talk and comments, I've seen and read from people, I've not heard of any more pressure to Congress on this issue. I've not heard one politician say "I'm pushing this issue because my constituents have been urging me to do something about it". We did something about SOPA and PIPA but have done nothing about patent reform. So, I fail to really hear anyone out on this stance if they're not actively trying to pursue a change. I've not seen one sign up or online petition on HN, Reddit or any of the other internet darling pushing this issue.

I think people need to stop taking such an interest in this, as Apple is only doing whats best for them, within the law that we all follow and are not trying to change. We all do whats best for us. An even though we're not companies, I think that's a greater reason for them to do so, as they adhere to shareholders; which are people. So if you have a problem, have it with the Shareholders Dilemma.

macspoofing• 14 years ago

Was a line-by-line analysis really necessary?

denzil_correa• 14 years ago

Someone apart from me found it amusing, Phew!

pjscott2• 14 years ago

Line-by-line flames are seldom necessary, but are often fine examples of their literary genre.

nirvana18• 14 years ago

It's time to put an end to the lie that Apple has patented ideas or the "right" to use features. This is simply not true, and not how patents work, and the anti-patent crowd really should be embarrassed at perpetuating this ideologically motivated, but obviously factually false claim.

Jeff Han demonstrated a touch interface using cameras a few months before the iPhone was demonstrated. Both sets of work can be patented because the idea of using a "touch interface" cannot be patented, by anybody.

Similarly, "pinch to zoom" or "one click purchase" or "pull to refresh" cannot -- and HAVE NOT-- been patented.

You can only patent inventions. Inventions can be particular implementations of features. And this is what Apple has patented. Jeff Han's touch implementation uses cameras and Apple's uses capacitive touch screen and a lot of VERY sophisticated software. They are both distinct and non-obvious and both of them could be patented.

I know this is an ideological position for those who are spreading (or repeating) the misinformation. It is much easier to pretend like these patents are trivial monopolies on ideas, than to admit that Apple put half a decade of work into them.

But you should question your ideology when it requires you to lie in order to make points.

learc837• 14 years ago

>Apple's uses capacitive touch screen and a lot of VERY sophisticated software.

Here is a summary of the claims.

  A multitouch display detects at least two contacts.

  Those contacts perform a first gesture.

  That gesture adjusts an image in some way

  The first set of contacts is broken.

  A second set of contacts is detected.

  The second contacts perform another gesture within a pre-determined period of time.

  The gesture continues to adjust the image in the same way.

That is the obvious way to implement pinch to zoom on a touch screen. You don't have to copy their "very sophisticated" software to violate that patent. If you implement a feature that copies the above claims, you are in violation.

Apple effectively has a monopoly on the feature pinch to zoom on touch screens. The patent is sufficiently broad that there is no way to do it on a touch screen that avoids the patent.

That is the problem with the patent system. Many patents are so broad that they don't cover a specific implementation.

If that were the case the infamous Amazon one click patent would cover a specific implementation of one click--say a particular way to store the user information, and you could implement a similar feature using a different method. However, you can't therefore Amazon effectively has a monopoly on a feature.

tripzilch7• 14 years ago

It actually all becomes really clear as soon as you realize that what Apple wanted to patent all along, was innovation itself.

Apparently that claim did not get accepted[1] so now they're trying to stop competition from using iNnovation by means of patent-lawsuits for everything else.

[1] Prior art, they said. Even though it's absolutely indisputable that Apple came up with the iWheel first, and everybody else copied its rounded corners.

blaines3• 14 years ago

Okay this guy wrote paragraph(s) retorting each individual line in a memo. The author is reading way too much into this. They wrote their opinion, this clearly wasn't a fact finding mission.

I'd probably give this a "C-" for poor format, unbalanced opinionated writing, and it's length (too long).

In the future, it's fine to pick a side, but make a case and defend it with research. Don't ask a series of questions in response to a memo. Questions are unconvincing at best.

"Should your kids be home before 10PM?" vs "Your kids should be home before 10PM"

Hopefully this helps the author improve their writing. I don't even have a Nokia phone, I have no phone. Maybe we'd be friends.

darkstalker• 14 years ago

I'm surprised how Apple-biased the people here is. They're clearly abusing the patent system by patenting ridiculous things. How come things like slide to unlock are considered innovation? that's been used to open laptops before Apple patented it.

learc837• 14 years ago

The thing you have to ask is: would apple have invented the iPhone if the patent system as it stands didn't exist? Also assuming that copyright protection, and protection against counterfeit goods was still in place.

I think the answer to that is, yes. Samsung and other companies did copy Apple just about as far as they could without actually creating a counterfeit.

Yet, that didn't stop Apple from making billions of dollars. To me that is proof that in this case the patent system did nothing to foster innovation.

Take the example of pinch to zoom. If Apple knew they couldn't patent the process would they have implemented it? Of course they would have, it's a better interface (and the fact nearly every other smartphone copied it, yet they still created it proves my point).

Furthermore the purpose of the patent system is to encourage innovation by rewarding inventors for not hoarding innovation with trade secrets. Could something like pinch to zoom even realistically be protected by trade secrets.

The implementation is so simple that once someone has seen it, nearly anyone could replicate it.

Patents no longer serve they purpose of disseminating knowledge. Companies aren't digging through the patent office in search of implementation details, the way it was intended to be used.

deepGem• 14 years ago

"Even the most rabid Apple fan can see through this and realize this is just about money. If it wouldn’t be about money and control then there wouldn’t be so many efforts to get injunctions and damages." - Seriously ??? Dude, A billion dollars is nothing for Apple. They probably earn more than that in a month.

If I'm not wrong, these were Steve's words to Eric Schmidt - 'I don't want your money, I don't want 5 billion $, I just don't want you to do Android, period'. So the lawsuit is definitely not about money.

jderick• 14 years ago

If an idea can be described in one sentence, it shouldn't be patentable.

andreyf• 14 years ago

I don't think this is about money. Apple has enough money. This is about destroying the competition - in particular, Android. I believe Steve Jobs wasn't shy about it, either: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15400984

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

My take on it is encapsulated by this:

"For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money."

It is clear that it can't be about the money because Apple makes 10x the money Samsung does, its all about crushing your enemies using every available tool in your arsenal, no matter what. When Microsoft did that by bundling their own browser into their dominant OS they were convicted of illegally using their market domination to crush competition. I don't think that fate will befall Apple but the ramifications of this on Apple will be far and wide and for the most part uncontrollable.

I expect that everyone reading this today will, in 5 to 10 years be able to look back at today and see all the manifestations of what happened because of it and then see what Apple has wrought. I have no idea if it will be the best or stupidest thing they ever did, but it will define them as a company. I'm strangely reminded of the Tesla / Edison rant for some reason.

pasbesoin• 14 years ago

The problem with prior art is that, with the Patent Office doing such a crap job -- thanks in part to the Congress that funds it -- you and your attorney have to document and present it yourself, at $300/hour.

Add first-to-file to this mess, and, well, at least there will no longer be any point in spending that $300/hour.

novaleaf• 14 years ago

while I personally dislike Apple, I think the poster would have kept me more interested if he took a more neutral stance.

overt hostile rebuttals made this a "TLDR" for me

aklofas• 14 years ago

Apple sucks.

goggles99• 14 years ago

Lets see how you all feel after Apple is done suing every android and smartphone manufacturer.

This is just the beginning. The first shot fired... The real war is yet to come.

uvTwitch2• 14 years ago

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Steve Jobs; Triumph of the Nerds.

EthanEtienne• 14 years ago

Does anyone else see the irony in that he himself is a domain squatter? The shit he hates, he is himself.

sterlingwes• 14 years ago

This is the ultimate in hypocrisy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

sapuser• 14 years ago

The idea behind patents is a _sound_ one; it provides incentive to innovate by guaranteeing profits for a certain period of time. Those who don't care about profits can freely give away patents or not bother getting one!

The details are probably up for a fair debate -- 20 years of loyalty that can be trivially extended by trivial process changes (e.g. Pharma companies) is undesirable.

For the argument that someone else can come up with an idea, that is an interesting point. If you can see how something works, it is not that difficult to reverse engineer it. But, in the true spirit of innovation, the innovators should be thinking about _outdoing_ what they see. Merely copying someone else is not innovation. And, that is the case with so many software features: both genuine and trivial ones are considered equal.

If there's a way to hide the secret sauce, people would easily do that (and that was historically done for so many things like the spices etc). The only way to achieving that in modern day is to (i) manufacture each important component by self and (ii) create a product that can't be taken apart. Imagine an Iphone that can't be un-assembled without destroying it. In this context, patents would speed up innovation (see the development of alternative compression algorithms) by allowing to examine the details of current implementation and improve upon it.

Samsung (and others) have been making un-wieldly phones for decades. I wonder why they decided to make "rectangular phones with rounded corners" after runaway success of iPhone.

And, this comes from someone who hasn't owned an iPhone :-)

The Tim Cook memo: line by line

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