The Next Step in Apple's Thermonuclear War Against Android

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120902120442355

by esolyt • 14 years ago

103 97 14 years ago

> These Four Horsemen of the Android Apocalypse are patents for what Apple claims are “key” product features -- “Slide to Unlock,” “Text Correction,” “Unified Search,” and “Special Text Detection.

Wasn't "Slide to Unlock" invalidated in the process against HTC?

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

And didn't Google devise a workaround for Unified Search in a week or so?

lelibertaire• 14 years ago

I was under the impression that the patch removed universal search altogether.

AnthonyMouse4• 14 years ago

That's the thing: It doesn't really matter. Take any given software patent and throw a research team at it, chances are you'll find invalidating prior art. Take any given software patent and give it to a CS major, chances are you'll have a work-around inside of a few days.

But that's not the problem. The problem is that you never know which patents will be asserted against you, and by that point the horse is out of the barn. You've now got to spend millions of dollars on lawyers for years to invalidate their improvidently granted patents. And the work-around doesn't do much good when they're asking for damages for past infringement on the millions of devices you've already shipped or suddenly having your trucks stopped at the border (and interrupting your business and straining your relationships with retailers) during the period before you can retool your supply chain to incorporate the work-around. Especially when the second you release a new product with a new set of work-arounds, they come at you with a new set of patents.

Software patents have got to go.

huxley3• 14 years ago

The HTC case was in the UK:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18709232

fpgeek10• 14 years ago

It was also tossed out in the Netherlands (Apple's attempt at a pre-holiday ban of the Galaxy S II and other Samsung products last year). Sadly, these results mean almost nothing in the US.

dvhh• 14 years ago

somehow Apple reminded me of monsanto. Maintain your dominant position on the market by agressively suing everybody.

dhughes• 14 years ago

Apple reminds me of Scientology, sue everyone who defies us!

marginalboy• 14 years ago

One can't help but suspect these players are acting in concert, to manufacture the most ridiculous exercises of technology patent abuse, so as to motivate the public and Congress to advocate for a reconsideration of the whole mess...

veidr4• 14 years ago

I don't think so, because the dysfunctionality of the patent system is working out extremely well for Apple.

However, I do hold out some degree of hope that the high-profile nature of these products, along with the self-evident insanity of these patents that give one company exclusive dominion over basic concepts (rounded rectangles, pinch-to-zoom) may be enough to make more people aware of how broken the patent system is.

So while I doubt Apple has any intention other than to keep exploiting the flaws in the patent system to attack its competitors, if there is an upside to any of this nonsense, that would be it.

Edit: Even though most of us on this forum probably reserve the most contempt for patent trolls like Myrhvold, with his zombie horde of non-practicing entities, I actually think that these cases resonate wayyyyy more with the non-programmer mainstream audience.

Indie programmers having to pay royalties behind the scenes to some shell company? For most people, that's not too interesting. The Galaxy Nexus getting pulled off the market because it can search for things? This is at least something that people have heard of, can understand, and can see doesn't make sense.

fpgeek10• 14 years ago

> The Galaxy Nexus getting pulled off the market because it can search for things?

Absolutely. A Google-designed product getting pulled because of search? Does not compute.

Steko4• 14 years ago

Some companies will have to pay a slightly higher per device royalty than they had wanted to and/or remove/modify some functionality. It's the Apocalypse! It's Thermonuclear War!

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Requiring royalties for open source, independently developed software is Wrong. An attack on Android is an affront to all independent software developers. Also, Apple has said they are not interested in licensing.

Steko4• 14 years ago

"independently developed"

This is a new claim and not one that will find many takers imho.

"Apple has said they are not interested in licensing"

This is far from the truth. They certainly offered licensing to Samsung. $30/device might sound like a lot but that was a starting point in a negotiation.

da_n2• 14 years ago

Just being open source should not provide blanket immunity. This is also hardly some small, independent developers we are talking about, they are very large international companies. IIRC Android Alliance rarely, if ever, accept 'independent' contributions, it is just a dump of source code when they feel like it (Android 3?).

I am a big fan of open source but I totally disagree on this specific case.

ripperdoc• 14 years ago

Look here. IP licensing is the tradition in this industry. All big telecom vendors pay each other yearly amounts for IP rights. Normally they simply bulk them together and see who got most. Now and then a court case flares up (it's a negotiation tactic). In this case, what has happened is simply an escalation between two biggest competitors where no one wants to back down, and Apple "got lucky" in this particular court's interpretation. Apple is not a bully among nice guys. Everyone has been suing. Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola, etc. Everyone is gathering patents like crazy. And remember, Android device vendors are already paying large amounts to Microsoft.

Yes, it's not the signs of a healthy industry, as most software patents are silly and things will get sillier as this progresses. Most are being patented simply because they can, to add a number to the total as ammo for next licensing discussion.

esolyt5• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if you are aware but "thermonuclear war" was the term Steve Jobs used. It's certainly not just Groklaw's observation.

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

I'd wish he didn't. It's not a "thermonuclear war" until there are iCBM's flying everywhere. Some phrases have too profound/big meaning to be hijacked by business marketing like that.

veidr4• 14 years ago

Apple isn't gunning for royalties, they are trying to use the courts to remove their competitors from the market entirely.

campnic• 14 years ago

Its funny that you say 'slightly'. The demands from apple are 4-5 orders of magnitude what they paid samsung for royalty fees on samsung's patents.

othermaciej4• 14 years ago

Does anyone see groklaw as a credible source any more? They used to have good reporting, but all I've seen since the Apple v Samsung verdict is spittle-flecked ranting.

veidr4• 14 years ago

I have found their coverage (of Apple v Samsung) useful. The only other outlet that covered some of the more unusual aspects of the verdict and the post-trial jury interviews (that I saw) was BBC.

othermaciej4• 14 years ago

I saw the same factual coverage of post-trial jury interviews on, e.g., The Verge, without GrokLaw's implausible legal analysis that this would cause the verdict to be thrown out.

aristidb• 14 years ago

Groklaw has proven pretty reliable in prior cases. Se's never truly impartial, but almost always quite close to the truth. And I can understand her, this really is an ugly set of cases.

[EDIT: Fixed gender pronoun.]

huxley3• 14 years ago

It's actually a her not a him that covered the Apple v Samsung case on Groklaw. PJ stands for Pamela Jones.

Steko4• 14 years ago

PJ is a she. Groklaw is often a reference to the whole community though.

Steko4• 14 years ago

Groklaw's approach worked well in SCO v IBM because SCO was a fraud so the story was entirely one sided. Unfortunately not all cases lend themselves to the open and shut "us vs them" mentality. Basically they've become the MSNBC to Florian's Fox News. Which is to say more sympathetic (Florian is a paid shill after all, a revelation we have Groklaw to thank for) but still not what I want from a legal tech news blog.

That analogy is not perfect, I do read and find value in both but the bias can be horribly grating and would love to find a reliable substitute.

Speaking of which The Verge's coverage has been excellent although there's a lot of forced false equivalence and it's pitched to a slightly lower information audience (I guess this make them CNN in my bad analogy?).

halo• 14 years ago

Groklaw has always had an outspoken editorial stance (in favour of FOSS) rather than being impartial.

I made a similar criticism of its editorial stance 750 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603929).

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Why is it ranting? They still post insights of how the law and the whole process works which is very useful for us lay people. Her arguments are still well formed and she makes good points, regardless if you agree with her bias. A biased post can still be insightful and useful.

If what you're really bothered with is the bias. Then I suggest listening to TWIL. They're almost as through, and they at least try to stay neutral. (Their recent discussion on this case had actual lawyers defending both sides, and even those defending Apple agreed with the point PJ is making in this post).

http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-law

othermaciej4• 14 years ago

Let me give you some examples from the current post that strike me as BS:

"But, in contrast, here's the Apple design patent, D504889, about those rounded corners -- how do you code around it? A tablet in the shape of a parallelogram?"

But the jury found Samsung's actual tablets, which are rectangles with rounded corners, do not infringe this patent. So her analysis that it's impossible to design around this is false.

Here's one from another recent post:

"Apple's lawyers are still clueless that the public is for the most part repulsed by Apple's IP aggression."

This isn't supported by any evidence and is almost certainly made up. I'm not aware of any survey supporting this claim.

At this point, I'm unable to tell which information about the case on Groklaw is factual and which is made up. As far as I can tell, the quotes from actual court documents are accurate, but I can't really tell about the rest.

scriptproof• 14 years ago

Do you have read the interview? The foreman read the source code and seeing it is not the same, he concluded prior art was a different invention!!!!!

air• 14 years ago

Funny. The last time you were criticizing groklaw here, you preferred Florian's analysis of the Oracle case as more impartial and accurate.

splamco2• 14 years ago

Groklaw is dead on. Apple's grotesque abuse of our legal system as a weapon to destroy their competition is wicked (the bad kind).

DanBC• 14 years ago

Groklaw links to a BBC interview with the jury foreman.

> we as jurors were sworn to abide by the rules and the stipulations in law as they exist today, at the time we made the decision.

Can't jurors just ignore laws that they feel are unjust?

huxley3• 14 years ago

It can happen, it's called jury nullification. There's some interesting reading in the background section of the wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#Background

philwelch• 14 years ago

It's a bit controversial whether jury nullification is an actual right or whether it's just a side-effect of the fact that juries can't be punished or held accountable for their verdicts. What's the difference? Well, for instance, judges tend to instruct juries only to consider the facts and not the law, and attorneys aren't generally allowed to discuss jury nullification in their closing arguments. On the other hand, the jury will rule however it decides, so lots of things from the merit of the law itself to sympathy for the victim or defendant will factor into their decision.

signalsignal• 14 years ago

Yes, and it's called jury nullification. The jury did not do so therefore they did not feel the law was unjust.

AnthonyMouse4• 14 years ago

I don't think jury nullification applies except for in criminal trials and only where the jury finds in favor of the defendant. You can't have juries running around convicting innocent people just because they don't like the law (or the defendant).

ars• 14 years ago

Actually technically jury nullification also applies to civil cases. But the judge has the power to throw out such verdicts.

adsr2• 14 years ago

Why would you need bounce back at all? It's one of those things that gives iOS it's personallity, you could definately make a touch based user interface without bounce back.

fpgeek10• 14 years ago

I wouldn't bee so confident about that.

The jury also found that the Nexus S 4G infringed the scrolling patent even though it doesn't include "bounce back" and, instead, using stock Android's "overscroll glow" (which, in theory, was supposed to work around the Apple patent). I'd say the breadth of this particular patent is an unsettled question, at the very least.

lowboy• 14 years ago

Bouncebacks and inertia scrolling help the user experience because they're closer to real world behaviour. On a subconscious level, people more easily interact with something that has a little weight and closer to real physics to it.

adsr2• 14 years ago

It solves some real world problems, but is it really closer to real world behavior? If I for example flip through a photo album and reach the last page, it wont bounce back. There are other cues to that, such as the thickness of the page or if I attempt to flip the last page I will instead see the back cover etc.

spaghetti4• 14 years ago

I'd love to see control of the "mobile space" be in the hands of individuals instead of large, for-profit and often evil companies. Clearly mobile computing is here to stay. If it wasn't then companies like apple and google wouldn't be fighting so hard for control.

Imagine a decentralized app store where people can make a living without having to deal with apple's ridiculous review process or ideas of what's appropriate. I suppose the major challenge is getting all the non-geeks into this ecosystem and away from iTunes and other privately owned app stores.

This is obviously wishful thinking. However given the importance of mobile computing going forward I think it's worth imagining the best mobile ecosystem possible.

gurkendoktor• 14 years ago

> Imagine a decentralized app store where people can make a living without having to deal with apple's ridiculous review process or ideas of what's appropriate.

So far, "freedom of App Store speech" and money don't seem to be correlated at all. (Or all the millionaires on OpenMoko and Cydia are being quiet to prevent a gold rush on their turf.)

I think the only instance where Apple's guidelines are prohibitive to making a living is porn. I for one would be a thousand times more likely to pay for porn on the trusted platform that is Apple, rather than on some dubious website.

Is it possible to use this as an advantage against established app stores? Or is Google already established as the platform to be on for mobile porn? (I can't check first hand, thanks to Google's GeoIP madness.)

fpgeek10• 14 years ago

> Is it possible to use this as an advantage against established app stores? Or is Google already established as the platform to be on for mobile porn?

Google has similar guidelines to Apple on this front (see Zinio's comments about why they don't have Android/iOS versions of adult magazines, for example). The only notable difference I can think of is that there's probably more post-filtering than pre-filtering of apps.

spaghetti4• 14 years ago

You're right about the money being at the traditional app stores. I'm trying to think ahead and see if this will change.

The enforcement of Apple's "guidelines" for apps harm developers' ability to make money on the app store far beyond porn. I have a non-porn, totally above-bar app that serves a niche that makes $n/day. I re-skinned my app to serve a different, larger niche and it was rejected multiple times for bizarre, ambiguous reasons. If this second app were in the store today I would be making more money. I'd bet my income would be at least 2 * $n/day from the apps combined.

splamco2• 14 years ago

There is no platform on the planet that could get away with exerting absolute control over what can be published on that platform except Apple. People can and do rationalize it but to subject yourself to an eco-system where your entire experience is subject to Apple's totalitarian control is creepy.

ender7• 14 years ago

The huge, HUGE advantage that the App Store brings to the average consumer is a feeling of safety. An app installed from the App store:

- Can be uninstalled easily, and leave no trace behind (remember "Register cleaners"?)

- Cannot interfere with other apps

- Cannot run in the background and spy on your surfing habits

- Cannot steal your credit card information and upload it to Russian mafia servers

For a long time, the standard geek response to these problems is "that's the user's problem -- they should be more careful about what they install". The response appears to be "fuck you, I don't want to waste my time worrying about whether this purple monkey screen saver will secretly empty my retirement account."

If you can find a way to make this "free and open" system also safe, then I think you'll have a winner.

kalleboo2• 14 years ago

> The response appears to be "fuck you, I don't want to waste my time worrying about whether this purple monkey screen saver will secretly empty my retirement account."

With the amount of non-techies I know with jailbroken phones with all kinds of super-tacky OS hacks installed, that is definitely not the only response.

esolyt5• 14 years ago

All of them are solved by sandboxing and permission mechanism.

"Fuck you, I don't want to waste my time" is actually the response developers should be giving to Apple when they are made to wait more than a month for their app to be reviewed and finally it gets rejected for a political, ideological, arbitrary, or personal (competes with an Apple service) reason.

biafra• 14 years ago

Point 1 and 2 have nothing to do with the App Store. Android does the same.

3 & 4 are not prohibited by the App Store review process.

Of course, the iphone app can steal all kinds of information on your phone and send it to russian servers.

Do you really believe the App Store review can prevent malware?

Or are you really only talking about the _perception_ of the App Store review process?

spaghetti4• 14 years ago

Indeed the feeling of safety from the app store is important. However I'd rephrase your last sentence as "If you can find a way to make the "free and open" system seem safe enough that average users believe it's safe then you have a winner".

exodust• 14 years ago

Maybe you're forgetting the whole "why does Angry Birds need to know my phone number and have access to my contacts etc". The iPhone NEEDS a firewall so we can selectively block apps from calling home and sending usage data back every time you use them, and other data that we otherwise did NOT grant permission to do so when we installed the app.

azakai• 14 years ago

> Imagine a decentralized app store where people can make a living without having to deal with apple's ridiculous review process or ideas of what's appropriate.

The closest thing we have to that is the web. You can run stores on it completely decentralized, and you can access it from all mobile devices.

spaghetti4• 14 years ago

I wonder if the "app ecosystem" will move towards paid web services that people use on their mobile devices. I know the whole native vs web app debate has been done to death. Many games probably won't run in mobile browsers in the future. Would be interesting if apple's (and other companies') mis-management of their centralized app stores ultimately incentivized developers to move to the web as the "app store" to the extent that one could make a living.

One data point or trend that seems to support the above idea: The popularity of free apps that are monetized via in-app-purchase. Would be great if the future saw more free web apps monetized via app-in-purchase provided by Stripe or similar.

001sky3• 14 years ago

For those who would like to read them, here are all the Apple patents in play in this case:

    5,946,647 (the “’647 Patent”), System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data
    6,847,959 (the “’959 Patent”), Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system
    8,046,721 (the “’721 Patent”), Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image
    8,074,172 (the “’172 Patent”), Method, system, and graphical user interface for providing word recommendations
    8,014,760 [Part 2] (the “’760 Patent”), Missed telephone call management for a portable multifunction device
    5,666,502 (the “’502 Patent”), Graphical user interface using historical lists with field classes
    7,761,414 (the “’414 Patent”), Asynchronous data synchronization amongst devices
    8,086,604 (the “’604 Patent”), Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system*

- Short form summary of the IP. Useful for reference.

alvarosm• 14 years ago

They ask themselves why Apple went for Samsung's head. It's pretty obvious... they don't want an Apple vs. Google. It's much easier to win vs Samsung (a foreign company, by the way) and thus establish some valuable jurisprudence. Google was recently said to be getting ready to sue Apple, it's only natural because Apple's target was always Google and it's now only a matter of time before we get to that. It's a bit like WW2 when Germany started invading eastern countries. It was in no small part a preemptive move, because eastern Europe being occupied by Germany or the USSR was only a matter of time. It would have been Russia if it hadn't been Germany. We might still see some preemptive moves by Google before Apple finally sues Google directly.

ash• 14 years ago

> It would have been Russia if it hadn't been Germany.

You are technically correct - Germany invaded Poland first. But German and Soviet invasions of Poland were just 18 days apart: 1 September and 17 September 1939. All according to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [1] signed shortly before that - on 23 August 1939.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact

some1else• 14 years ago

I'm very much against software patents, at least regarding the UI. But the proposed Bouncebackandforth workaround is how the iOS Photos app works.

The Next Step in Apple's Thermonuclear War Against Android

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