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Apple Sues HTC For 20 Patent Violations In Phones
eldavojohn writes "Taiwanese HTC is being sued by Apple for 20 patents regarding the many phones HTC manufactures. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, 'We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Apple has similar patent litigation with Nokia and may be trying to scare the rest of the industry into licensing patents similar to the Microsoft-Novell and Microsoft-Amazon deals regarding patents covering Linux functionality."
First there's a patent that prevents the USPTO from rotating applications 180, and now they can't even turn their screen to read stuff?
Life in the thing-rotation space is getting pretty tight.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Remember this day. This day marks the beginning of Apple's decline.
Here is the cure for your ignorance concerning the alleged theft by Apple of the Xerox GUIs:
As for Nokia, they are, as other posters have noted, trying to hit up Apple with more stringent terms than other companies. Apple wants to be treated fairly.
No sig? Sigh...
And will Apple pay Xerox for inventing Graphical User Interfaces?
Erm, you DO know that Apple and Xerox had an agreement on the sharing of GUI technology?
Here's some of the history:
Since its inception, Xerox had given other companies tours of PARC, showing off the highly advanced Alto workstation, which had a bitmapped display, an object oriented programming environment, was networkable, and was more powerful than most minicomputers of the day. (The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders and stopped giving tours.)
Convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the 1980s, Jobs offered Xerox a killer deal: Apple, which was privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 - in exchange for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted and gave Jobs and a team of Lisa project engineers a tour.
Sapere aude!
So, as the submitter, I saw a lot of similarities here. Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.
Have you noticed that Microsoft hasn't sued anyone else?
At the time Microsoft went after TomTom, it was pretty clear that the suit was only because TomTom had threatened them with a lawsuit first. Microsoft took the offensive and filed their suit, to which TomTom responded in a matter of days with their own, clearly indicating they had the suit ready. Not only that, but TomTom had a history of going after others, such as numerous suits between Garmin, Toyota, and others.
The fact that Microsoft hasn't gone after anyone else seems to indicate to me that they were simply defending themselves, not "demanding everyone to pay protection money who i using Linux".
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The Apple apologists are coming out of the orchard like cockroaches.
Nice ad hominem. I guess if you can't make a successful argument then you can at least try to distract people by attacking the person you are arguing with!
Xerox attempted to pull off what was basically a double-dip. They profited very nicely from their agreement with Apple to invest in the then-privately-held Apple Computer in exchange for giving information about the Alto to Apple for the purposes of Apple developing those ideas into a product.
Xerox shelved the Alto technology for years because they felt it was a dead-end. Many years later, after Apple was successful in using the traded information, Xerox does a 180 and tries to sue over information they traded to Apple in order to get another slice of the pie.
So the pattern was: invent technology, trade technology, shelve the technology, wait for the company you traded with to make it successful, sue that company.
The lawsuit wasn't dismissed because of the statute of limitations, it was dismissed because the judge determined that Xerox was making its complaint in the wrong forum and over the wrong issues. From an actual news article instead of Wikipedia:
Judge Walker dismissed two counts relating to Xerox's efforts to get Apple's copyright declared invalid, apparently agreeing with Apple that the proper place for such an action would be the Copyright Office, not the courts. He also dismissed three counts relating to the unfair competition assertions, saying that the lawsuit should really be a copyright infringement case, not an unfair competition case.
Xerox didn't go on to make a successful case on the proper grounds, thus proving that the lawsuit most likely was without merit. They were attempting to go for a quick cash grab and were thwarted when their case was dismissed. End of story.
If you are going to start slinging mud around you should at least try to get your facts right first or someone might call you out on it...
Sapere aude!
Ahem.
"Apple reinvented the mobile phone in 2007 with its revolutionary iPhone®, and did it again in 2008 with its pioneering App Store, which now offers more than 150,000 mobile applications in over 90 countries. Over 40 million iPhones have been sold worldwide.
Steve Jobs was quoted as saying "We would like other companies to compete by re-reinventing their own phones, not stealing ideas like a screen you can touch or a program you can download for local use. These innovations are clearly thanks to us."
Yes, this phenomenon is known as Reality Distortion Field (or to use technical jargon, "lying scumbag executive").
A program you can download on your phone for local use? You mean like JavaME JAR files? Like the app store that GetJar started years and years before Apple?
A screen you can touch? Like the LG Prada, announced before the IPhone, or like hundreds of other touchscreen kiosks in the last three decades?
Yup. Apple. Re-inventing marketing.
Uh, you realize that Jobs's 'quote' above wasn't real, right?
No I didn't, though I knew the parent was being sarcastic... To my defense: reading through the actual complaint, he might as well have said that: Half of the claimed patents are about displaying documents on touchscreens, most others are such gems as "Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor"... Pointing out prior art and obviousness is left to some other humour-impaired slashdotter.
That doesn't take into consideration that all of their devices run on a form of OSX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osx [wikipedia.org] ) which is made from BSD (made by University of California, Berkeley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bsd [wikipedia.org] ) and Mach Kernal (made by Carnegie Mellon University http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_kernel [wikipedia.org] ). Just because it was freely available doesn't make it theirs. They stood on giants and made it appear if it was their own, only geeks know that OSX is a mostly a cut-n-paste job, the public thinks its unique programming on Apples part.
You mean the BSD whose license deliberately lets you do anything you want with the source code, including making it entirely into your own product? The BSD that Apple freely mentions in its own literature? At no point does Apple claim that BSD is theirs, they rightfully say that they developed Mac OS X and Darwin on top of BSD and Mach. To Apple's credit they have "payed it forward" by enhancing and releasing a lot of open source stuff to other developers.
Yeah, the average user is clueless as to what BSD and Mach are and that they form a basis for Mac OS X. The average user is clueless about a lot of stuff and it really doesn't matter at all. Truth to be told, there is a ton of "unique programming on Apple's part" in Mac OS X so the public wouldn't be too far off in believing that.
Sapere aude!
Apple used the Xerox technology and made it successful, and then started suing other companies for infringement. Xerox, as the legitimate inventor of the technology, tried to license it to other companies, and they all said, "You don't own that technology. Apple does." So, it was a dick move to take over intellectual property that they didn't develop.
At that point Apple had done considerable development on the concept of a GUI and had many innovations that were not part of the original Xerox intellectual property. It was those new developments that formed most of the basis for the lawsuit between Microsoft and Apple, and between HP and Apple. Perhaps Xerox was finding it difficult to license its IP to other companies because of Apple's bought and developed IP but they didn't make it an issue until they had a chance to cash in on the conflict between Microsoft and Apple by diverting an Apple win into their own coffers.
In the end, Xerox didn't have a case. They had to pursue the wrong case because of their deal with Apple and the fact that they allowed Apple to do so much development on Xerox's IP before they sued that there was almost no resemblance to the original.
Anyways, the original point of all of this was that Apple DID pay Xerox for their IP. It really doesn't matter that later on the involved companies fought for a bigger slice of the GUI pie. In the end they all failed and their original agreements held just as they were when they were made.
And if we were having this conversation about Microsoft, you wouldn't care either.
Keep up with those ad hominem attacks! You have no idea what I'd do if this involved Microsoft and, frankly, it's not pertinent to this discussion. It if makes you feel better then go ahead and keep trying to defame and attack me. I just think it's funny, attacking your opponent only serves to weaken the strength of your own argument.
Sapere aude!
Though as for Apple freely mentioning about it, show me a 'I'm a PC, I'm a Mac' that states it openly, and not in some of the more finer print like most company's do to 'publicly' hide information. Your one link is for developers (not a general public location), the other one looks like you have to know about BSD to learn about BSD.
Right on their What is Mac OS X page, a "general public location":
Mac OS X is the world's most advanced operating system. Built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation and designed to be simple and intuitive, it's what makes the Mac innovative, highly secure, compatible, and easy to use.
On that page they also link to this pdf which tells you just about everything you'd want to know about the technologies that go into Mac OS X, including BSD and Mach.
Of course Apple is not going to throw around terms like BSD and Mach in its commercials and such because those terms are meaningless to Joe Average. However, they do talk about them in their literature where the ordinary consumer can be more easily informed as to what those terms mean. Apple is by no means hiding the fact that they are building upon technology developed outside of Apple.
Sapere aude!
In the case of Apple, I would hope to use their own 'lovely, mature' OS they wrote from scratch in 1984 to power their original machines, like Microsoft. Not drop all of their own work and use someone else's 17 years later. Think of the uproar if Microsoft did this.
Microsoft DOES also do this. Take a look at this article:
Now, some of Spider's code (possibly all of it) was based on the TCP/IP stack in the BSD flavors of Unix. These are open source, but distributed under the BSD license, not the GPL that Linux is released under. Whereas the GPL states that any software derived from GPL'ed software must also be released under the GPL, the BSD license basically says, "here's the source, you can do whatever you want, just give credit to the original author."
Eventually the new, from scratch TCP/IP stack was done and shipped with NT 3.5 (the second version, despite the number) in late 1994. The same stack was also included with Windows 95.
However, it looks like some of those Unix utilities were never rewritten. If you look at the executables, you can still see the copyright notice from the regents of the University of California (BSD is short for Berkeley Software Distrubution, Berkeley being a branch of the University of California, for some reason referred to as "Berkeley" on the East Coast and "California" on the West Coast...and "Berkeley" is one of those words that starts to look real funny if you stare at it too long - but I digress).
Keep in mind there is no reason to rewrite that code. If your ftp client works fine (no comments from the peanut gallery!) then why change it? Microsoft has other fish to fry. And the software was licensed perfectly legally, since the inclusion of the copyright notice satisfied the BSD license.
Microsoft doesn't advertise it but they have freely used BSD code in the past. They did NOT write all of their own code from scratch. In the end it really doesn't matter who wrote the code, so long as it's being used properly according to the license. The BSD code is released under and open license that allows you to do just about anything you want with it so there's very little trouble there.
Sapere aude!