Apple Mines App Store Submissions For Patent Ideas

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Apple has started filing a bunch of patents on mobile applications. That might not be so interesting in and of itself, but if you look closely at the figures in one of the patents, you can see that it's a copy of the third-party Where To? application, which has been on the App Store since at least 2008. There's also a side-by-side comparison which should make it clear that the diagram was copied directly from their app. Even though it's true that the figures are just illustrations of a possible UI and not a part of the claimed invention, it's hard to see how they didn't get some of their ideas from Where To? It might also be the case that Apple isn't looking through the App Store submissions in order to patent other people's ideas, but it's difficult to explain some of these patents if they're not. And with the other patents listed, it's hard to see how old ideas where 'on the internet' has been replaced with the phrase 'on a mobile device' can promote the progress of science and useful arts. This seems like a good time to use Peer to Patent."

Comments

Re:i dare a fanboy to justify this

[Imazalil]

How about niftydude's reply below. But then again why am I even trying to reply to AC troll posts.

God help me, I'm barely 30 and I already remember the good old days of slashdot when there was actual discussion happening by people who actually looked at the source material of posted stories. Not this digg / engadget knee-jerk reactionary garbage based on story titles alone.

Re:It'll be fun seeing

[WingCmdr]

Apple: "All your base are belong to us"

Re:It's not a good thing but not the problem state

[causality]

It isn't so much I have a sore spot, as I feel like people's motivations should be pointed out in a way that is self-reinforcing if valid. The person I was responding to didn't really care if Apple was lifting ideas or not, he was simply chortling with glee that there was something negative about Apple he could use as leverage to attack anyone who liked Apple products. So it was more Slashdot judo than anything.

"Slashdot Judo" is an interesting and amusing term for it. Sometimes I'm rather direct and not so creative as that. So, I tend to use words like "reacting and being the effect of a cause to something you could overcome with a better example". Really the only difference at all is caring about what the other person does.

It's a subtle thing. It's the difference between "setting them straight" versus "something's wrong with that". The former is about the messenger; the latter is about the message. The former impacts you in some way while the latter is dispassionate.

I personally feel the informative parts far outweigh the troll rating

It's easy to agree with that one. Then, I'm not among the easily offended. That makes me content with a "diamond in the rough". If a post is 90% garbage, I don't have to be offended or disappointed with that because I'm too busy appreciating the remaining 10%. There's no disagreement from me that a lot of mods feel no desire to understand a post before judging its merits. Thus they have a knee-jerk reaction to strong wording without a thought for whether it's justifiable.

, but was expecting some down-moderation from someone so rage-filled as to just ignore the pertinent things that were said - in effect the troll moderation is thus reinforcing the last point, which I find rather humorous.

Or it just shows the inherently irrational nature of operating on rage as a motivating or driving force behind one's actions. That may even explain your fascination with triggering the phenomenon. The drawback is that your humor may be the only purpose it serves.

That is not really correct. I consider one of the larger goods of Apple to be how it integrates open source and contributes back to same. The work they have done on Webkit, on LLVM, on HTML5 and many other little things (like Zeroconf) - these are all very good things, both from a practical and moral standpoint and absolutely benefit an audience much wider than only Apple customers.

The logic behind a successful corporation is that the expected cost of a thing is less than the expected gain from doing it. If Apple has worked on Webkit or any other project, it's because its gains from community support or goodwill or positive PR outweigh what it has to pay its employees to do so. I wouldn't call that "morally good" or morally anything. I would call that amoral.

If I were going to compliment or appreciate anything it would be the events that had to be set in motion before we'd have a situation where cooperation was viewed by an amoral corporation as its best possible maneuver. That would have a great deal to do with Open Source as a movement, various communities, various principles, and generally wouldn't have anything to do with Apple Inc.

That rules out any kind of altruistic behavior on the part of Apple. Their non-altruistic, monetarily compensated behavior is on behalf of their customers who compensate them. Any benefit to anyone else is secondary to this purpose. This again is amoral and not altruistic.

I can of course see where it counteracts, I myself pointed out how I consider this patent illustration thing to be copyright infringement and not good whatsoever. That said, does taking a few screen shots without permission really impact that wide an audience outside the world of patent applications and some iPhone application developers?

If a few song