Slashdot Mirror
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."
how the loyalists try to spin this one as a good thing.
in before the inevitable fanwar...
i don't think even microsoft would seriously consider doing something like this.
but then, a company is a company. they're dicks by nature.
Reality 1) Apple is not submitting patents around what the application does. The patent has nothing to do with what the app actually does, even though the illustration is used.
So in fact it's just another annoying software patent.
Reality 2) This is actually the bad thing, that people seem to be overlooking - isn't it copyright infringement on Apple's part to be lifting app screens basically wholesale?
So the summary (and most of the posters here) are totally wrong about what is bad about this.
So you see, Apple users can easily admit when Apple is doing something wrong, and in fact even correct you about why it is wrong - because we are thinking more rationally about the real problem, and not just about how much we hate Apple and hey here's an awesome negative article on something Apple is doing.
Contrast this to people such as yourself, who are pathologically incapable of admitting when Apple does something good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry for calling them monkeys but, if you think about it, by ignoring hundred million Symbian handsets, about a billion J2ME handsets and even Google backed Android and relying to App store for their only source of app sales and shipments, they deserve all kinds of such treatments. "Symbian development sucks" is NOT an excuse anymore, especially after there is working Qt frameworks completely backed by Nokia and real life, million download apps exist. There is even an application which is coded entirely in J2ME (Locago) which manages to beat free/pure C+++ multi billion dollar worth Nokia maps. Oh guess what? Nokia doesn't seem to bother, they even advertise it.
There are pretty advanced developers there, highly professional, not known to stand to bullshit until... iPhone shipped. As a person who uses Apple desktop for years (surprise!), I know some of them. If it was 5 years earlier and I told them that some intern will analyze his app symbols and let it ship based on that, I can predict the answer I would get.
Not just that, they (Apple) and their slave developers who can stand to every kind of treatment, including idea stealing/patenting gives some real bad/evil ideas to the rest of industry including Microsoft. That is the part concerning me. Back in 1990s, when old nerds bitched about MS-DOS and Win16, we told them "why would I care? I own a 32bit Amiga" but, that backwards junk managed to kill all competition and transformed the industry so bad that, we are just recovering from it...
Remember this post when something resembling "app store" manages to go live on desktop on OS X 10.7 or Windows 8.
Apple have been either buying out or stealing other peoples IP then passing if off as their own "patentable innovations" for years.
How to get rich:
1) Troll the app store for ideas ...
2) Replace "on a mobile device" with "in bed"
3) Patent it
4)
5) Make money
I've said it before--Apple-haters have taken over the site. The relentlessly biased articles (check out the recent story about how Android "outsold" the iPhone in the last six months, even though iPhone 4 sales weren't included in the figures) are no coincidence. There's an agenda at play, maybe even driven by Google astrotufers. Hey, I'm just saying, it's no surprise to me that the hateful posts and submissions began when Android came out.
But that would interfere with Google's anti-Apple astroturfing campaign.
But using it nonetheless? Fuck you and fuck apple. They stole it nonetheless.
If you don't want to see shear ignorance on slashdot, just start ignoring timothy and kdawson
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Boom, 500 angry comments from people who didn't RTFA.
That was so natural... I think we may have found Steve Jobs' account.
excuse me but isnt what's above in parent, the VERY thing that this news piece is about ? how more a fanboi can one be to mod the article itself down in this indirect fashion ?
they ARE stealing other people's work. it is as simple as that. deal with it.
Read radical news here