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Push Email Suspended On iPhones In Germany
New submitter elashish14 tips this news, snipped from Ars Technica: "Apple has been forced to disable push e-mail delivery for iCloud and MobileMe users in Germany this week. The move is thanks to a recent injunction awarded to Motorola as part of the ongoing patent dispute between the two smartphone makers.... The patent at issue relates to older pager designs, but Motorola was able to convince a German court that it applied to Apple's implementation of push e-mail that syncs across devices via iCloud. The injunction went into effect on Thursday of this week, requiring Apple to disable push e-mail syncing in Germany."
Yet another way the consumer is being raped by this senseless patent war. Call a truce you loopy money hungry bastards..
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Motorola better hope their old pagers didn't have any rounded corners, or they'll get retroactively sued for predicting future designs.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
invalidating the patent is not apples only hope.
they could, heaven forbid, licence the patent for actual money.
No, Germany stopped doing that about 67 years ago.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
After observing the antics of Apple, Samsung, and Motorola in the past year, in particular, how could anyone wind up still believing that patents and copyrights promote creation or indeed help anyone but the assignees? When does the true reform begin?
This is a really old and actually valid patent.
Just because you don't like it doesn't make it invalid nor wrong.
It was a huge matter of argument when it got written into the US Constitution. Allowing the copyright clause seemed a strategic compromise at the time, but seems now to be a fatal flaw as it has enabled a highly profitable industry determined to use the profits they've garnered thereby to destroy the rest of that document.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
the new US District Court of Eastern Texas.
Actually, Moto has been negotiating with Apple over this patent since 2007--to no avail.
Generally, the German courts have been much more level headed than Eastern Texas.
In this particular case, the German court determined that Apple had been negotiating in bad faith, and thus, Moto was entitled to a special injunction (because of Apple's egregious/scofflaw behavior). When Apple saw the handwriting on the wall, they rushed to [the court to] "pay up", but the court said "too little, too late".
Considering how much of a patent bully Apple is, this is one of the few places where they've been properly spanked.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Apple started making iPhone in 2007, then they tried to mess with a company that was making portable phones for over 30 years prior and were the main developers for the backbone all all the cellphone technology. Apple thought they were hot stuff and decided to kick a sleeping dog, they just didn't realize that dog was bigger than them in the cellphone business and would bite them in the ass for messing with them. Apple has a lot of good patents and a lot of bull crap ones, ie round corners on a rectangle. This one is an actual technology and doesn't apply to the 3G standards of FRAND so they are pretty much screwed on it. They asked for it though. Motorola left Apple alone, but Apple had to try to sue Motorola and every other Android phone maker. I guess their lawyers didn't think twice about suing the company that hold nearly every patent that involves the backbone of cellphone technology.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
If I have a stick its just a stick, Currently I can patent throwing the stick, balancing the stick on my nose, throwing the stick, but it's still a stick. If I add some string to make it so I can throw it farther its now an enhanced stick worthy of a patent. Hardware is the key and should be the deciding factor when accepting a patent.
All the companies are just interested in making Apple sit down and shut the fuck up. None of this counter-lawsuit stuff started until Apple started to try and shut everyone else down. The other companies that made cellphones had occasional hissing matches with each other, as companies seem to like to do, but it would get resolved since they realized it was in their best interests. While they'd all like to be the one and only phone provider in the world, they know that isn't going to happen so they'll settle for cross licensing and so on.
Then in comes Apple who decides they can just sue everyone else out of existence. They think they should be the only company other than maybe RIM who is allowed to produce a smartphone or tablet. No surprise it has raised the ire of all the other companies and they are now striking back.
They don't want money, they want Apple to stop suing. I'm not sure Apple will though, I think they are real scared. Apple's rise to their current mega corp status has all been about getting in to markets that nobody else is really having any success in and making it cool. This lets them sell their stuff with a massive profit margin due to no competition.
They did it with MP3 players first. They weren't the first company to make one, but they made them cool, made them a fashion accessory. Now everyone had to have one, but not just any one, an iPod. That has waned quite a bit these days, but no problem, because then they brought smartphones to consumers. Blackberry's were always business toys. The US government loves the things but they didn't sell so well on the consumer market. The iPhone made smartphones a thing to have and they did well there. Then of course they made tablets the new toy to have. Most people have no idea why they want one, but they want one.
However they don't seem to have a "what's next" and unlike the MP3 player situation, people are moving in on phones and tablets quicker than they are ready for. Android went from more or less an experiment to an extremely competent competitor in just a few years and has been selling really well. They see their market slipping, and have nowhere else to go.
So they are going sue happy, to try and keep everyone else out. If they can't, they risk losing their place of prominence, and no company wants that.
The big point about having the Nuclear Bomb is to NOT use it...
Steve Jobs broke the truce and went nuclear against Android... Except that most of his nuclear missiles are rotten (patents on obvious things... didn't we have "swipe" in "Minority Report" for example... and rounded rectangle... no comment)
Now, it's beginning to backfire... Samsung, Motorola and other would probably not have sued Apple out of existence... But now, Apple has put them in a situation where it's probably the best move...
My guess is that they will sue Apple again and again until iPhone and iPad go to oblivion... And Apple is in a dangerous situation. It's share is bubbling up... which means that it's perceived value is probably much higher than it's real value... It also mean that the Apple share can drop suddently to levels well below it's real value (panic effect) when the bubble will explode... And market bubble always explode one time or another...
There are no software patents in Germany. This is not a software patent. Also, it's "die Juden" not "der juden".
See, you just learned two new things! Knowing now how easy that was maybe it's time to fill out that school application and give education a try? It's never too late they say.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
You're not accounting for the usage habits of the buyers.
There are *no* ad-supported apps on my cell phone. None. Everything I have installed is either legitimately free, or it came with the phone. And I don't use mobile web at all. I'm on a flex data plan, and my usage is consistently in the bottom tier (25mb/mo). 100% of my data usage is e-mail, calendar, and contacts. I would not show up on either of those statistics. And yes, I have an Android device.
Considering that the iPhone is marketed as an internet-connected consumer device, specifically for the consumption of stuff on the web, I would be willing to lay odds that iPhone users consume more web, on average, than Android users. Sure, there will be aberrations on either platform, but ultimately I think the numbers will show that on the whole, iPhone users consume more data. That will naturally skew statistics that come from watching peoples' data use: that is, search hits and ad impressions.
Your non-violence attitude is fine when all you care about is not starting a war yourself. Doesn't do squat when someone else starts beating up on you.
That's what's going on here. This particular spate of patent fights was triggered when St Jobs decided to go all holy war on Android and Google and won injunctions against phones which had rounded corners among other stupid patents. Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and other Android makers got caught in the cross fire and shot back. Don't get me wrong, Apple fan-boys: everyone plays the same game, it's just this particular mini-war which was started by St Jobs.
The fault is with governments that make money from issuing as many patents as possible and lawyers who make money from fighting as many patent battles as possible. It's quite evident that "obvious to anyone skilled in the arts" and "for a limited time" mean nothing. Patents would have a purpose if they were actually limited to innovative clever not-so-obvious features and there were only, say, one thousandth the number we have now.
But it's also obvious that governments and lawyers have an interest in not limiting patents to the truly innovative, and we'd be better off with no patents whatsoever. Innovative companies would always have a lead in clever designs, and early adopters would be glad to pay a premium for that and quality. Copycat companies would always be playing catchup and have to charge less for mass production.
The world would be a better place if all those patent lawyers and government bureaucrats had to find useful productive work instead of being parasites who gum up the works.
Infuriate left and right