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Apple Yanks Toddler's Speech-Enabling App
theodp writes "TIME reports that four-year-old Maya Nieder's speech-enabling 'Speak for Yourself' app was yanked from the App Store by Apple due to an unresolved patent dispute at the behest of Prentke Romich Company (PRC) and Semantic Compaction Systems (SCS), makers of designated communication devices (not iPad apps). 'The issue of whether or not Apple should have pulled Speak for Yourself from the App Store before the case was decided is trickier. Obviously, Apple would rather be safe than sorry and remove a potentially problematic app instead of risking legal action. The problem, however, is that this isn’t some counterfeit version of Angry Birds.' 'My daughter cannot speak without this app,' writes Maya's mom, Dana. 'She cannot ask us questions. She cannot tell us that she's tired, or that she wants yogurt for lunch. She cannot tell her daddy that she loves him.' If you're so inclined, Dana suggests you drop a note to appstorenotices@apple.com."
But its still on her device - so she still can do all those things. If she syncs her phone/ipad with itunes, she even has her own back up of the app and can reinstall it just fine.
An app being yanked from the AppStore doesn't mean it gets removed from your device.
Don't you wish you could just decide for yourself what you could were allowed to install on your device?
If the Buddhists are right, some patent lawyers and company executives are looking forward to an reincarnation as a pile of petrified sh*t at the bottom of the ocean.ï
There is no way they can make up that amount of bad karma.
This partial quote is extremely misleading. Apple simply removing something from the App Store does not delete it from devices it is already installed on. They can still use the application. That is part of a hypothetical "What if Apple remote wiped it from our device" which has not happened.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
He's the greatest mind of our time, very famous around the world, has millions of pounds in the bank, the best medical care money can buy, etc.
Yet he refuses to upgrade the archaic system that allows him to spak.
This is exactly why. You just don't trust something that important to a fly-by-night company that sells their wares through the Apple Store, of all places.
Innocent until proven guilty is criminal law... which I don't believe patent suits fall under.
From: http://techland.time.com/2012/04/04/a-little-girl-finds-her-voice-thanks-to-threatened-new-ipad-app/#ixzz1xfwxflS6 Maya smiles and gives me a big hug as soon as I sit on the couch, or as big a hug as a tiny three-year-old girl can manage. Her mother, Dana Nieder, laughs and explains that because Maya has difficulty speaking, she often has to express herself in other ways. She is as smart and curious as any other girl her age; the problem is that the muscles that control her speech are weak and disorganized, making saying a single word incredibly difficult. Doctors have run multiple tests but all they can determine is that it is probably a genetic condition.
Because some disabilities can leave you mute whilst still able to understand verbal communication (Deformed larynx for instance) although god knows what disabilities have left you such an insensitive clot.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Apple is not a court and App Store policies are not the law. Due process does not apply.
The same thing could happen to software on an Android device. If this was available on Android the same companies that have had it pulled from the app store would have had it pulled form Google Play.
This has nothing to do with iOS except that it happens to have been an iOS app and not an Android one
Watch those corners
"the problem, however, is that this isn’t some counterfeit version of Angry Birds."
This cracks me up. Angry Birds was a pretty solid ripoff of "Crush The Castle." At least CtC authors acknowledged their inspiration from "Castle Clout." Pulling anything imitating Angry Birds is pure BS.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
At which point you could either get it from a different app store or just skip the app stores altogether and side load it. And no, that does not require rooting it. It just requires not using Apple.
And let me add: don't use hardware that only have one manufacturer for something important. This is something I always tell to some management people whet they try to bring a change to Apple devices in their enterprises. You have no option to switch to another manufacturer if for some reason Apple is not able to match your needs, be it there is a shortage in the country, some ban (stupid patents lawsuits) prohibits it from selling here, ...... and more
Seriously, if the kid is mute she should have been taught sign language from day one, then she wouldn't be in the position of being unable to communicate at the age of three.
Actually I was thinking more along the lines of the hilarity here where apple fanboi's are forced to think of the children.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
So the app was written by a toddler, right? No, it was two speech pathologists, Heidi LoStracco and Renee Collender. So it was funded by the four-year-old? No again. So it's the only way she speaks, at least? Nope, just the one she likes the best.
This headline, most of the summary, and the majority of TFA are an appeal to emotion to cloud what's ultimately a bog-standard legal issue. The app's future sale and distribution has been blocked, just like Galaxy tablets, XBoxes, iPads, and many other products that are banned from sale until patent issues are worked out. The point of the story (I guess) is to point out that patent litigation affects innocent bystanders, but this is nothing new, and I personally find the intense spin disgusting. Somehow, the fact that a four-year-old uses this app supposedly makes it okay to copy someone else's research and development? What about the researcher at Prentke Romich whose income depends on the company's speech hardware, who has a toddler at home to feed? What about the toddler whose lawyer parents are working on this case?
Won't somebody please stop thinking of the children?
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
There is actually a slew of them
one list is here
http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/augmentative+and+alternative+communication
There are some that are open source.
But please, don't let facts interfere with your rant in the future.
Did you even read the summary? This is not a case of censorship which Apple has done in the past. This is a case of a legal dispute of patents and ownership. If it was on the Android or WP7 or BB store it would have been the same. Apple will put it back on sale once the developer and claimant resolve their dispute. This is the same knee jerk reaction when Apple pulled VLC. The first reactions were Apple was hostile to GPL when reality was one of the developers of VLC objected to his code being deployed in the App store because he felt it was not compliant with GPL.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The kid is 3 years old! There have always been ipads and iphones during her lifetime.
You might want to restate the question...
Actually patents are polar opposite. If I file a patent dispute against you, the burden of proof lies with you, you must prove your innocence or I win. And there's very little teeth in the ways for you to recover additional damages from me to cover your defense expenses, the inconvenience, the time your product was pulled off the market. That's the other fun thing, while you are trying to prove your innocence, I can get the govt to pull your product off the market so you don't have any money coming in to spend on lawyers for the ~18 months it'll take. Only the big businesses have those kinds of reserves. Even if you do win, you're down a year and a half of income and have lost a lot of market share that you'll have a very hard time getting back since the new customers have been buying from someone else due to lack of you as an option.
Combine that with near rubber-stamp patent reviews on overly-broad wording, and you have the mess that is the current patent system.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Let's be clear. It's the app developer that's being sued by another company. If they lose, the app is likely history. Even if had been developed for Android and was still floating around on some app site, that doesn't mean an an Android update wouldn't break it.
If the parents are worried, don't update the iPad. Get another one for general use. The app will continue to function as it always has.
Before too long the dispute will be resolved one way or another. This app will return and if not, another one will come along that's better. That's the nature of software.
Actually, the bad publicity generated by this lawsuit may force a resolution sooner rather than later.
But the manufacturer of the app didn't pull it. the app store did. With iOS that is sufficient to kill the app. On Android, as long as the manufacturer still wants to distribute it, nobody else can stop them because people can get it from the manufacturer themselves.
The manufacturer is unlikely to pull their app before the patent dispute has been settled. Whereas Apple has frequently decided to pull apps on a whim.
I realise this is slightly OT, but it annoys me a little to have Buddhism replaced by cartoon-Buddhism. Buddhism is not Christianity. It's medieval Catholicism in which the patent lawyers and company executives would spend eternity in a nasty place. For traditional Buddhists, any and all engaging with the illusion that is the world of the five senses is karma.
Modern relativism has largely obsoleted religious sanctions - and I'm not about to regurgitate Durkheim - but the fact is that there are an awful lot of people who in the past would have had the fear of Hell to create a check on their antisocial behaviour. Now, they just don't care. Hence increasing inequality and doctrines like Libertarianism (which basically comes down in the end to, he with the most money to pay lawyers always wins).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Except that android does not have the same problem because there are multiple app stores, and you don't even need to use any of them to load apps, you can still side-load on every android device.
Android can not block you from getting a specific app if the developer wants you to be able to get it. the most they can do is remove it from one of many app stores.
Friendly computers are immune to a patent dispute causing previously-installed software to stop working, yes. Poster tried to tug at heart strings by implying this happened (RTFAing tells me this is not actually the case; they won't have a problem unless they need to replace hardware, migrate, etc).
Furthermore, friendly computers are immune to patent disputes allowing someone other than publisher to interfere with the market, prior to a court order. Apple should not have any say in whether or not this product is on the market. Even a stolid authoritarian would agree this is a matter for the courts, not Apple (or the marketplace, since we're using an authoritarian PoV). But the platform's unreasonable reliance on Apple-only repository makes it an Apple problem.
That is a design flaw. A known and very high-profile (and staggering) design flaw since day 1, which is one of the reasons I never bought any of these products.
And really, if you think about it, a truly friendly computer cannot even have its software interfered with by an injunction, even if we think that's a bad idea. Unless government forces have knowledge of a specific computer, that computer ought to be answering to its owner rather than another party.
We have seen this principle at work in the past, where people used patented codecs, cryptographic software, and DMCA-prohibited software despite its illegality. This is the essence of a friendly computer: serving its owner over all other considerations. That's true even if you think it's a bad idea -- that there's such thing as "too friendly," and that society has a legitimate interest in having the capacity to forcefully deny users the ability to use their computers in certain ways.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Did you even read the summary? This is not a case of censorship which Apple has done in the past. This is a case of a legal dispute of patents and ownership. If it was on the Android or WP7 or BB store it would have been the same. Apple will put it back on sale once the developer and claimant resolve their dispute. This is the same knee jerk reaction when Apple pulled VLC. The first reactions were Apple was hostile to GPL when reality was one of the developers of VLC objected to his code being deployed in the App store because he felt it was not compliant with GPL.
Sounds like a mechanism any cash rich company can use to throttle competition for any applications being distributed via Apple's system. Start a lawsuit and bang! apple will pull the app.
Apple is wrong here. They should have left it up for sale unless ordered to do so by the court.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Why should we be flooding Apple's inbox with requests to put the App back in the AppStore?
By doing so, they expose themselves to legal liability and potential lawsuits.
It seems that if you are angry about this and wanted to see this app back in iTMS, you'd write the software creators and patent claimant urging them to settle their differences fairly and amicably in the interests of the consumer. iTMS will promptly put the app back online when instructed to do so and can be assured they will not be sued for doing so.
So she cannot speak without it, yet it begs to ask: "How did you speak before your iphone?" iphones haven't been around forever... what would you have done if it never existed... what did you do?
Kids like this either found the thousands of dollars for a custom hardware solution or used paper words and photos, which are much less portable (if you want anywhere near the vocabulary available in an AAC). Or they just went through life with a significantly reduced ability to communicate, which is incredibly frustrating for them and their caregivers.
o Two companies have legal dispute over some speech thing.
o Apple is asked to pull app until legal dispute is settled.
o Apple: (shrug) OK. (pulls app) (App remains on iPads that downloaded it)
o Media: "ZOMFG!!1! APPLE DESTROYS THE ***LIFE*** OF CHILD WITH HANDICAP AND DRIVES MOTHER TO MISERY AND MADE FLUTTERSHY CRY!!!11!2657682365879!!"
o Slashdot AppleHateSquad: "LOVE ITSELF HAS BEEN OBLITERATED FROM THE ENTIRETY OF THE PAN DIMENSIONAL MULTIVERSE!!!!!"