Slashdot Mirror
Google Says Some Apple Inventions Are So Great They Should Be Shared
An anonymous reader writes "In attempting to fend off Apple's suit against Motorola Mobility and advancing its own patent litigation against Apple, Google, which is facing a lot of regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad over what some allege is abuse of standard essential patents, has been arguing that proprietary non-standardized technologies that become ubiquitous due to their popularity with consumers should be considered de facto standards."
Google wishes to embrace and exploit.
It's getting scary out there, kids...
That strategy might work in the media to get people angry at Apple, but it's a bad idea in a court. You are basically admitting that Apple is right, but then saying it doesn't matter because it "oughta be" a standard. At that point the judge will say: thanks for admitting Apple is right to save me the bother of the trial. Not a smart move.
Considering what Apple's patents tend to be about (swip to unlock anyone?) they may be annoying but they aren't what I would call "standards" in the way that 802.11 is a standard.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Translation: Steve's gone, mind if we drive?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I mean, technically you COULD direct a car (or almost any vehicle, they're so ubiquitous) without it but they're so useful it seems almost mandatory. (I think, maybe, the first Wright brother's planes didn't use them but last I checked they're actually two of them in every cockpit). I'm not a patent attorney or IP expert so this is just my guess as to what the issues are.
However, that's a pretty high "standard". What should be the standard? Should it be determined by a popularity contest? User interface designer's testimony? Shouldn't Apple be entitled to something (I mean they spent time and money coming up with their ideas, not to mention that "utility" patents which are essential, are not free).
Yet another issue to be debated during possible patent reform.
He would say that the best company should win and everyone else should die.
Sez Apple,
That's right. It can make calls, and texts, and run apps, and view maps and play music and view the web .... wait. I'm pretty sure my old Sony Ericsson candybar phone could do all of those things. It could also receive FM radio.
I wonder, do these people really believe what they say, or is it just a job to them?
Interface standards are not about "great technology", they are about convention and usability. There's little that's ever been innovative about how steering wheels look or work, where the hand brake goes in a car, how you turn on a TV or a light, etc.; many of those are just arbitrary choices. But there is a huge benefit to having these items standardized so that consumers can easily move from one car to another. The same is even more true for user interfaces: user interfaces benefit tremendously from standardization. Apple's user interface elements aren't "great" or innovative, they simply set the standard because Apple is first.
(And most of Apple's user interface elements aren't even Apple's inventions; sliding switches on touch screens, for example, were not invented by Apple, Apple just copied them and then patented their application to unlocking.)
I believe this would be implemented as follows. First, a patent is submitted by interested parties to a neutral standards group. If the group decides the patent covers something essential to the functionality of products across the given industry, they grant a mechanical license. This means anyone gets to use the patented idea, but must pay a fixed predetermined fee to the patent holder. I can think of some patents that I wish had been handled that way, for example back up cameras on cars -- so useful for safety, that it should be universally available to all car manufacturers. A company might even come to hope that its patent is selected for such licensing, as it becomes a standard every manufacturer will use, giving a guaranteed revenue stream to the originating company.
-- Perhaps I see less than some, but more than many.
What's mine is mine, and what's yours is ours.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
By offering as reason that certain patent becomes crucial before it expires as a reason for being shared, Google is basically shooting down their own argument. Barring patent-trolling, this is exactly what the patent system was designed to do: Grant a limited monopoly--a short-term disadvantage to everyone else but a high-risk/potentially large-returns investment--to spur constant innovation, which is a long-term benefit to society. Sure, the owner of the patent can choose to share (for a fee of their choosing); but they can also use it as an exclusive seed to build a thriving business. Or do nothing at all. There are many things wrong with the patent system (too longer? too easy to write spurious patents? too hard/expensive to be a lone inventor), but this isn't one of them and I'm disappointed at Google for voicing a short-term view like this.
only he would deliver that message in a 13-hour long monologue. then rape someone. what stamina!
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
I didn't see that being a a shot against apple per se - much more microsoft and the exchange activesync suits.
"when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. Because proprietary or de facto standards can have just as important effects on consumer welfare, the Committee’s concern regarding the abuse of SEPs should encompass them as well."
Microsoft has patented exchange activesync, and then licences those patents to companies that want to talk to an exchange server. That's what has most android makers coughing up money to microsoft for - the ability to talk to exchange as an email/calendar client. Note, android developers, like all exchange activesync licencees, have to write their own code against the standard, which changes whenever MS update Exchange server.
Now, Exchange is pretty much ubiquitous in business. Therefore talking to Exchange is a necessary defacto standard, but everybody does it a bit differently as they write their own code. Should the patents covering exchange activesync, as a defacto essential standard, be under scrutiny for abuse by the same body that's investigating FRAND patent holders for abuse of their essential nature?
That seems to be Google's argument, anyway.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Apple's PR is doing a great job. Way to spin something into a provocative flamebait. Google didn't say what the title says it did, but timothy just couldn't resist.
The summary is misleading. What Google is saying is that if certain patents are considered standard essential for communication (3G, WiFi etc.), then parents on touch screens, scrolling etc. should also be considered the same. Apple would not be forced to share them, they would be forced to license them at a fair cost. Right now, Google-Motorola cannot use their patents the way Apple uses theirs because they are classified as FRAND, whereas Apple can use their patents to force import bans on Motorola and HTC products, for example. Apple would still be paid for the licenses to those patents, but would not be able to refuse to license them or charge an exorbitant fee.
The alternative would be to, you know, not issue broad patents for scrolling and slide to unlock etc.
Are you kidding me? Do you think the average (even above-average) user wants to go through PAGES and PAGES of radio buttons? Rounded vs. sharp corners? Why not allow them to determine just HOW round? Now we've gone from radio buttons to sliders everywhere.
Seriously, customize EVERYTHING? You can do that in Linux - look at how well that worked out for the consumer.
Google's argument actually makes sense. As I read it, they're saying that a company which holds a patent on technology that is essential to meet an industry standard must license it in a Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) way. But a company that has such a strong market position (i.e. a monopoly) can use patents to exclude competition. So Google is saying that FRAND should apply whether the technology is required because of an industry standard or because the patent holder has a monopoly.
While it's an interesting idea, it brings along a whole lot of problems and inconveniences of its own.
Letting the customer choose means there will be many different variations of the same device. This makes maintaining a stock supply impossible for small retail outlets, and makes it a pain in the ass for the distribution centers aswell.
Also, needing only 1 specific version of your products casing means you can get a massive volume discount from , When you need multiple different shapes or even just colors, this discount grows smaller which increases the price of the final product.
You lose brand/product recognition because they all look different.
Documentation and product art decline in quality because the pictures don't really match the actual product that the user is holding. I'm sure you've come across product manuals that cover the entire productrange of a device, it always makes them a pain to read because every other step there is a note that mentions "If you have model X then use the red button, if you have model Y then press the blue button instead. If you have model Z-Deluxe then you can use the wireless application blabla".
I'm sure there's many more minor disadvantages, especially in areas like fabrication, storage, ordering process, etc. Not to mention that i'm not so sure it would absolve them of litigation. It's still an interesting idea though.
Samsung, Motorola and other old players in the telecoms game have a huge problem today because for many years they have been playing reasonably nice with each other. It used to be that the players came together in standards organizations, agreed on standards, promised to license them to each other on FRAND terms, and then competed on implementation. Then a new kid comes to town who wants everyone to license it their FRAND patents without giving any back.
Apple, like Microsoft, hates to offer their own patents as FRAND, and only ever tries to create formal standards when they need to subvert another standard. They are the masters of de facto standards. Since the old players are now desperately abusing their FRAND patents as leverage in patent negotiations, they have a difficulty in calling Apple out on the hypocrisy of this.
However, the big loser in all of this is us. Since FRAND patents are so weak in aggressive patent wars, and antitrust bodies are now looking to make them even weaker, companies will stop making FRAND promises. The result will be less standardization and more lawsuits, leading to less capable and more expensive products. Hence Google's point is actually a very good one.
The article's title isn't correct. Google is really arguing that most patents should be treated like SEPs so it's harder to get injunctions. As the patent war heated up Google bought Motorola largely to quickly built it's defensive patent portfolio. A strategy that has largely worked except Motorola has a lot of SEPs.
So now Apple is suing Google and its hardware partners like crazy all over the world, but they're coming back with SEPs in the counter suites. HTC took Apple to court in retaliation using 2 SEPs it got from HP, IIRC. Google is also beginning to play a more aggressive role defending its hardware partners. Google is even beginning to ask the courts to name them as defendants even though they weren't sued. And guess what type of patents they're bringing to the party?
Motorola recently announced that it was leaving long standing patent agreements with Qualcomm. Guess with litigious company relies on Qualcomm for protection against SEPs?
Now add the fact that the US government is actively re-evaluating how litigation around SEPs are handled ( there are hearings going on right now ), and you can see why Google is saying what they are.
Google largely wants to be able to use its SEPs defensively in a fight they really didn't start. But of course, once that cat is out the bag and fast forward a decade when Google maybe on the ropes, then it's likely we would see SEPs used more agressively. '
The other solution is to not loosen restrictions on SEPs but to go the other route. Make it harder to get injunctions using non-SEPs by treating them like SEPs. Personally, I believe that's the way to go. Currently Apple has an injunction on the import of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 over a flimsy design patent. Samsung can't just pay a reasonable fee, they have been banned from importing the product at all. Even if these flimsy patents are not tossed out of court, they should not be used to outright ban products, but competitors should be allowed to license them on a FRAND basis.
The term for this is "punishing success." Create a technology that's too successful and pretty soon people will call to have it stolen from you for the "public good." And naturally they will mask their naked desire for such theft with terms like "sharing."
Note that I don't support software patents---I don't support the idea of patents, or "intellectual property", at all. But so long as we're going to have the government pointing its guns around at people, protecting businesses' intellectual assets as if they're real property, the idea of selective enforcement of patents, especially based on criteria like this, is even more repugnant than "IP" itself.
So! I hope Google will be equally as cheerful when the government comes in and wrenches all of their technologies away from them because they've become so ubiquitous! I mean, if there's anything "everyone" uses on the Internet nowadays that ought to be "shared," it's Google search, right?
Liberty in your lifetime
apples pricing on the Ipad is only becuase they manufacture one or two styles at the same time.
What the competitors need to do is to stop pumping out new models and build just a couple high quailty models
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
How about this as a solution? In determining the Fair and Reasonable terms for licensing a FRAND patent, reciprocity (including that of non-FRAND patents) may be considered.
What this means, is that Apple's own terms for licensing Apple's patents may be considered when creating a definition for what is "Fair", when FRAND terms are demanded from other players.
Google bought Motorola. If you haven't heard about their FRAND patent licensing and the investigation thereof, you might want to get more background before reading this story.
Right. The title of the summary and article should instead read "Google says some Apple inventions are so obvious they should be shared". Apple's insistence that designs should differ vastly goes against the long tradition of artistic emulation and imitation. How many can really tell the difference beween Raphael and Michelangelo?
Almost all of the ones I saw in the PDF were pretty bogus ones. Claims by competitors that google pushes it's own results to the top of the results. So far I've yet to see a case for that one presented convincingly, the top results tend to be whatever is most often the more popular item, in things that google is the most popular, google's items show up, in the ones they aren't their competitors show up. Then warnings and alogations of patent abuse. Can you even name a time google used a patent offensively? Can you crop out the fat and point out 1 or 2 that google was actually ruled guilty in, most of those are either undecided or not found not guilty. I'm not saying google isn't debatably bad, I'm saying that particular list is focusing on pretty ridiculous stuff. Google deserves quite a bit of flack in the privacy area, but their patent practice in the phone arena? I've yet to see them do anything shady in that arena besides attempt to cover their own ass from incoming fire.
I really don't see the need to spend $400 on an outdated tablet. I can buy an Android tablet, brand new, for $200. If I wanted bleeding edge, I can buy an Asus EEE Pad Transformer for $500 (the same price of a bottom-end iPad 3) and have a lot better specs (double the storage space, better CPU, better camera, etc.).
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Of course there are innovations on many Apple products, but ALSO there are many obvious patents (such recent "invention" of scrollbars in touch screens that hide when no use). Imagine if someone many years ago decided to patent a kind of generic "wireless communication device".
Let's apply it to search algorithms!
Reading the comments it seems that requiring all patents to be FRAND by default would actually better serve their original purpose.
There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics - Umberto Eco
Hear, hear! He would correctly point out that to use force (government) to seize the intellectual property of others is, well, evil. That's what's at stake in something like this. There are technologies that are so popular, and the originators of same technologies so successful in getting market adoption, that those without the where-with-all to achieve similarly should be able to simply take what they couldn't produce.
I'm thinking Linux worked out for consumers pretty darn well given that it is WILDLY popular. True, most of the choices on how the Linux equipment would look and behave were made by the manufacturers, but that is neither here nor their when it comes to Linux.
What Google and Samsung should do, is make their products highly customizable. Allow the user to design their own product. Want rounded corners instead of sharp ones? There you go. Want a black border around your screen? No problem. Want an aluminum case? Want some fruit depicted on the back of your device? Etc.
I'm quite sure Apple can design products better than I can. I very, very much hope that Google and Samsung employ someone who can design products better than I can. Even if they cannot guess my preferences, and everyone has different preferences, they can design something that I like better than anything I could design myself.
Lets throw out the old model.
Instead lets have panels approve needed inventions for fields. The patent would sort of then be the x prize for the invention.
Then the panel would decide the relative reward for winning the patent. It could be a fixed amount. And it can also be longer than 18 years. It could be x amount per produced item for x years. Or a set licence fee per organization per year. Payments could also be structured to match inflation.
This way some things such a medical treatment for rare disorders could have a low enough corporate "tax" to be affordable but still produce money a hundred years from now.
Also lets throw out that patents are a contract and can't be reevaluated.
I believe that it is the government which sets up the laws which protect private intellectual property. Without these government patent laws, there would be no way to protect intellectual property. Anarchy would allow the free flow of ideas without these artificial barriers to embrace and extend.
Not sure how John Galt would resolve the conflict between "government is evil" and "government must protect my private property" since it has been 50 years since I read those polemics.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Congratulations, you're idiot number Lucky Seven in this thread to mix up "make patent open for licensing" and "make algorithm open for licensing"! It's not like Google asking for Apple to open parts of iOS source.
Sure, why shouldn't you be able to license PageRank and related patents? Now implementing them and filling the database is completely different matter. Unlike implementing all the "slide lock, but now on a touch screen" or "search, but now with plugins" patent ideas which you could accidentally do in half a dozen different ways without even knowing such patent exists.
Software patents work without source code "work" (please note that I'm using quotes to denote the process, not the validity of the process) because the patent discloses the technique. Having the source code in a particular language is irrelevant. The source code is not the invention. The method behind the source code is the invention. Beside, what relationship does the source code have with the invention? I'll postulate: None. First, the source code is an intermediary between the idea and the execution process. Any of a number of intermediaries can be used. Should revealing the source code in C++ mean that a parallel implementation in Fortran is allowed/does not violate the patent? Second, even using the same source code, what is the impact of compiling to a different architecture? No, source code has no value except as A METHOD of explaining the idea. It is not the idea.
As always, primary source citing is generally best when discussing vague and complex topics. Here is the actual quote from Google's legal filing:
"Indeed, many of the same interoperability benefits that the FTC and others have touted in the SSO context also occur when one firm publishes information about an otherwise proprietary standard and other firms then independently decide (whether by choice or of necessity) to make complementary investments to support that standard in their products. Because proprietary or de facto standards can have just as important effects on consumer welfare, the Committee’s concern regarding the abuse of SEPs should encompass them as well."
So yes, essentially, they are saying that proprietary practices that become the economic standard should de facto lose their proprietary status.
If this viewpoint was made precedent that would also mean that other technologies that benefit from lopsided market advantages due to their ingenuity, and thus consumer appeal, would lose their patent protection.
+ Invent a car with 200MPG fuel efficiency using a proprietary engine and corner the market? Your engine design becomes free domain.
+ Develop a new MOBO arrangement that drastically increases speed while reducing energy consumption? Sorry, but once you start replacing all standard server MOBO's you lose your ability to maintain exclusivity.
The problem then becomes obvious. It wouldn't make financial sense to invest in R&D, the most successful companies would have the means of production and wait for an industry leading technology to hit the market. They would then just sue via the "industry standard" precedent and function as a copy cat company, making the newest and most desirable products for less than the inventors.
In the end it would benefit consumers but crush technology development.
Hear, hear! He would correctly point out that to use force (government) to seize the intellectual property of others ....
If by "correctly" you mean the complete opposite of anything "correct".
The ideas are already out there, so the government isn't seizing anything, so your entire argument is nonsense. As soon as a product hits the streets competitors can tear it down and see what makes it tick.
The role of the government with patents is to use force to prevent competitors who already have your IP from being allowed to make something that uses it. That is the opposite of "seizing".
"Others can embrace and extend when the patent expires."
The problem with that line of thinking, is not realizing that all that is created is evolutionary. Everything we build is done in small incremental steps, building on what was just built. No one goes from a horse and buggy to a Ferrari. You go from a horse, to a horse and buggy, to a motorized carriage and so on. Everything that Apple or anyone else has built, was done standing on the shoulders of giants.
This is the classic designer first vs. sales/engineer first debate to designing software.
Typically in PC land, the sales team says, we need something new to sell. The engineers say sure we can do anything, but we don't know what people want, so we're just going to make it "customizable" and let users figure it out. We geek out on making it so flexible. More to do in the product often leaves less time to perfect the code which then ships with more bugs, we just patch in a service pack. It also leads to usability issues like stuffing more and more "features" into menus, eventually overstuffing the product with so much, users can't find anything to get the job done.
Apple takes the opposite approach, they battle it out in boardrooms for whether or not a feature deserves to be in the product in the first place. The designer first approach leads to a lower quantity of features, which provides them more time to get those fewer features perfected and polished to a shine.
FWIW, more and more people are giving the designer first approach a try in Silicon Valley. Top designers are being snatched up left and right.
Cars are not fly by wire systems; they are mechanical (with some hydraulic support via "power steering", but even when the power steering fails the car can be controlled via the mechanical wheel).
And before fly-by-wire aviation joysticks worked in a similar mechanical/hydraulic manner.
Can you imagine the force required to control a car via a joystick if you had to keep it mechanical?
Having once driven a non-power steering late 60s Ford pickup truck I can imagine. I don't think the issue is one of the amount of force, rather one of granularity. The wheel has an advantage in that it is moving in a circular path and would seem to be able to travel a longer distance, possibly offering finer control.
If you then made it a completely drive by wire system, you just added a bunch of complexity and failure modes to what should be a ubiquitous and (fairly) inexpensive object.
That is pretty much the same argument made against fly-by-wire in aircraft back in the day.
I'll take a rough stab at answering this.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand took the (for lack of better terms) "collectivist" (liberal, etc...) and "individualist" (libertarian, fiscal conservative, Austrian school, etc...) schools of thought to their logical extremes. Liberalism, of course failed miserably in her example, but it is also quite telling that in order for her fictitious libertarian paradise to succeed it required technological/science fiction props (free energy, projected holograms, infinite broadcast power, etc...).
Ayn Rand demonstrated a clear assumption that intellectual property rights would be respected by both "sides" of the conflict. This is demonstrated with the subplot of the government using dirty tricks and manipulation to force Hank Reardon to sign over rights to Reardon Metal to the government. This was considered a fundamental attribute of the United States, as compared with other countries (note the nationalization of Francisco D'Antonio's assets). So, she clearly demonstrates that she believes in IP protections. John Galt, the character, would also share in these beliefs, since he's represented as the embodiment of her highest ideals.
As to the internal consistency of this, I agree that on the surface there is some conflict. Especially given Rand's discussion of force as being the antithesis of reason, but to rely on force to protect that which reason creates could be considered inconsistent. There is an exception to Rand's disavowal of force, however. She absolutely recognizes force as necessary to protect one's self and property. She also recognizes the military as one of the few legitimate functions of the government. This is made clear by the following excerpt from The Virtue of Selfishness:
"The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality"
Ayn Rand makes it clear that she supports the court systems and police force as a legitimate function of government to protect property and, by extension, ideas (patents/copyright).
I'm frequently surprised at comments I see that conflate Ayn Rand/objectivism/libertarianism with anarchy. It is simply not true, and is mostly only done by those who have little education or understanding of those philosophies.
There's no evidence, that I'm aware of, that Ayn Rand ever considered government to be "evil". What she considered "evil" or immoral, was a government that exceeded it's bounds and participated in activities outside of which those that she considered to be legitimate functions.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
And yet using government force to defend a completely artificial monopoly of ideas is somehow not problematic?
Yeah, yeah - patents are (supposed to be) on implementations, not ideas - but what is an implementation but a very specific "concrete" idea? Besides computer-related patents are typically so broad that they should rightly be denied as covering ideas rather than implementations anyway.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This almost sounds like Rearden Metal in Atlas Shrugged...
I always though Ayn Rand as supposed to be a nutter not a prophet...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
ALL Inventions are so good the should be shared.
Wow!
Thanks for this great discussion.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
As soon as a product hits the streets competitors can tear it down and see what makes it tick.
That's why violin makers have been duplicating the Stradivarius for centuries, right?
Let's not overdo it. First, "Atlas Shrugged" is poor sci-fi, not a serious work of philosophy, although it is as lengthy and as boring as the swan song of your typical bad philosopher. I have no idea why it is treated as some sort of eminent philosophical work, it isn't.
Second, Rand does not "take collectivism to extremes" to build a believable "collectivist" society. That is what Huxley, Orwell and, well, Zamyatin (a Russian guy who wrote probably the greatest dystopian novel, "We") do. Hell, even Asimov does it much better than Rand in the latest Foundation books, in which he really takes it to the top by imagining the ultimate "collectivist" society - the one-counsciousness of Gaia.
Third Rand does not "take libertarianism to extremes" either. Adam Smith does in better the "Wealth of nations", where he explains how unrestrained, laissez-faire capitalism results in monopoly and social harm.
Finally, Rand's world of individual inventors who drive progress does not make much sense either. In the real world, advancement is incremental and depends of the collective work of many people ("shoulders of giants"). The more . An individualist, a Randian "hero" would by himself be a hunter-and-gatherer, even if he's very smart.
As a post script, even her "philosophical" works are junk. For all her claims about being objective, fact-based, scientifically oriented, etc, in her philosophy she has ignored everything that modern science has to say both about the individual (psychology) and about the collective (that would be economics and parts of sociology and political science).
Have time for Ayn Rand? You'll be better served by reading something from K. Anders Ericsson or James Buchanan.
The more .
Doh.
The more complex the society, the larger the body of knowledge, the less likely are the exceptions to the rule that you can't do it on your own.
Allow the user to design their own product.
Apple profits from the simple fact that users are more than willing to pay designers to design things.
Familiarity breeds content.
The device that can be shared --- the device thar everyone knows how to use.
That won't trip up the temp that has to cover for you on the days you call in sick with the flu.
based on that logic, MS office should be free. As the most popular software around, why should I have to buy a copy. or Why pay royalties for the song "Happy Birthday"? Let Google start the Ball rolling and see how far it goes.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Could someone cite the part where Google said that "some Apple's inventions are so great" please? (I couldn't find it in TFA)
Note that "invention" doesn't need to be grea, to be come a de facto standard (QWERTY keyboard for instance)
"that become ubiquitous due to their popularity with consumers should be considered de facto standards."
search is ubiquitous too. call me when google posts the source for their search to github.
Considering he was pissed off about the ebul gubmint stealing his patented process, I think he'd tell Google to eat shit.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Google can't sue you for use of PageRank, as they don't own the patent on it. Stanford University does.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Google apparently has forgotten something -
We are no longer at the innocent age where people did not patent obvious things like round corners
In this age that we are living, it won't be long when someone is awarded the patent of breathing, or patent for using O2 for survival, or a photosynthesis patent - the thing that leaves had done for millions and millions of years
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
there wasn't a law against being successful. Customers choosing to buy your products because of the features doesn't mean that everyone else should get those features without having the talent/R&D spending in the space to justify it. Waiting until something like the iPad comes out then cloning it, right down to the form factor and styling, once the market has been proven is pretty shady.
If it really is as important as Google thinks it is than everyone is free to copy designs/protocols/whatever once the patent has expired just like it works in every other industry.
You've established the first part, but you haven't found any support for the extension to patents and copyright in Rand's work. The example of Reardon Metal doesn't help - that's a physical, bricks-and-mortar company that's being signed over, not a bunch of patents.
Did you actually read the book? It was very specifically the patent to the metal that was signed over. The company was not called Rearden Metal, it's called Rearden Steel, and Rearden retained control over it after "gifting" the patent.
Also, Rand had explicitly stated her views on copyright, patents and other forms of intellectual property in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" - there's a whole chapter there devoted to the issue - and it's in full support of the concept. In fact, she went so far as to claim that the right to own ideas is a natural right, rather than a social contract. Here are some salient quotes from it.
Tim Cook received some $500M in stock options. He'll be able to cash it in few years from now and until then he has to keep its current (absurd) market capitalization where it is and keep all these hedge funds invested in it. This is pretty darn good incentive for any CEO to do whatever possible with complete disregard to those petty "externalities". My bet is he'll push to continue patent trolling, cheating (photoshopped "evidence"), bribe government officials (make them punishing everyone trying to defend against Apple patent trolling, changing law to Apple's favor if necessary) and do other cruel things in order to keep Apple monopoly on certain designs and thus keep its profit margins and share price without actually innovating too much (Steve Jobs is dead after all and some prominent engineers left Apple recently). It's too much money at stake here - expect never ending stream of dirty tricks from those crooks.
Since the US Constitution states that the purpose of patents is to advance the useful arts and sciences, and interoperability is key to that advance, all interfaces (whether human-machine or machine-machine) should only be patentable if they are FRAND. That should be a constitutional legal requirement for any US patent covering an interface or protocol.
Interfaces are important. Imagine if every car were forced to have a different interface by patents, with different pedals in different places and different steering wheels. That's no different from the slide-to-lock patent. We want to reward the creation of new and better interfaces, yet allow such interfaces to spread when they are proven to be better. FRAND is exactly the middle ground we want, as the success of GSM (a machine-machine interface) shows.
The 'Reardon Metal' case illustrates pretty well the difference between physical and software inventions. The IP to the metal apply only to the metal. There's no patent on 'building train tracks out of Reardon metal'. Just on producing the raw material. Presumably, Reardon would sell his metal to anyone at the same price; otherwise, that would be problematic.
Now take 'swipe to unlock'. First of all, 'invention'? If ever there were a patent on a pure idea, this is it. On a touchscreen device, you need to have a purposeful gesture to say 'I want the device to unlock - this is not just a case of the device bumping around in my pocket'. A left-to-right swipe on an icon is the simplest most obvious gesture to accomplish that. Anyone would have thought of it. But beside that, there's no way to place a reasonable price on rights to use it. It costs exactly 0 to produce a 'swipe to unlock' thingy. You can't just say, okay Apple produces 'swipe to unlocks' and everybody has to buy them from Apple. Microsoft has actually attempted to set a price on their patents, and the pricing is ridiculous. They charge about 30% of the cost of WP7 for the right to have a progress bar on the web brower, and to support SD cards, which use FAT32 filesystems in order to be compatible with desktop computers.
In the smartphone market, apparently, once one of the big guys (Microsoft and Apple, who already have a MAD patent sharing pact) gets a 'do this, but do it on a smartphone' idea, they can hold the whole industry hostage. Maybe John Galt would've been okay with that, but I doubt it. In the fantasy world of 'Atlas Shrugged', monopolization of industries wasn't the objective of its heroes. It was more of 'let the best inventor win' - not let nobody else compete.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
but it's ok to be wicked, apparently.
-- I speak only for myself
While Apple has had some successes in court, it is clear that trying to protect the overall design of their products has been an uphill battle. But Apple is still doing just fine in spite of the deluge of Apple-clone devices--Apple continues to have the dominant products in their categories, and their products continue to be highly enough valued by consumers to earn Apple large profit margins. So there's no need to pity Apple.
I'd say the real victims of the Apple-clone deluge are companies like Palm and Blackberry. Both have their own unique product designs, developed independently rather than as copies of Apple's products. But Palm is dead and Blackberry is dying. And what has killed them has not been competition from Apple, but rather competition from the hordes of Apple-imitators. Both were companies with unique products and a strong sense of design. If they only had had to compete with Apple, they probably would have done reasonably well, differentiating themselves on the basis of design and price from Apple's limit product line. But they didn't only have to compete with Apple, they had to compete with the Apple knock-offs, which were sold as Apple-plus devices, offering a resemblance of Apple's style, and adding in some extra feature, like a larger screen--and at rock-bottom prices, because unlike Apple, Palm, and Blackberry, the knock-off manufacturers were taking little risk--most of the features of their phones had already been market-tested, by Apple.
The consumer is the victim too. Apple's phones and tablets are very nice, but not everybody wants an Apple or Apple look-alike phone or tablet. Unfortunately other choices are being squeezed out of the marketplace by the Apple clones. Palm is defunct, Blackberry on its last legs. The only real alternative to Apple-based design is emerging from Microsoft. Microsoft has never exactly been noted for brilliant design, but at least they have the financial resources to risk introducing a novel design into a market overloaded with Apple clones.
If anything, the history of the iPhone and the iPad shows a need for stronger legal protection of design.
Are you arguing Stadivarius violins were protected by patents?
No. I'm pointing out that since patents weren't available to Stradivarius, his only means of protecting his intellectual property was to keep his methods a secret. To this day, nobody has been able to duplicate his instruments, rebutting the argument that his competitors would be able to simply tear it apart and figure out how to duplicate it.
(I don't want to be one of those guys but the reason we cannot duplicate the instruments is that they weren't amazingly better than other violins. This is completely peanut-gallerying over here though, adding nothing to the conversation, IGNORE ME.)