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In Wake of Samsung Verdict, HTC Does Not Intend To Settle
Taco Cowboy writes "The recent lost by Samsung in a court battle against Apple apparently does not put a dent to other parties determination to fight Apple, inside and outside of the court system HTC's Chairperson, Ms. Cher Wang, has publicly re-iterated her belief that the $1 billion jury verdict against Samsung in the U.S. 'does not mean the failure of the entire Google Android ecosystem.'"
This. I can't even begin to think of an equivocal thing that has happened throughout history. Perhaps union busting might come close, but for sweet jesus sake, the way these patent lawyers are working is just sickening. It's funny how you hear so much about tort reform and other such garbage from politicians but you don't hear a peep about patent trolling or the abuse of IP rights which is more of a hampering force on our economy than all of the malpractice lawsuits in the history of forever ever have been or will be.
I feel the need to post this on ever damn patent story on here. Read your history. This is both nothing new, and pretty tame by patent battle standards. The industrialization of the US happened both in spite of, and *because* of these sort of patent battles. The patent battles over things like programmable looms and sewing equipment made Samsung vs Apple look like something Judge Judy would preside over. And the fallout of those battles during the 19th century established the foundation of the companies that went on to fund the continued industrial growth and innovation in the US.
And the answer to how you can innovate these days is simple -- the same way every other company did over the last 200 years. License what you think is critical, ignore the things you think you can get away with, and patent as much as you can because the cheapest way to license patents has always been to cross license patents. Oh, and really study your history. They say there's nothing new under the sun, and in IP and technical litigation, that is absolutely true.
Actually, that's the entire reason Android is popular. The HTC Dream came out in 2008 @ $129 on T-Mobile, undercutting the $199 iPhone. It was unarguably a "cheap knock-off". It was priced to entice people to join the Android camp instead of Apple. Now you have the tribalism that goes on amongst Android and Apple camps (there are Android fanboys just as much as Apple and they suffer the same "reality distortion"). It's typical human behavior. Now, look up "commitment bias" and "irrational escalation" and see that you are a sheep who bought into a marketing ploy just like the Apple kiddies. Then look up "confirmation bias" just for fun. Are Android handsets cheap knock-offs now? No. They were when no one knew how Android would fare in the market. Was Android OS a cheap knock-off? Yes--it was first a rip-off of BlackBerry and then a poor, buggy rip-off of iOS. Now, it is different, refined, and better/worse than iOS in its own ways. TO EACH THEIR OWN.
HTC was king of Android phones a few years ago. Once Samsung started stealing Apple tech, they took the crown from HTC.
Now that HTC and Samsung should be competing on an even playing field again, I predict HTC will overtake Samsung for good this time.
I think you're mixing up two words there; "obvious" and "popular".
You remember the 1994 device by Fidler, right?
http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/screen-shot-2012-06-05-at-11-03-06-am.png%3Fw%3D604
To him, a rectangle with rounded corners must simply have been an option. To others, sharper corners were an option. yet others had maybe pondered square devices, or round, or triangular.
Point is - none of them are "obvious" per se - they're simply one of many choices out there that, if you were to ask a person, would come up with.
There's certainly advantages to a rectangle - we're used to rectangles. Be it horizontally when dealing with TVs, computer screens, etc. or vertically when dealing with newspapers, magazines, books, etc.
There's also advantages to making the corners round. Making them razor sharp simply makes them uncomfortable to hold.
In that way you could say it's certainly a more obvious choice than a triangular, sharp-cornered, screen.
The thing Apple did do - through its marketing prowess, among other - is make it popular. But its popularity is not what makes it obvious.
Similarly slide-to-unlock. No, 'slide' mechanisms weren't very popular until the Apple's use of it. That in itself isn't what makes it obvious, though. The average lock on a public restroom stall may be what makes it obvious - because if you ask 100 people to come up with ways to perform an action (not necessarily unlock) given a 2D surface on which a continuous/non-continuous position may be tracked, 'slide' is more than likely to come up as one of the first suggestions.
So why didn't others use it before? Because there weren't 100 'others'. There was Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, essentially. Most everything else were what you would now call 'feature phones' and unlocking those is pretty universal.. '*, OK' or '#, OK'. Maybe that was patented, too, and everybody licensed that from whoever held that patent. I should hope not, though. They copied that model - Windows Mobile required pushing an on-screen 'unlock' button or *, followed by an on-screen button or the 'enter' key, for example. If Microsoft were told by, say, Ericsson that they patented 'a two-tap method for unlocking' and to quit using it and also get all devices banned from sale (instead of just licensing it out for something a little less ridiculous than e.g. $10/device), odds are that Microsoft would have implemented a slide action - and thought of 50 more ways, patented them all, etc.
There is a difference between these two, though.
The former is form following function. Nobody wants to be jabbed in the hands by the throwing star tablet and look at the accompanying screen because it's just impractical - so the rectangle with more or less rounded corners is something that you eventually tend to evolve toward. Granting a patent on that, or even its use as a component in a patent (design or otherwise) is shenanigans.
The latter, however, is completely arbitrary. To use the bathroom stall analogy - there's knobs you have to turn, buttons you have to push, bars that you have to flip over. If the cleaning crew wants to access the maintenance room, they may have to enter a pin, or hold up a card (NFC), etc.
There's so many ways in which to implement a device lock/unlock method that at least when faced with patent litigation, it's not worth the bother to fight over keeping a 'slide' mechanism on your device unless you're fighting it out of principle (i.e. believe the patent should not have been granted OR that it should be FRAND).
That's not to say that the horizontal slide is innovative, ground-breaking, etc. Just a lot more 'meh'.
Form an LLC (super cheap) and release the software.
You will not be sued, at worse you might get a letter claiming you violate some patent. If so just ignore it.
The WORST that can happen is yes, your company gets sued. So then you close it off and you are done.
But far more likely is nothing with happen and you can just continue to sell your software.
The way things are now it's already like you have already been shut down. Why pre-suppose a very unlikely case?
I'm not saying the software patent situation is not bad. I am saying that it's silly to do nothing because of abstract fear with the end result being the same as if your fears came true.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The first artist who got a copyright on his own work was Albrecht Duerer - 100 years after the first copyrights (imprimatur, as they were called then) were handed out, and only because he was the Albrecht Duerer , and some people felt that his works were actually his to profit on. The first law to recognize that an artist has a general right to his own works was the Statute of Anne 1710 -- 250 years after the first imprimatur. All those laws and principles were designed foremost to protect the manufacturer, the rewarding of the creator has always been an afterthought.
I'd argue that it's always been like this, but the 1% want you to believe in the 'American Dream' and that you can actually achieve it. As long as you're toiling away with dreams of eventually making it, you won't be distracted by the system that is so obviously set up for you to fail. Once large numbers of people start to realize this, then those in control will really be in trouble (the Occupy movement was a brief start).
Exactly. I actually passed on a job a few weeks ago with a mobile phone software start-up, simply because their profits were increasing TOO quickly, and they were building a product lineup that directly competed with some very lawsuit hungry companies. The profit portion was great; year over year profit increases of 75 - 125%, for the past four years, but the prospect that they'd soon come into the class of some very big names scared me off.