Wozniak On the Samsung Patent Verdict

dgharmon writes "'I hate it,' Wozniak told Bloomberg in Shanghai today, referring to the patent battle. He thinks the ruling will be overruled. Samsung will of course appeal, and this case will go back and forth for months still, but Wozniak just wishes everyone could get along. 'I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies,' he said."

Comments

Please.

[pdbogen]

That would be amazing.

Re:Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best outcome for Apple is still just a Pyrrhic victory for them. Before this lawsuit, they were branded as the top smartphone manufacturer, far ahead of the competition. In the average consumer's mind, there was Apple and a half-dozen second-tier competitors.

Now, the longer this case drags out and the more press coverage it generates, the more consumers will hear "Samsung copies Apple!", "You can't distinguish Samsung's and Apple's products!", "Samsung is the same as Apple!". This is the kind of advertising that Samsung couldn't have purchased at any price. Apple has basically plucked the Samsung brand from the pack of also-rans and made it its equal.

Three years ago it would have been unheard of for Samsung to open their own exclusive retail stores. People were skeptical of Microsoft doing it. If this trial drags out another year, Apple vs Samsung will be looking much more like Coke vs Pepsi instead of Coke vs RC Cola.

Apple should never have started this lawsuit. Their best play would have been to keep promoting the image of Apple vs cluster-of-copycat-mass-market-manufacturers. They should have kept claiming that the entire market is still copying Apple's old products. Instead, they blew a giant smoking hole in the "Apple is unique" brand concept.

The really stupid thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple STARTED this patent war. If they hadn't started aggressively going after the other major Smartphone makers, everyone would still be rolling along quietly.

Couldn't we all just get along?

[jerpyro]

I suspect that nearly everyone except the lawyers and leadership wish we could get along. When the patent system was envisioned a long time ago, progress didn't happen nearly as quickly, consumerism wasn't so rampant (you didn't buy a new ANYTHING every two years except maybe a toothbrush), and the manufacturing cycle was MUCH longer than it is today.

I consider the lawyers of these tech companies (Apple, Samsung, Oracle, etc) to be exploiting 'bugs' in the patent system, and I suspect that most others do as well. The patent system needs a hotfix, and there's no political pressure to do so.

Re:Couldn't we all just get along?

[Dave Emami]

Basically, at least as far as high tech is concerned, the patent system has morphed from its original "encourage inventors to share and explain their inventions in exchange for a short period of official monopoly" to a legally-empowered version of "I call dibs on that." Rather than developing something and patenting the result, people are observing trends, anticipating where things will go, and patenting that. Sometimes (such as with Apple) they proceed to actually develop something, and other times (as with patent trolls) they just wait to cash in. But in either case, the patent boils down to "I was the first person to tell the Patent Office that things were moving in this direction."

Re:Couldn't we all just get along?

[an unsound mind]

Woz has always been so geeky I would be more surprised if he didn't have an active Slashdot account.

All this lawsuits, copyrights and patents business probably annoys him, because it means it'll be harder to make the next cool toy.

Nope, Apple did not start it

[SuperKendall]

Apple STARTED this patent war.

Samsung started it with blatant copying of Apple products,

I agree with Woz, I wish it did not happen, but we should be clear that there are no clean companies in this war. Samsung clearly did copy substantially from Apple, and that triggered Apple to sue.

In an ideal world neither would have happened.

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone has been copying from everyone else in this industry for decades, including Apple itself. Now that they're the king of the hill, they want to change the rules. Too bad for them, this kind of crap means that every other player will now proceed to nuke them with everything at their disposal - and rightly so. /me is eagerly waiting for a lawsuit over LTE in iPhone 5 from Samsung...

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why this is modded up to 5 when it's verifiably false. Their demos were a month or so apart, with F700 coming a bit later, and LG Prada with similar design came out a few months before them both. If anything, it just shows that market was coming to this already.

Anyways, I find Apple fanboys' claims about "blatant copying" rather silly, considering courts have mostly denied Apple's claims about copying (up to telling Apple to apologize in UK's case) and most surviving claims are utility patents related, though even those didn't fare as well as Apple hoped.

So yeah, it seems "infringing on a software patent" == "blatantly copying" in their lingo.

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[maeglin]

Must we go though this every time?

The F700 was announced in Feburary 2007 at Mobile World Congress, after the iPhone was announced in January at MacWorld. It also relied on a slide-out keyboard, so in usage they are not very similar at all. And the appearance of the UI is very different, it doesn't have the design features which were the subject of this lawsuit.

Show's how little you know

You need to consider each patent separately. The UI with four icons has nothing to do with the patent on the physical design. Nor does the four icon layout have anything to do with the slide to unlock patent.

I have no opinion on the design patent question beyond it just seems silly to my non-designer mind. As an actual software developer I do take issue with the software patents and as a member of the human race I take issue with the concept of "owning" ideas in general.

But what really gets me is the litigation apologists who selectively treat these patents as either severable or not depending on the direction the wind is blowing in order to rationalize the desertification the intellectual commons.

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[Hazel Bergeron]

So what you're saying is that Samsung's 'phones were dressed provocatively and Samsung was asking for it.

(OK, what's you're actually saying is that you have a qusi-religious devotion to Apple, or shares that you want to be maintained as ridiculously high as possible, but I'm trying to imagine you as having more of a character.)

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[shentino]

That may actually suggest that Apple and Samsung both copied a third party.

Which implies prior art that should in fact have completely prevented the patents in question from being issued in the first place.

The whole thing about federal courts giving the USPTO higher deference on patent validity when the USPTO itself rubber stamps everything and lets the courts sort it out.

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[BronsCon]

Even more than that, Samsung had filed for design patents on the f700 before the iPhone was demoed.

Re:Nope, Apple did not start it

[AliasMarlowe]

Show's how little you know, the year BEFORE iphone was even announced, samsung released a little device f700. If you compare the 2 side by side they look very similar so on topic of who copied who first, that would be apple copied samsung.

I hate Apple with a passion but you're just wrong. The F700 came out just slightly after the iPhone. Obviously they both had to be in development around the same time but Apple was in fact first.

The myth posted above has be debunked many times, just use a little Google-fu and you will see.

Indeed, the F700 was publicly shown just a few weeks after the iPhone's first appearance. However, Samsung had filed for a Korean design patent on the F700 several weeks before the iPhone was revealed. It exactly matched the F700 (BTW, there were rounded corners on the rectangle). The whole "who did it first" issue is stupid, and describing it as "copying our innovation" is utter lunacy, when basic design principles lead to just a few possibilities, all of which were released by somebody.

Why doesn't someone say what everyone is thinking

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

"For anything non-trivial, it is simply illegal to develop software." Companies are getting away with patenting things that are trivial and obvious, for almost any piece of software, you're tripping over dozens of patents. If we were to enforce the letter of the law, developing software is illegal.

A Voice Of Reason

[ChodaBoyUSA]

It is truly sad that a voice of reason like Woz is so rare in "business" anymore.

Re:A Voice Of Reason

[jrumney]

It leaves the little guy relying on the "and play nice". This is basically what we had in the mobile phone industry between 2006 and 2011 (or whenever Apple kicked off this nonsense). Before 2006, Qualcomm, Nokia, Ericsson and others were all suing each other over 3G patents. They came to a settlement where everyone decided to cross license their patents and offer FRAND licensing so that the little guys didn't get shut out. The problem is that Apple came along and took advantage of the little guy provisions to enter the market, then started throwing patents around which are very much not being offered on FRAND terms ($30 per device for half a dozen UI interaction patents, vs $6 for hundreds of radio and networking hardware patents?).

Big players exchanging patents isn't ideal either

[SpazmodeusG]

Having the big companies exchanging patents just means the big players divide up the monopoly between them whilst suing the start ups out of existence.

woz is a great guy

[LodCrappo]

Woz always seems to be sensible, realistic and honest. Make you wonder how S. Wozniak got mixed up with the likes of S. Jobs in the first place.

Re:woz is a great guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Assholes seek out brilliant, hard working people to take advantage of. That's how they operate.

Re:that's becuase he's a douche

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple and their fan base are the biggest bunch of crybabies I've ever witnessed.

Woz, on the other hand, continues to gain respect. A good man.

Re:He also added...

[darkfeline]

At least Google doesn't try to hide the fact that they are advertising to you, and offer great compensation in the form of high-quality services such as search and mail. On the other hand, you're paying Apple to be the product.

Re:The Woz is an engineer and a nice guy but...

[Empiric]

You don't get ahead by sharing everything you make and helping out the competition.

Yes, you do.

Open Source has proven this to be the case, even winning over the historical corporate bastion of conservatism that is IBM. I had two machines on my desk. One Windows, one Linux. Both made the company money by different means.

It's the old question of "getting more of the pie" versus "growing the pie"--the difference being, in software, you can grow the pie exponentially and at a trivial incremental cost. When the domain of technological possibility is grown like that, there's more room for profitable activities for everyone involved.

And... no, Apple lost because the Lisa and Macintosh were absurdly high-priced for their capabilities. IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing. Windows just eliminated Apple's sole claim to advantage, and had the clearly better OS until... well, Apple stuck to tradition and stole the BSD OS. That they don't -like- sharing doesn't alter that they'd have no OS for their desktop/laptop systems without people who did like sharing, before they slapped an "Apple" label on others' work.

As the final argument on how this history proceeded, we can look at what happened when IBM tried to "pull an Apple" with the PS/2 and proprietary interfaces--an unmitigated disaster in the market. It's working for the time being for Apple as history repeats itself, but I expect it won't be long until Android reverses the perceptions again--it's just important to understand that there are alternatives to rapacious business, and spending your money exclusively on that just harms progress and technology for everyone, regardless of immediate perceptions. Though, granted, Apple is all about immediate perceptions...

They did, the judge supressed the truth

[SmallFurryCreature]

Samsung wanted to submit evidence they had ripped off Sony instead who had done the shape before. For that matter, the XDA (MS Phone years ago) seemed to me to be the grand daddy device that looked very much the same.

Oh well, doubt the appeal court will have such an obviously Apple fangirl for a judge. So Apple will loose and all will be well again. But it would be nice if the asian tech giants told apple for its next device. Nope, sorry, we don't have any items in stock at the moment. Go shop somewhere else. Oh there isn't? Well, go complain to the US tech companies that outsources all tech then.

Would be nice. Won't happen but it would be nice.