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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."
That would be amazing.
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.
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.
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...
"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.
God spoke to me
It is truly sad that a voice of reason like Woz is so rare in "business" anymore.
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.
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.
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 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.
-Lod
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.
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.
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.
Even more than that, Samsung had filed for design patents on the f700 before the iPhone was demoed.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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...
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.