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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.
"...and, you know, world peace would be great. Somebody should do that."
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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...
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.
Er, its not the "decision of California".
First, because its not "of California", as it is in a U.S. federal court that happens to be located in California.
But mostly because its not even (yet, and quite possibly ever) even a decision in that court. Its the jury verdict which is still the subject of several post-verdict motions before the court finally (not considering appeals) decides on a judgement in the case.
"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.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs 1994
Nope, Samsung filed a patent on the design of the F700 shortly before the iPhone was announced. It wasn't released until Nov. 2007.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700
Shows how much you know.
If it were just Samsung getting a little sloppy about Apple's design patents, you'd have a point. But the motivation for this war is the belief that Android itself is one big ripoff of iOS and needs to die. If Apple is allowed to claim ownership of the dominant user interaction paradigm, they will end up being the sole owner of the smart phone marketplace.
You say there are alternatives? These are a few small time platforms that manage to stay outside Apple's claimed IP They will always be too nonstandard to attract significant user or developer mindshare.
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.
"If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan
Help stamp out iliturcy.
One Steve made a name for himself by opening up computers. His idea that a desktop computer should be a big open platform that anybody can plug into dominates computer design to this very day, and had a lot to do with the explosive growth of computing.
The other Steve wanted to close up smartphones. Come to think of it, he took a control-freak attitude toward every product he ever launched. Ironic, really.
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.
I prefer this version
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
Please go and read the USPTO design patent D504889 (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=D504,889.PN.&OS=PN/D504,889&RS=PN/D504,889) and then come back to us. That particular patent is **exactly** a rectangle with rounded corners.
There may have been other patents in play, but that one is essentially what people complain about when the discuss this issue.
I, for one, despise design patents. The whole point of patents were to be novel (ie, new), non-obvious (to those versed in the art), and **useful** - that's the three-prong test for a valid invention. Design patents are only allowed on non-functional (hence non-useful) stuff and have therefore mangled the entire inventive process.
If they were "exact copies" why are verdicts from all over the world centered on software patents like slide to unlock and multitouch gestures, not design patents? Why's Apple suing Samsung for Galaxy SIII when it was widely claimed to be "phone designed by lawyers" as to avoid infringements?
Sorry, but "Apple only has a bone with Samsung because they make exact copies" don't really work, considering those verdicts, SIII lawsuit and preceding lawsuits with other major Android manufacturers.
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
I love Steve Woz. He is a really cool guy and is really the original brains behind Apple. Apple may have skyrocketed into fame because of Steve Jobs' marketing but its Woz that made Apple who they are today. The man is a old fashioned hacker, which is something that is missing from today's computer hardware and software companies. The computer enthusiasts have been replaced by the greedy business men in the computer world and its really sad.
Apple's '677 patent is exactly about a rectangle with rounded corners.
Read it yourself:
http://www.google.com/patents/USD618677
Fight mega corp! Buy from big corp!
Woz is so cool. If only he were Apple's CEO, we wouldn't be having all these lawsuits, and we'd probably have some REAL innovation from Apple (not catching up to making a 4" screen and including LTE). C'mon, smartphone makers, where's that long-lasting battery power (perhaps with a solar panel on the back to boot)? Where's that built-in holographic projector (a la R2-D2)? Think how useful that would be in the corporate world! (Not to mention gaming!)
Yeah, he stole that quote from Picasso
"The best lube is your own spit" - Jenna Jameson
The specific (whole) quote that everyone likes to reference ("Good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing good ideas.") was made during a 1996 PBS documentary called Triumph of the Nerds.
Sure, but then you can make many pies. Billions and billions of pies.
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.
So what if Samsung copied. Yes, if they did, it would be illegal, but that just means they should suffer a reasonable penalty.
Do you really think the amount Samsung had to pay Apple was reasonable?
First you have to prove that Samsung's copying of Apple products benefited Samsung. Sure you can point to Samsung's sales, but if you interview people who bought their products, none would tell you it was because of the iphone similarity.
I bought my galaxy S DESPITE the similarity, not because of it. I was happy enough with the phone that I was prepared to suffer the embarrassment of owning a phone that looked like an iphone (but clearly bigger).
Do you really think all those samsung phone owners were happy every time someone asked "is that an iphone?".
Personally I don't know and don't care if Samsung copied Apple. In my view there is no way that is worth 1 billion dollars. That is basically saying that Samsung contributed nothing to their own phone, or that people only bought it because of (Apple's) design. It isn't just wrong, it is ridiculous.
Do you think Apple is being honest about all this?
They are trying to include the Galaxy S3 now - a phone that looks nothing like any iphone ever made. And yet they are trying to make similar 'copying' claims about it.
IMO the original galaxy S1 and maybe the galaxy tab 10.1 are the only devices Apple actually has any shred of a valid claim against. But they are clearly not suing samsung for the reasons they state.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
People who think you just need to get out of tech.
Go be a lawyer somewhere. Or go into marketing.
Apple lost the desktop war because they refused to play and collaborate with others. They wanted the whole deal for themselves.
A lot of us grudgingly use Windows on the desktop, but at least we have a huge variety of choices of hardware to run on it. If Apple had won we'd all still be using beige Macs.
If Apple Can Copy Braun Then Why Can't Samsung Copy Apple?
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
If Jobs wanted to go Thermonuclear they should expect mutually assured desctruction
Shit man, I dunno if I'd of given that whole quote out and sourced it. You're likely to have to go into witness protection now.
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