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iPhone 4, iPad 2 Get US Import Ban
Bent Spoke writes "The U.S. trade agency has banned the import of older Apple iPhone and iPad models due to the violation of a patent held by Samsung (PDF). 'The president can overturn the import ban on public-policy grounds, though that rarely happens. Apple can keep selling the devices during the 60-day review period. ... Apple pledged to appeal the ITC decision. The underlying findings will be reviewed by a U.S. appeals court specializing in patent cases. ... The decision could mean fewer choices for AT&T and T-Mobile customers who want to get an iPhone without paying the higher cost of the iPhone 5. Samsung told the commission that Cupertino, California-based Apple could drop the price of the iPhone 5 if it was worried about losing potential customers. All of the iPhones are made in Asia.' It's getting so complicated we need a scorecard to keep track of who's winning these offensive patent battles in the smartphone coliseum."
If we're lucky Apple will realise that patent reform is in their best interests as well as ours. More likely though is that this will be seen by Apple as a sign they need to step up their legal activities even further.
I know there will be apologists but Apple really brought this upon themselves with their frivolous lawsuits based on patenting rounded corners and their seeking of bans of other devices. Whilst the rest of the phone manufacturers have all joined in the same rotten game, and many were playing at it before Apple, it was the Cupertino based company that (in my view) turned to the courts as their primary competitive strategy.
Let the flamewar begin!!
Component sales to Apple are a relatively small percentage of Samsung's profits from the mobile sector. They've probably calculated that the potential gain in market share, and related profits, easily outstrips any drop in component orders by Apple.
What strikes me as how both the interviewee's in the news clip shown in the TFA constantly confuse the terms "around the country" and "around the world". Americans' are bred thinking that the country and the world are one of the same. These Freudian slips are just proof of their cultural ignorance.
If Obama did overturn the ITC I'd ask the question, why even allow Samsung the freedom to file cases against Apple in the first place? I'd say if Obama did overturn the decision (no matter the ethics behind the decision) it's just proof that the USA is doomed. Ideally the Govt should be held accountable to it's respective laws, that fact a committee even exists for this sort of thing just highlights how Totalitarian the US has become.
And someone explain WTF "public-policy" is?
I wish karma were a real thing.
If we're lucky Apple will realise that patent reform is in their best interests as well as ours. More likely though is that this will be seen by Apple as a sign they need to step up their legal activities even further.
If Apple and others conclude that Patent Reform is unavoidable, or in their interest, they will refocus part of their lobby and legal teams to ensure that it is as much in their interests(...) as possible, and as little-as-possible in ours (the public).
Are you honestly suggesting that Apple had Samsung make their iPhones and then Samsung took those designs and made identical copies on their own?
1. Phones exist (very important logical point I believe).
What a revelation.
2. American company asks an Asian company to make a new type of phone based on a set of blue prints that the American company provides.
Yeah.
3. Asian company builds a machine that makes said blue prints.
'said blue prints'? So a machine that makes the exact blueprints that were sent to them such that the american company did nothing other than turn on the machine that makes the blue prints and sent the output to the asian company? Or did the american company create them somewhere and just print them out on the blue print making machine?
4. American company asks for X number of phones to be built. Asian company delivers X number of phones.
That's generally how it works.
5. Asian company realises they can make Y number of phones which is x2 as much as X.
Y number of what phones? The ones the American company contracted them to make? Or different ones? Or are they built from the output of the asian blue print making machine?
6. Asian company sells X-Y=Z phones
So they sell -X phones? According to point 5 Y = 2X so given the above Z = -X.
which in turn pisses off the American company.
Damn straight, they're selling negative phones instead of building phones they were contracted to build!
So who sues who?
The guy who came up with the idiotic math, then we praise the blue print making machine that made the Americans redundant and wonder what the fuck the Asians are doing.
...that a US company can't sell their product in the US because of an import ban on that product?
“We believe the ITC’s Final Determination has confirmed Apple’s history of free-riding on Samsung’s technological innovations,” Samsung said in a statement to AllThingsD.
http://allthingsd.com/20130604/samsung-wins-import-ban-against-older-iphones-ipads/
I can't imagine them saying it without at least some irony in their voice. Seriously though, Apple has all but confirmed that they're violating patents for various reasons (e.g. FRAND terms were not offered) and has always been rather blasé about much of this stuff, while Samsung has at times blatantly ripped off a number of its competitors, most recently Apple (before Apple, a number of their designs ripped off Blackberry and others), sometimes doing so rather shamelessly yet denying it entirely.
And all of this won't matter much in the end anyway, since sixty days will get us darn close to the post-back-to-school time when Apple typically announces new versions of their devices anyway, including the heavily rumored low-cost iPhone that will be replacing the iPhone 4 (quick note: this injunction only applies to the iPhone 4 model used by AT&T, apparently, since the iPhone 4 had different chipsets for GSM and CDMA in all but one of the models (the late-released white iPhone 4)), and a new version of the iPad and iPad mini, which will be obviating the need to keep the iPad 2 in the lineup.
So, kudos to Samsung for winning a victory where one was deserved, but in the end, it's all just more of the same.
It's actually worse than that.
Apple's patents are on design, silly things like rounded corners and page bounce. They are easy to work around. Everyone else's patents are on the technology needed to connect to mobile networks and other standards essential stuff which, as demonstrated here, is clearly enforceable and impossible to avoid.
Samsung did offer to license the patent to Apple, as they are required to do under FRAND rules. Most companies don't pay cash for this, they just cross license their own technology patents and call it even. Apple doesn't have any tech patents to bargain with and its design patents are worthless, so they have to pay $$$ instead. Apple didn't like the fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory rates so refused to pay, and now the court is punishing them for it.
Patent reform won't help them. Patent reform is only going to destroy their own design patents, not the technology patents they don't want to pay for.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No need for a scorecard. As always, the patent lawyers are winning, and the consumers are losing.
This sort of shitty competition through litigation was vile when Apple did it to Samsung, and it's equally vile when Samsung do it to Apple. Showing more and more why we desperately need patent reform. I'm not even that concerned about the impact on Apple and Samsung - it's the smaller players who can be crushed by litigation like this that I've got more sympathy for.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Apple has more than 400 FRAND patents mostly acquired from Nortel, but they decided to never sue based on FRAND patents.
Samsung ask 2.5% of the price of the whole iPhone as a "reasonable and fair" price. This is exactly what Motorola ask to Apple and Microsoft as well for FRAND patentd. Recently, a court has considered that in a Motorola vs Microsoft case, a fair price would be 1/2000 to what Motorola asked.
Nobody can seriously think that 2.5% rate is a fair price as there are thousands of FRAND patents involved in any smartphone concerning 3G, 4G, WiFi, Bluetooth etc.
Why?
Who cares if they can't sell their old, dull junk?
Nobody any more - only out of touch wanna-be desperates and old people still use iPhones
I'll try to ignore the juvenile condescension dripping off that post and try to stay factual. Millions of people who do not fit your description still buy the iPhone, the iPhone 4 is Apple's entry level phone and entry level devices are kind of important for enticing new customers. The problem (for Samsung) is that firstly, this will be appealed and secondly, the iPhone 4 is about to be succeeded as the entry level model by the unaffected 4S and possibly the rumoured low cost iPhone model. So for Samsung this is mostly a propaganda victory whose magnitude depends on how much the Samsung PR department and Samsung/Google's army of fanboys can inflate it's importance
I found the article linked to in the summary to be a bit confused, there is a somewhat better analysis available here
U.S. Patent No. 7,706,348 concerns an “apparatus and method for encoding/decoding transport format combination indicator in CDMA mobile communication system” (an allegedly UMTS-essential patent). Newer iPhones and iPads coming with Qualcomm QCOM +0.84% baseband chips (starting with the iPhone 4S) are definitely not affected, limiting the potential impact of this decision on Apple’s revenues — basically, Apple would have to make the iPhone 4S its entry-level iPhone model and discontinue U.S. sales of older iPhones (and the “new iPad 4G”, the third-generation iPad, its entry-level model for iPads with cellular connectivity; WiFi iPads are not affected at all). Formally the decision also relates only to the AT&T versions of those older products, but Samsung reserved the right to allege infringement by Apple products running on other networks (unless they come with Qualcomm baseband chips).”
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Are you honestly suggesting that Apple had Samsung make their iPhones and then Samsung took those designs and made identical copies on their own?
What... are you stupid? No, of course not. Samsung had no choice. Apple forced Samsung to copy Apple's innovations... by innovating in the first place. You have a lot to learn about Chinese culture, my friend.
What does Chinese culture have to do with it? Samsung are a Korean company.
Nice spin. You can say that the rate was "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" but that doesn't make it so. Apple certainly didn't believe so, hence the lawsuit. If they felt it was fair they would have paid up right away, like they did for the many, many hundreds of other FRAND patents that are essential to the iPhone's function.
You do know that it was Apple that sued Samsung first, right? That this particular suit was a response to Apple suing Samsung for violating their "look and feel"?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
It's not abuse-the-frand. Frand doesn't mean license-free, it means a fair and reasonable license. Apple doesn't like the terms of the license, but nothing about them is particularly unfair. The usual claim by Apple apologists is that Apple doesn't pay the same terms as, say, HTC - but there's a reason for that: HTC happily cross licenses technologies of equal value - from Samsung's Point of View - in the same technological arena. If Samsung didn't like HTC's terms, Samsung would charge HTC the same rate as Apple, and most likely HTC wouldn't have a problem with that.
I don't like patents, but am somewhat less sympathetic to hardware makers who refuse to license FRAND patents, especially over something like this. You get two choices, pay the fair rate, or negotiate an alternative. Apple is apparently unwilling to do either.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Not per patent. For an entire portfolio, it seems an entirely reasonable place to start bargaining from. And that's what happened in the Microsoft/Motorola case -- Motorola put in an opening bid, and Microsoft immediately (with no counteroffer) when running to friendly local court asking that court to decide that the negotiations (to which they'd declined to respond at all) were innately unfair.
Now it will force users to buy iPhone 5 and iPad 3 or Mini instead of cheaping out on an older model. Its a win win here.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.