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Obama Administration Overrules iPhone Trade Ban
Back in June, the U.S. International Trade Commission issued an import ban on the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 3G due to patent violations. Now, the White House has exercised its privilege to overrule the ban. In his letter to the ITC (PDF), Ambassador Michael Froman said 'he was not making a decision about the merits of Samsung's case, or its right to seek compensation. Rather, he emphasized that because the patent in question was now a widely held technology standard, banning the products in question would be too disruptive to consumers and the economy.' This is the first time an ITC decision has been overruled since 1987.
Money buys a lot.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Google in the past has said they object to companies using FRAND to sue.
The same was not done for Samsung when their products were banned over flimsier design patents
Hate! Hate! Hate!
Apple
Hate! Hate! Hate!
Barack Obama
This should cause furious Slash-gasms among the nerds, and plenty of page hits, and plenty of profit.
It would be very wrong of the White House to give one US corporation carte-blanche to ignore a patent. Although the ITC ban may be too strong a response, there's still the fact that Apple has been ignoring a patent for years. They shouldn't be free to continue indefinitely.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
does he?
Rather, he emphasized that because the patent in question was now a widely held technology standard, banning the products in question would be too disruptive to consumers and the economy
That argument could be used to sooooo many other patent litigations, and somehow never is, except when the affected part is a big American company.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Money buys a lot.
Double standards if nothing else.
This is how you get rewarded for letting the NSA in your servers
U.S.A. is dead. Period.
Will the white house do something similar for a small company?, or this is the white house on the rescue of a rich company?
Imagine how the liberals would be screaming if a Republican President did this. I'm not arguing with what he did. Just listening to the silence.
And all the Asian companies comply. If this isnt protectionism, I don't know what it is.
Apple Political Donations
Top Candidate Recipients, 2011-2012
Barack Obama (D) $308,081
Mitt Romney (R) $28,910
Ron Paul (R-TX) $16,004
Nathan Shinagawa (D-NY) $5,000
Mark W. Neumann (R-WI) $5,000
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000021754
Because it's Apple who won this move, patents are important to the Slashdot crowd. Funny that.
Most of us would be happy if patents were to go away.
What we object to is the US President telling US courts that he's going to ignore the law for Apple, but not for everyone else. Either the law applies to everyone, or it should be repealed, not just ignored by executive fiat.
Glad they aren't pulling this crap with something important like healthcare!
--- Mercutio was right.
You mean the law that says he can do that?
Or the imaginary one you made up?
The Apple Protection Act at work. More big U.S companies will get the same treatment as Monsanto and now Apple, and the hammer is going to come down on foreign owned companies.
Signature intentionally left blank.
Amount of money spent on lobbying in Washington, D.C., in 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-06/samsung-s-patent-spat-with-apple-spurs-u-s-lobbying-push.html
Perhaps the devices come equipped for NSA snooping and they're wanting to keep them selling for that reason?
and the patent system came tumbling down.... This the clearest indication yet that the system is a dead duck. When the US won't follow its own rules, why should anyone else.
The other two branches of government always seem to be looking the other way. So it is a de facto dictatorship. Nixon was forced to resign for much, much less than Obama has gotten away with.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How does Apple's donation to earnings ratio compare to that of, say, The Walt Disney Company or ExxonMobil?
I mean... the US is a big market, but it's peanuts compared to the US. You can only be an asshole for so long before it comes and bites you in the ass.
The US has been like a tumor since the 60s. Most people I know (who do travel a lot, I don't) won't set foot in the country, just out of principle. And these are not concentious people who have an agenda. These are drunkard who don't give a flying fuck about anything.
They are just repulsed by the US and its constant dickwaving.
So am I.
The white guy would just say the law is a piece of paper.
All those Asian companies you elude to are free to create their own filesystem or use any existing unencumbered filesystem.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If applying a court decision against Apple cannot be done because it hurts the economy, I guess there are strong grounds for an antitrust case that would split Apple.
One of the few computer companies moving more manufacturing to the U.S. (the new Mac Pros are made in the U.S.).
Or the one with many hundreds of retail stores in the U.S. bringing in billions of revenue each year to U.S. states?
So yes, THAT U.S. based corporation. It's more U.S. based than just about any other at this point...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Tell me, oh wise one, what other recourse did Samsung have?
They had the recourse to make an infinite number of other designs that were not exact rip-offs of the iPad.
You can't just steal liberally from anyone and claim you had no other recourse because you wanted to make it look identical. That's nuts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
iCorrupt, it changes everything... again.
Gun Transaction Laws (Fast and Furious)
IRS audit laws
The Corrupt Practices Act
Federal election guidelines (especially those to prevent foreign donations)
Not to mention widespread hostility to the 2nd and 10th Amendments.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Apple is NOT good for America. They are just a funnel moving wealth out of the country. The money you morons spend on iShit leaves the country and never returns.
Everybody starting from the Attorney General is lying to congress with impunity and without facing any prosecution from, uh, the Attorney General? And the president feels fine to just set aside decisions by American entities.
It's becoming easier to do business in Nigeria than the U.S.
Nixon was forced to resign for much, much less than Obama has gotten away with.
It's a reasonable middle ground between how things were run by G.W.Bush and how things were run in Kenya.
Almost every dollar of value added over a simple sum of the cost of the parts (plus a couple dollars for assembly) is added in California.
Apple has filed legal documents that say that's untrue, and in May Tim Cook testified in front of The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations where he reiterated that a large percentage of the dollar value added by Apple is added in Ireland.
Especially how much they and the supreme court got paid to allow this obvious violation of checks and balances in concert to occur.
Watch this be a matter of national security.
Bet none of you have the balls to ask now that I've posed the issue.
Watch the administration run over your sorry asses because you won't fight.
Fucking cowards.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It is definitely protectionism, for their own safety those small will have to pay this protection money or they will get "democracy" from the U.S. They see it happen all around on a regular basis.
Typical obamaism is getting ubiquitous.
Any existing unencumbered filesystem that's supported by Windows without special drivers? Good luck with that.
Basically Obama just killed the patent system. The US is no longer the power it once was and it is just legitimized India's moves to take essential medicines out of the patent system. And while American voters can be easily swayed, the rest of the world has just seen that it is okay to ignore US laws when it doesn't suit you and they WILL follow.
Obama seems determined to go down in history as the worst US president ever. This WILL end up biting the US in the ass. Samsung doesn't care about a billion dollar fine but the US NEEDS the patent system and for it to be respected. You can't win a trade war if you just made your only remaining product worthless.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
made tech easy for non-geeks to use... therefore non-geeks (who could afford the higher prices) like politicians, lawyers (and judges who are mostly lawyers), and media people (on the left and the right) grabbed onto Apple products like drowning men grabbing for life jackets
You do not need to buy a judge or a politician if you are the provider of his life preserver...
For fun, imagine this news came from China, and Apple sought the ban (that is, same story, but swap some nationalities around). Now ask yourself this: if this was another country (China, Korea, EU) overruling an ITC ban that favoured Apple and hurt Apple's competitors, would you react the same way?
In other words: would you feel overruling a ban is justified if it is not the US overruling foreign restrictions, but foreign sovereign states overruling US rules?
that, too, provided even more good high-value jobs... and Apple has always charged a price premium for their hardware that was so high it eliminated the excuse that "we HAVE to make it with slave labor in order to be profitable!"
News Flash: If you export all manufacturing jobs to the 3rd world and only keep the "good" high-value design and engineering jobs here, most of the population will be unemployed (most people will never be able to be world-class programmers, product designers, or engineers). Furthermore, those same businesses that have farmed-out all the manufacturing and only retained the so-called "high-value" jobs are even now demanding congress eliminate all the limits on H1B visas so they can bring-in cheaper engineers and programmers (The Senate's "comprehensive" immigration bill has this drooled-over-by-CEOs feature). These execs with their MBA's would happily export all the programming, engineering, and design jobs as well, but they have run these experiments and interacting with these employees from halfway around the globe (and with those employees working in places not covered by US laws) and they have arrived at a more-optimal solution: Import them into the US where you can easily supervise them use US law to control their work product (but with H1B visas you can hold over their heads like a sword and use to "discourage" them from getting out of line)
Here are a few reasons why they, and other high-tech firms have dubious claims to the title "American Company":
Actually, what *might* make Apple seem a little more American would be to bring some jobs back to America, and stop hiding so many billions of dollars in off-shore tax shelters. I'm not normally that opposed to businesses doing whatever the law allows in moving jobs around and shifting assets to minimize taxation.... but Apple has long supported the very left-leaning politics that give rise to high taxation, high regulation, and crowds of mindless "occupier" style idiots screaming about "the one percent" ... so they ought to "walk the walk" and NOT export ANY job (after-all lefties claim all their regulations and taxes will not hurt) nor hide even ONE DOLLAR offshore. I don't buy their stuff because I cannot stand the stink of their hypocrisy
The meme that "Smoot Hawley" lead to (or made worse) [a] The Great Depression and/or [b] WWII is a "big lie" told "often enough" at the insistence of two groups: Corporate America and Globalists. If you actually examine the economic records, you see that the Depression became the "Great Depression" largely because of many American Government interventions as desperate politicians flailed-about writing law-after-law and erecting thousands of new regulations (often with no congressional debate at all and no public input) to try to do something they had no legitimate Constitutional role in: "Managing" the economy (often with the fantasy that they also were capable of, and had a right to, manage the global economy too). Economic downturns come and go... but all the really bad ones in our history are the ones the Government managed... and the ones most people have forgotten are the ones where government kept its fingers out and the recoveries were both quick, and steeply-up. Unfortunately, after each "recovery" we are always left with the added burdens imposed by these do-gooders. For most of the post-WWII years, corporate money men and globalist politicians have repeatedly used the slogan "Smoot Hawley" like a stand-in for "Abra Cadabra" to convince middle-class Americans to give-up their good-paying manufacturing jobs, their pensions, etc. It's been one gigantic scam. Propaganda Goebbels would be proud of. If any American worries about losing his job and his home, the globalists and money men just say "well, you don't want to cause another Great Depression and another World War, do you? (you selfish little stupid person)"
When Reagan intervened, he allowed foreign products into the US in the national interest (as opposed to allowing an American company to import its infringing product from an overseas manufacturing site in a protectionist move to let an American company ignore a competitor's patent)
The Reagan intervention (allowing the import of DRAM chips by Samsung) came at a time when there were some very nasty market manipulations underway in the memory chip market and I would argue that none of the players had clean hands. We'd been through several price shocks in DRAM chips, American manufacturers were exporting their manufacturing (while making two-faced pleas for protection for American workers) and both American and foreign vendors kept having "accidents" in factories that lead to "unforeseen" shortages (and huge price spikes) and rationing of chips (manufacturers of electronic devices had to get on lists and get "allocations" while paying premium prices and often accepting inferior grade parts). DRAM chips were a component of many products and the companies waging war over them and with them were all very large and very wealthy and completely unconcerned with the overall economic damage they were doing... they were fiddling while Rome burned an they were happily preparing to toast marshmallows
Reagan's intervention helped end a nasty situation and smoothed-out a market that in-turn improved the situation for thousands of businesses that had been being victimized by the semiconductor titans who were staging a wrestling match
This current intervention helps a single US company that is politically-aligned with the President.
History, and details, matter
Can't have the foreigners getting the law applied fairly in detriment to your own contributors, can you?
Fucking morons.
This makes perfect sense to me. An American president is protecting an American company over a foreign one. Why wouldn't he do that?
Never under estimate indirect, and possibly unintentional, corruption.
I would like to see how much money pertinent people have invested in Apple, elected officials, their wives, their families and friends. I know I have changed my behavior to stop a wife of a friend that has a direct interest from making my life worse in a variety of ways. It would be foolish to think that people in a position of power would not do the same.
This is a blatant expression of the corruption in washington.. ITC already keeps stuff like that in mind and still did come to the ban, but noooo some corrupt politician on the obama administration who is big friends with an Apple executive overruled the decision, what's the f-ing use of the ITC in general then..
Easy, such a design patent would not be granted.
When automobiles were new, why wouldn't a patent on control panel layout or signal layout have been granted? Apple managed to snag a design patent on the layout of controls in iTunes.
Basically, the iPhone 2 and 4 sell a lot in the U.S., and banning them would disrupt the U.S. economy to some extent, so they chose not to.
Well, arresting all those high-ranking officials starting with the Attorney General who are committing repeated perjury before congress would disrupt politics. But the message that is sent by letting those criminals continue shitting with impunity on the people's representatives just because arresting them would cause a rucus is worse. Just like letting Apple continue shitting on their obligation to license patented technologies they are using.
Apple doesn't actually donate much to politicians at all
Apple paid Obama $308,081 in 2012.
Apple spent $1,410,000 in lobbying in 2013.
Apple spent $1,970,000 in lobbying in 2012.
etc etc
These are just the above-board, reported amounts. Thanks to recent SCOTUS decisions, corporate slush funds are becoming effectively cryptic. The declared amounts are more like a formality.
Da Blog
Please actually read the source articles out there.
Fosspatents:
"Florian Mueller of Foss Patents, who has been following Apple and Samsung’s case before the ITC, called today’s veto “a victory for consumers and fair competition.”"
Forbes:
"To the surprise of almost no one the Obama Administration has overturned the looming ITC ban on the imports of certain of Apple's older products...The particular reason used was that the patent in question was a standards essential one... This seems reasonable enough: the EU also has a similar policy that violation of SEPs, that should be available on FRAND terms, cannot be used to ask for product or sales bans... It’s possible to be rather cynical about this. Apple is the largest single taxpayer in the US and it’s sorta unlikely that an administration would ban the products of said largest taxpayer. But I think such cynicism would be misplaced here. The important point being that it is indeed all about a standards essential patent. And the general movement in patent cases seems to be that SEP violations should not lead to product bans. So, given that this is an SEP violation, no product ban":
A criminal government helping out a convicted price fixing criminal? Were you expecting another outcome?
This will make companies think twice about offering their patents for SE technologies.
Have Apple or Samsung commented on this since its overruling? Are their any other countries that this ban is being fought in? It'll be interesting to see the future dynamic between Apple and Samsung.
Samsung is the crown jewel of South Korea's economy. In retaliation of Obama's treachery, I fully expect Seoul to cancel purchases of more US warplanes for its air force. France's Dassault or Germany's EADS will be very happy sell South Korea some "eurocanard" jetfighters for half the price of a F-15 or F-35. They can even buy quarter-price by going to Sweden's SAAB for the Gripen NG!
$$$ talks and our "President Social Media" is too involved in local matters--a little too much and a little to politically agenda-sided, enough said.
Now , how about Obama ends the DOJ shakedown of Apple? So all Apple should have done as to do is lobby ( grease palms of) congress and the DOJ verdict would have been different or at least the penalty less severe. I wonder how much Amazon spends lobbying?
Whaaaa? You just used the same excuse people tell to the media groups to justify piracy (sorry I mean infringement). If that excuse isn't good enough for media pirates, then what makes you think it is valid to use at all? I know I saw somewhere here on /. that the #1 stated reason people pirate Game of Thrones is because HBO refuses to license it to anyone who doesn't have a cable subscription. They are probably right but that doesn't stop the army of anti-pirates that get on this board and scream at us for "stealing" thier stuff. So go and re-read what you posted, either move your goalposts or double down on your orignal statement, or go ahead and retract your statement for the obvious troll it was. I'd help do it but I got one mod point left, and you are already at +5 informative so I won't waste my measly point to counter the groupthink.
No it isn't and you know it you silly troll! (For any students observing the Forum Troll in its native habitat please follow along )
You even stated that you ran it because it was it was defective as in not functional. If you are practicing civil disobedience then you are protesting that law, whether it functions or not. It's a matter of principle. Besides you are conflating a law, which isn't a real thing, but an idea, with a mechanical item. When one says a real item is defective then we all know it is broken. We know it didn't change 'sides' like what you mean when you say a person has defected. I give this a 0/10 for trolling. I thought you were better than that Tepples. Have my last mod point.
Like the fake iPhone chargers that kill people?
Google spend more than 7 times as much in the same timeframe.
Well, the issue is Obama overturning an ITC ruling favouring not Google but Samsung over Apple. So dragging Google into it is a kind of distraction.
Apple paid Obama $308,081 in 2012
Samsung paid Obama $1,000 in 2012 ( as $250 and $750).
How likely is it, do you think, that Obama will turn around and veto the recent Apple-requested ITC ban on Samsung products?
Da Blog
You actually believe Obama made that decision himself?
Well, not entirely. There's also the bipartisan lobbying by Obama's fellow USians. Despite the fact that Apple dodges most of its US tax via the Double Irish, and indirectly Apple employs 700,000 Chinese to make its gadgets (vs 43,000 in the US), it's still marketed as a "United States" corporation. So it plays on the sympathies of its "local" politicians.
But you know, a couple of hundred grand goes a long way. If Samsung had been paying as much, maybe it would have got more consideration.
Da Blog
Your argument seems to rest on drawing a complete comparison between the evils of Apple and the evils of Samsung. As such, given that the two companies are apparently, by your argument, about approximate, then the only quantitative, non-falsifiable difference between them within the parameters of argument is their relative donations to Obama. We then arrive back at our original premise, which is that politicians' behavior is correlated with their relative payment amounts from donors. Congratulations, thanks for backing me up.
Da Blog
everyone but Samsung and the Apple haters agree.
It must be nice to see the entire world split into these tidy categories that define behavior. Very soothing. Very simple.
Da Blog
Says the Republican
There's not enough space in the world for laughter sigils here.
Again with the labels. You're really into simplifying, aren't you.
Da Blog