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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.
Because those patents were not submitted and accepted as FRAND. Samsung agreed to license these technologies in Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory terms. Anybody can use their patented technologies, and the only question is how much they get paid for them. When any infringement can be resolved with monetary payment, injunctive relief is not an appropriate tool. Samsung can always be made whole at any point in time with a monetary judgment.
.mov container that quicktime has used for ages, and they have never attempted to get an import injunction over that patent or any others that they submitted to standards bodies.
Apple made no such promises to any industry group concerning the design patents in question. They did make such a promise over the mpeg4 container, which is just the
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
And Apple has refused to license those patents. They have refused to negotiate to license them. They have even stated that they will not accept a court-ordered license fee unless they happen to think it's low enough.
Tell me, oh wise one, what other recourse did Samsung have?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Unless you work for either company, you don't know what negotiations have or have not taken place. You only have what is printed in the media. You believe everything you read?
We know that Apple refused to negotiate a license for those patents because the ITC stated, in their ruling, that they ruled against Apple in part because of their failure to negotiate a license for the patents in question.
That's probably because Apple was the first big corporation which refused to license those standards-essential patents under the same RAND terms as all of their competitors, again as a form of corporate warfare - they're trying to get all the R&D work required to make modern mobiles possible for free, whilst suing all their competitors who did do the R&D over crap like swipe-to-unlock, meaning those companies can't even make back their costs by selling their own phones!
You do know how hard it is for some US manufs. to try to be allowed into the S.Korean markets, right? Korea practices protectionism as much as any other country or block. There are many technology and trade agreements in play, with more tapped for future release - actions like this amount to no more than card play in a high stakes give/take game that will take some time to end.
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
Samsung refused to reasonably license the patents. Most FRAND patents are licensed as a percentage of the product using them. However which part of the product is the biggest question. Typically it is the piece that implements the patent. However in this case Samsung wants a percentage of the phone, rather than the typically percentage of the baseband processor (which implements the patent). Notice it is only a few of the products that are unlicensed, most notably ones that don't use Qualcomm modems. Qualcomm licensed the patents for Apple at a percentage of the baseband cost (~3%-5% of ~$20), where the older product Apple was supposed to license them separately and Samsung is asking for ~3%-5% of $450 which is basically discriminatory compared to the other products that license it for 1/20 of the cost.
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
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 much of an innovator as you claim.
What they are is very good at creating a well integrated product with a very slick user interface out of existing technologies. This is a hard skill which very few other companies have, and one that they wish to protect with lawyers. It is not, however, one you can protect with lawyers.
So they they try by sueing over bullshit patents and people like you step up to defend them. You believe that others are doing a disservice to Apple, but you are just as guilty of doing a disservice to the people who invented those things in the first place.
When it comes to swipe and multitouch gestures, it was mostly covered by academic (universities and industry) researchers im the early 80s long before the touch screen tech was anything but cumbersome, expensive and unusable out of the lab.
Oh and as for the interface, you know that the whole icon grid, touch screen and apps was not even remotely an Apple innovation, right? http://www.xorl.org/people/krw/ipaqalone.jpg
And the whole nothing but a touch screen as an interface was even older. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_Simon_Personal_Communicator.png
The point is many innovations that are associated with Apple were around before.
Apple are very good, possibly better than anyone a putting them together, but it does everyone a disservice to pretend Apple is something that it is not.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Of course the last time the ITC was overruled was in 1987, siding WITH SAMSUNG. Lol.
Samsung offered fair and reasonable terms. The ITC agreed that they did. Apple just kept saying "no", hoping to get a lower price. The ITC saw that they were being unreasonable and rightly blamed them for the failure to reach an agreement.
Read the report, it's quite clear. What it boils down to is that Apple doesn't have any real technical patents that Samsung needs in order to do the usual license exchange, so they have to pay cash. The cash rate is set as a percentage of retail price, and because Apple products are at the upper end of the market it isn't pennies. It's the same rate that everyone else pays though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC