Slashdot Mirror
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.
The same was not done for Samsung when their products were banned over flimsier design patents
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!
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.
Not unless banning the products in question would be too disruptive to consumers and the economy. Unlikely for a small company.
c++;
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
This should cause furious Slash-gasms among the nerds, and plenty of page hits, and plenty of profit.
Nah. Not really. It's typical gaff from Anonymous Coward. We're used to it by now. Move along.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Who was President in 1987? Was there any screaming when Reagan overturned a ban?
Hmmmmm....
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.
This is wrong no matter who does it. However, what can we really do to stop this kind of behavior? The side with the most money wins elections and with the citizens united ruling there is no way to ever match what a company can for money there seems to be no real chance of getting better politicians. It seems that every group that wants to fix politics is quickly coopted and twisted..
How can we actually get real leaders that don't do this? My state had some of the toughest election laws in the county and within one year of citizens united that was mostly burned to the ground. The price of elections went up by over a factor of 10x and a LOT of pro-corporate people got it in some very nasty campaigns. If you can't even have clean city or state elections what chance is there for president?
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
That's why google only permits it's subsidiaries to do so...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Not unless netcraft confirms it!
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?
Yes, he did.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-13/apple-decision-in-samsung-itc-case-rescheduled-to-may-31.html
I certainly don't remember any screaming from liberals in 1987.
In fact the only screaming is that we are hearing from conservatives in 2013.
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
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/
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.
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.
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)
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)"
Apple refuses stubbornly to pay for the Samsung patents ( offered on FRAND terms ) and uses the technology , We got a serious problem . ..
That's the story behind the ban. Apple refuses to pay from the get go to use Samsung's FRAND offered patents in this case.
On top of it , it tries to ignore the USPTO decision that made void and null ( and they got a final notice of rejection ) the patents it sued Samsung for.
Of that litigation , very little damages if any will remain against Samsung.
The whole Apple Samsung debacle documents at www.groklaw.net
Google is right,using FRAND offered patents to sue companies suck .But there's a difference between suing someone because they refuse to pay for the patents they use offered under FRAND terms and using them as an anticompetitive weapon. That is what Apple is doing , they refuse to pay to use the technology.
That is unacceptable . That is why they got banned. That is why " unbanning " the products is totally inacceptable for ANY company that releases patents under FRAND terms. It means it's OK to steal and use technology,Buy someone in Government if you want an out of jail card. This is a terrible decision.
There will be repercussions for anyone that thought about or have patents offered under FRAND terms.
This makes perfect sense to me. An American president is protecting an American company over a foreign one. Why wouldn't he do that?
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..
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.
$$$ 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.
No it isn't and you know it you silly troll!
I am a cyclist, and there are three specific intersections in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that neither Fort Wayne nor Indiana is willing to fix. What should I have done to appear more sincere?
Besides you are conflating a law, which isn't a real thing, but an idea
The law is as real as the police officers and judges who enforce it.
with a mechanical item.
The mechanical item, in this case the signal set, implements the law, in this case who is permitted to proceed through the intersection.
Do you even know what a standard is?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I'm aware of what a technical standard is, but I'm also aware that some standards have patents associated with them. GSM is a standard, but it's also patented. In fact, Rambus managed to get some of its patented processes into the standard for DDR computer memory behind JEDEC's back. My claim is that during the early days of motoring, someone could have claimed an exclusive right on red signal for stop and green signal for go or on the accelerator pedal being rightmost and the brake immediately to its left. I'm failing to understand what you're claiming here.
I'm aware of what a technical standard is, but I'm also aware that some standards have patents associated with them. GSM is a standard, but it's also patented. In fact, Rambus managed to get some of its patented processes into the standard for DDR computer memory behind JEDEC's back. My claim is that during the early days of motoring, someone could have claimed an exclusive right on red signal for stop and green signal for go or on the accelerator pedal being rightmost and the brake immediately to its left. I'm failing to understand what you're claiming here.
Your "claim" is just a dangling in the air, and the only thing that possibly would be different is that a hundred years ago things would have been decided in a different way. And unless you can give a real good reason why "stop" has to be red or else the world ends, "blue" means stop would be the only thing that makes sense - because that's what everybody would have been taught for a century.
Any standard body worth its name requires companies submitting their patents into a standard to licenses them under FRAND terms. Motorola and Samsung tried to get around that attacking Apple. Now they get into trouble for it. Deal with it, indstead of making claims not related to the issue at hand.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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