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Samsung Infringed On Apple Patents, Says ITC
The U.S. International Trade Commission has ruled that certain models of Samsung phone violate Apple patents, and are likely to be blocked from import to the U.S. From the article: "The patents in question are U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949, which relates to a touch screen and user interface and U.S. Patent No. 7,912,501 which deals with detecting when a headset is connected. The ITC said Samsung didn’t infringe on the other two patents. In a statement on the matter, the ITC said the decision is final and the investigation has been closed. ... As was the case with the previous ruling that saw Apple devices banned, the ban on Samsung devices won’t go into effect until 60 days but can be blocked by a favorable ruling following a presidential review. That seems unlikely as such a block has only been issued once since 1987 – last’s week’s ruling in favor of Apple."
OK... I broke with Slashdot tradition and actually read TFA. That said, I STILL cannot figure out exactly which Samsung phones are being specifically banned in this ruling? Is it a top seller like the Galaxy S3 or Note II, or some older phones that only the prepaid carriers offer now?
Not that it really matters... 60 days is probably enough time to come up with a workaround to get around the infringement.
No, if they don't then we know its because Apple is an American company and Samsung is not.
I assume the ungodly ridiculous amounts of verbiage is not to be legally clear, but be legally obfuscating, wearing down patent examiners and causing days of study just to begin to get a handle on what they are claiming.
The one or two cool little tricks being patented, if any, are deliberately obfuscated.
Does anybody even know what little bit is supposedly infringed?
One of the "claims":
6. The computing device of claim 1, wherein, in one heuristic of the one or more heuristics, a contact comprising a finger swipe gesture that initially moves within a predetermined angle of being perfectly horizontal with respect to the touch screen display corresponds to a one-dimensional horizontal screen scrolling command rather than the two-dimensional screen translation command.
So if you drag left or right witihin some predefined angle, it shall be considered a horizontal swipe rather than a 2D arbitrary angle swipe. And nobody ever did this before?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you cannot win in the market, the next step is to win using the law - this is business 101 in the USA today.
From PJ at Groklaw:
You mean, like a mechanical switch that comes built in to the jack chassis?
For crying out loud, I built an amplifier in high school in 1980 that could detect when a headset was detected. Making software detect the same thing would amount to merely polling on a physical line the switch is on and converting the voltage on it to a digital signal of true or false.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Why would it be unlikely?
It's the same exact situation, just with the roles revers.. oh.
Yeah, exactly the same - only Samsung has standard essential patents they didn't offer under FRAND terms, while Apple's patents are, well, normal patents.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
It's not the exact same situation.
The Samsung owned patents that Apple was found to have infringed are FRAND patents. This indicates that Samsung is willing to licence those patents out to anyone willing to pay the appropriate licencing fees.
The Apple owned patents that Samsung was found to have infringed are not FRAND patents. Apple made no implied or express promises to licence them.
Both sides sought equitable remedies in the form of sales injunctions and import bans. Equitable remedies are by their very definition appropriate only when financial remedies are insufficient to make the plaintiff whole.
Since the Samsung patents were available for licence under FRAND terms, there's no reason to believe that Samsung could not be made whole through monetary remedies. The ITC ordered the import ban on the iPhone devices not because they infringed on FRAND patents, but because Apple had made little to no effort to negotiate a licencing agreement.
The opposite is not automatically true for the Apple patents as they are not available for licence under FRAND terms.
Apple is playing US tax laws off irish tax laws to avoid paying taxes. Just because its technically 'legal' currently doesn't make it any less douchebaggy or wrong.
Just another case of privatized profits and socialized losses. And you're defending it... So you too are a scumbag..
Paying taxes simply to not be "douchebaggy" is irrelevant. Apple, Google, Intel, etc... they all pay what is LEGALLY required of them. You have a problem with it, write to your congressman and change the tax laws. It's the government's fault, not Apple. Get over it.
Whiner.
On one hand, if you read claim 1 (the base claim), Apple actually spent effort on designing their own jack, which apparently has a special connector that creates a second circuit that is used for detection. On the other hand, the technical contribution seems to be a bit on the easy side, considering that the actual detecting circuit in figure 3 shows a circuit that is probably obvious to anyone schooled in designing circuits, though not to me.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Sorry, but Apple's "no declared tax residency anywhere in the world" bullshit is tax dodging, pure and simple. The fact that they can't avoid things like sales tax or income tax doesn't excuse the vast amount they do get out of paying.
Apple has found the holy grail of tax avoidance schemes. They claim not to be resident in any nation, for tax purposes. It works by having a shell company in Ireland. Irish tax law says that companies pay tax from where they are run, which in Apple's case is the US. US tax law says that companies pay tax where they are incorporated, which is Ireland. So neither Ireland nor the United States gets any tax revenue from that company, except for what it can't avoid by having US employees and offices. Profits are funnelled to it from subsidiaries around the world. Tens of billions coming and and stored in untaxable bank accounts.
It goes way beyond not just moving profit back to the US to be taxed "twice". In the case of the UK subsidiary it wouldn't be taxed here anyway because corporations only pay tax on profits, and Apple UK doesn't make any due to having to pay huge fees for using the Apple branding. It's the same trick that allowed Starbucks to make a loss in the UK and pay zero corporation tax, despite clearly being very successful and having huge revenue.
Apple are not the only ones to dodge tax. Google does it in the UK, I'm sure if you look you will find Samsung does everything it can to minimize what it pays. Apple is both the worst and largest offender though, especially for a company that tries so hard to maintain a good public image and attract the idealistic hipster crowd.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Nice try.
Samsung demanded cross-licenses to Apple's non-FRAND patents. That puts the D back in Discriminatory.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
The US corporate tax rates are by no means the highest on the planet. Here's a list, but I'll explain it to you in text in case you don't decide to look.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
First, the US corporate tax rate varies, from 15% to 51% (including both federal and state taxes - federal alone is 15% to 39%). On the low end, 15% is on the lower side of the list (the only large, developed countries not known as tax havens with a lower rate on the low end are Canada and Russia), and well below the highest flat rate, which is Cameroon at 38%. Notable countries with rates higher than our lowest rates are Germany, Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Poland, Turkey, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Australia, France, the UK and Chile. Bangladesh has a rate that ranges from 0 to 45%, which is the highest single rate on the list - obviously above the 39% federal tax highest rate.
So, no, the US doesn't have the absolute highest corporate tax rate. It has among the highest possible corporate taxes for the largest entities, but it is not the "highest worldwide" by a wide margin for the vast majority of corporations who will fall lower on the spectrum than a giant like Apple.
To be fair, apple started the iProduct meme with the iMac. Not saying it should be a trademark, but giving props.
Well, there's the ipaq, which someone else pointed out. There's also Sony i.LINK and iSCSI. There are probably a lot more.
Obama got $308,081 from Apple in 2012
Obama got $1,000 from Samsung in 2012 (as $250 and $750)
Even disallowing the home team advantage, I really would be surprised if Obama does Samsung the same favour he extended to Apple last week and overturns this ban.
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