Slashdot Mirror
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."
They both blatantly copied each other constantly, misused patents, misused lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All these individual little patent disputes are really annoying. They should each be barred from suing each other for anything that happened prior to a certain date so we can be done with this. Then, if they want, they can just duke it out in a paintball game or Mario Party 9 or something.
Why would it be unlikely?
It's the same exact situation, just with the roles revers.. oh.
Who cares? Samsung has already won the battle! http://bgr.com/2013/07/26/mobile-phone-market-share-q2-2013/
t has nothing to do with bribes, Koreans don't vote in US elections.
Apple doesn't pay so much in bribes as it does in customer data.
... on foreign companies. I think we'll see more of this in the future, U.S gov getting at the foreign companies. Samsung should just stop supplying U.S companies and see how they start feeling about things. Don't just lie there waiting to get kicked again.
Signature intentionally left blank.
Ding ding, round n of "Boo-hoo :-( you make better phones than us and we can't find a way to collect 'our' money from 'our' customers via phone sales with you in the market."
No, I didn't RTFS or RTFA.
Requiem for the American Dream
Patents are meaningless and hurt the overall market. There, I said it.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
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.
The Russians are pissed enough to harbour Snowden.
The Chinese aren't backing the US in the North Korea talks.
The Japanese just sailed their first war ship in 50 years.
I can think of a dozen wars that started with this sort of trade embargoes and tariffs. Just the precedent itself is enough to block US made goods in half the world.
It won't happen like it used to since everyone have Nukes now, but you can bet your Made-in-China-lives that the repercussion will be soon to follow.
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.
ANd where are Apple products made, compared to where Samsung products are made? It'd be almost hilarious is Samsung set up a manufacturing plant in the USA.
If you cannot win in the market, the next step is to win using the law - this is business 101 in the USA today.
and You?
Apple gets the presidential blessing for no good reason, how about Samsung?
Patents in both directions are bullshit anyway.
The fix is in.
From PJ at Groklaw:
So Apple is the only one who can make and sell devices with touch screen and icons
Mendacem Memorem Esse Oportet
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'
I wish I had mod points for funny.
A free market. So how did that work again?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I wish slashdot had mod category of Sour Grapes.
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..
As you can read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentability
the US patent office pretends that one of the conditions for granting a US patent is non-obviousness.
Considering that it is very unlikely that someone swiping a finger across a touchscreen achieves a movement that is 100% horizontal and 0% vertical, it is obvious that any solution of the problem would tolerate a certain amount of vertical movement, and this is what that patent claim is about.
US american companies are promoting politicians with a kindergarten understanding of science, so that they can profit from that bullshit:
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/07/12/1645228/google-raises-campaign-funds-for-climate-change-denier
Also, the invention of input gestures is not as novel as you seem to believe, because the patent was filed 2008, while for example the video game Black and White had gestures in 2001. Okay, it was mouse gestures, but there is no big difference to a touch screen regarding movement.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
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
Yes, I am aware that it doesn't stand for FREE.
If Apple doesn't want to pay up, then they can settle it in court. However, an injunction is not appropriate unless the party seeking the injunction can demonstrate that they will suffer irreparable harm without an injunction. That's the whole purpose of an injunction, to stop something before it causes irreparable harm. By licencing the patents in question to over 30 other companies under FRAND terms, Samsung had almost no way to demonstrate that Apple's infringement would cause irreparable harm. They can still seek damages the good old fashioned way if Apple doesn't want to play ball, but an injunction is very hard to get for FRAND infringement.
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.
Do you think it's Fair for Samsung to demand 2.4% of the total price of the phone -- somewhere around $16 per unit -- for a tweak to the standard implemented by the Infineon baseband processor? Do you think it's Fair that Samsung is demanding this fee despite the fact that Infineon paid for a license to manufacture a part that used that patent? Do you think it's Fair that Samsung is essentially double-dipping here?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
I know the US patent office has given up on this, but they are supposed to not grant obvious patents, and doing anything on pc/internet/touchpad that has been done on paper/pc/touchscreen(yes, they existed before Apple) before most of the time sounds pretty obvious, especially when you consider that patents are usually formulated in legal language designed to stake a claim as broad as possible and as devoid of technical information as legal.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
Moronic Yanks have given their president absolute power - Obama is a dictator for his period in office like all new presidents now. Free to create any laws he wishes. Free to imprison or release any person he wants without oversight. Free to ignore ANY aspect of the Constitution or Common Law.
Now King Obama, with a giant Apple cheque in his family bank account (fully legal under the Law that allows all Washington US politicians to engage in insider-trading or to accept bribes from US companies), freed Apple from the consequences of negative ITC rulings (against all principles of International Law). A Law that is selectively applied is no law whatsoever. So, King Obama is choosing to punish Samsung on behalf of his Apple sponsors. The ITC ruling is irrelevant because the US no longer respects the ruling of this body.
Are you Yanks happy with this situation? Well you were happy when you murdered two million people in Iraq, and destroyed that secular society. You were pleased when Obama the butcher murdered the people protecting their secular regime in Libya. You are happy when Obama the genocidal war criminal sends the greatest terrorist army ever seen in Human history into the secular society of Syria, in order to create an extremist Islamic horror story run by the depraved women-hating, gay-hating beasts that rule in Saudi Arabia.
Hitler had to pretend to be a nice guy at home, because the German people felt they had very high moral standards. By contrast, Obama simply has to say "let's murder those dirty foreigners" and you Yanks stand up and scream "F**k yeah, America is the best". Where the hell do you think this is going to end up?
Does Apple really have to cheat, steal and bribe in order to have great success? Obviously not. But, given no reverse pressure from the moral climate in America, Apple simply gives in to temptation, and allows its wealth to achieve whatever it can, without regard to what is right or decent. But how the hell do you think the rest of the world views your despicable companies, and your despicable presidents? The world has always admired the business success of the USA, and the entrepreneurship of the US people. This alone ensured the US a position at the top table. But this repugnant evil that infests the USA today ensures the US has no long term future - you Yanks want another World War, and everything you do is in preparation for this. Why the hell do you idiots think you are growing your military power so obscenely, and engaging in as many murderous wars against defenceless nations as you can arrange?
These ITC shenanigans are the tiniest symptom of an infinitely greater problem.
Why are you shilling for Apple?
Yeah, no dodge there. They just have a non-existent office that also -- just by sheer accident of good ethical business practices -- makes 30% of all of their worldwide profit. Apple uses a different loophole than other corporations, but its still a loophole. They paid a fair amount of taxes in 2012 because the writing is on the wall -- even McCain understands that corporations simply aren't paying their fair share.
Also, I'm not sure when corporate accountability became unfashionable, but you need to cut that shit out. America needs a reasonable tax base to take better care of its needs and if it allows every major corporation to avoid paying taxes, we won't have the money for important things like transportation infrastructure and an educated populace that can compete in the future economy.
You can't sell iPads to people who can't read, or who spend all of their money on inefficient ways of commuting and car repairs.
Do YOU think it's fair to patent gestures, shiny icons, and rectangles? We can go down this rabbit hole all day.
Its both of their fault.. Asking for an exception is just as bad as actually giving the exception.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
and got told they wouldn't get non-discriminatory terms
False. Apple was told that they'd get the same terms as anyone else licensing them (the definition of "non-discriminatory") but considered the percentage too high since it was based on a percentage of selling price or revenue per unit, or something like that; in a nutshell, the licensing costs were higher for Apple because their products were more expensive.
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.
...because none of these actors^H^H^H^H^H^Hclowns care about where the factories and the jobs are located. This is about politicians granting favors to extremely rich corporations, who in turn help the politicans pay for their campaigns and give them and their appointees revolving-door jobs.
All setup by our do nothing congress. Weren't they the ones who fronted the money to make this all possible?
Yippie for the stooges on Capital Hill.
I haven't heard any real new laws being passed on how to set things to rights from the grand-standers who made this all possible.
As for any company making use of the laws congress passes... they should ... they owe it to their shareholders to make as much money as they can. To do any less would be negligent. I don't fault any company from making use of a loophole unless they wrote the actual law to create the loophole they are using.
I don't know of any touch screens before that even could detect angle of input
Are you seriously that ignorant of geometry?
Anything that returns more than one (x,y) coordinate pair (not even at the same time) is inherently returning an angle. In other words, every touch screen ever made.
-- Alastair
Cross licensing is the usual way to get access to standards-essential patents. The problem here is that Apple did not want to cross-license, but wanted to pay the same cash amount that companies that do cross-license do. Obviously, cross-licensing is worth something, so this was blatantaly idiotic, but Apple's been able to get away with it so far. Yay for Chicago politics.
If Apple doesn't want to pay up... wait, what? No, they don't have the option of not wanting to pay up, period.
If they don't pay, they are stealing, and if it's essential to run, that means the device won't work without it - ie - no patent use, no device. That means that Samsung is entitled to 100% of whatever anyone pays for every infringing device.
Now look at Apple's non-patents - you know, those ideas they stole from other people (look at Braun designs through history)
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/apple-design-doesnt-fall-far-from-brauns-tree-176668
Then look at the touch screen ideas they stole from others and incorporated, and then patented (even though they didn't invent the tech).
Beyond their original ideas from Woz, Apple hasn't developed anything that isn't based on tech that was invented, developed and shown by others.
to use the Patent system as a weapon against innovation? I bought my first $57 android phone last week, and it outperforms the iPhone 4 it was replacing. It seems like its against my interests as a consumer to be limited to a device that retails at over 10x that figure.
This is ridiculous. FRAND patents MUST BE SHARED and in exchange a company gets to have their component used in all devices; Samsung gets to have that bit in nearly every phone so we can have some kind of a standard If we didn't have standards, you'd have to have a different set-up on every tower for phones from every vendor OR the phones would cost too much to buy. Either way, it would be a mess.
Because Samsung has the privilege of FRAND, it does not allow them to extort the ability for more than the current rate and it doesn't allow them to extort for access to someone else's patents -- that defeats the whole purpose of FRAND. If other companies share IP with Samsung (usually ubiquitous stuff) -- that's their business. But it doesn't translate as some right to take by Samsung.
Apple didn't protect their IP before and Microsoft boldly and wholesale ripped them off, and now they are protecting it and everyone is jumping on their case as if they were patent trolls -- and yet they are still getting ripped off. It's the system we have -- what are they supposed to do? And now everyone roots for a clone company that has nothing but sweat shops and considers Samsung a paragon of innovation; What Cool Aid is everyone drinking and did they bring enough to share?
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Demand is a strong word. Samsung made an offer. That is part of negotiations. Apple made no counter offer and went straight to the courts.
The patent is obvious bullshit. The designer and engineer of the touchscreen incorporated within the design the ability to detect motion on the screen. To then layer an additional patent on there that particular motions are total complete and utter USPTO patent bullshit. It's like saying that touch screen designer didn't design in the ability to detect where on the screen you are touching or what motion you make post touch basically a touch screen that doesn't work at all. That the US Patent passed that is total and complete corruption of the patent system.
As for detecting what is plugged in, seriously what the fuck passed for obvious with the USPTO, seriously. Again a blatantly lawyer titled patent designed to run up fees.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18PbwYdjsps
I hope Apple and Samsung implode at the same time.
Actually the corporation that pays the highest US taxes (both effective tax rate and total taxes paid) also happens to be the ones that Democrats hate the most: Wal-Mart.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1004/gallery.top_5_tax_bills/
Apple pays more total tax dollars, but that goes to other countries during transfer pricing, not the US. And no, it isn't other corporations combined - Exxon for example pays more than twice as much in total taxes than Apple does with Chevron coming in second place, and Apple third.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/03/17/companies-paying-highest-income-taxes/1991313/
Wal-Mart doesn't have the luxury of transfer pricing, so as long as they're as large as they are, they'll always be paying very high taxes. And as you said, the US tax rates are unreasonable as hell, which is why everybody goes out of their way to avoid them.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
How is that douchebaggy?
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Actually not quite. Google the words "transfer pricing".
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Ummm... Apple devices are made in sweatshops in China and elsewhere. Samsung phones are made in Korea. South Korea had an average wage in 2011 of 31,051 USD (disposable income). The US was $42,050.
So... what????
Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents, which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper makes it pretty clear that percentage of handset price is the norm. The "not more than $1 per handset" Apple was insisting on would be less than 0.2%, which is ridiculously low by market standards.
The douchebaggy comes in when company A gives a million dollars in political contributions on the understanding that the tax laws will be changed to save company A a billion dollars in taxes. It's all legal bribery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I don't fault any company from making use of a loophole unless they wrote the actual law to create the loophole they are using.
And this is the problem with the American system. Politicians need fantastic amounts of money to win elections and it is cheaper for company A to make campaign contribution on the understanding that they can write a new tax loophole then to actually pay the tax. Of course companies B to Z also take advantage of the new loophole and then make campaign contributions so they can also write new tax law which company A also takes advantage off. Rinse and repeat a few times and you have the current system where companies A to Z all claim they're just taking advantage of existing loopholes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
Da Blog
Also, if Apple really didn't want to pay the appropriate licensing fee, then they could have just used technology that did not violate any of the patents. After all, they do place a very high priority on IP.
But Apple don't want to pay what others paid for it.
You DO know the definition of "FRAND" is not "Better deal for Apple than anyone else gets" right?
Yes, I do, but neither you nor Samsung know that it means "the same deal as anybody else".
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Cross licensing standards-essential patents is the usual way to get access to standards-essential patents.
FTFY.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Ummm... Apple devices are made in sweatshops in China and elsewhere. Samsung phones are made in Korea. South Korea had an average wage in 2011 of 31,051 USD (disposable income). The US was $42,050.
So... what????
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/11/27/china-labor-watch-hits-out-at-samsung-over-poor-working-conditions/ - what indeed.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
There's no "Exception" going on here. If you do business in a foreign country, you pay your taxes in that country. End of story.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Again, petition to get the laws changed if you don't like it. Having a cry about somebody working within the law to maximise their returns is just sour grapes.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Am I reading the same wiki page as you?
Canada, 11%-15% (federal) + 5%-16% (provincial), which works out to 16%-31%
Russia, 20% (13% for SME, 0% for education and healthcare industries), 6% for small business
Both are above your 15%, which, if I may say, means practically nothing, if most of the companies actually pay a rate closer to 51% than 15%.
I just thought it strange that you specifically quoted *Canada* as a low tax country. It's anything but.
Don't quote me on this.
If you think this patent thing is about the generic use of rounded rectangles, you're a fucking retard who needs to learn how to read and comprehend the actual case.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Samsung was willing to accept cash. The same amount of cash as everyone else was paying, and they Samsung itself would have to pay if it didn't cross license patents. There was nothing discriminatory about it, Apple just whined because it's products are expensive so the cash fees were going to be more than it wanted to pay.
Discriminatory means they would have been offering Apple different terms to everyone else. They didn't, and that's why Apple got upset.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yep.
And companies and individuals with large amounts of money can claim they are doing everything legally when they offshore their investments because the laws are written that way after all. Only congress would be able to remedy the problem, but they are paid not to.
But at least in this case, I don't think Apple had any hand in writing the legislation that seeded the money to pay consultants for Ireland to setup this offshoring stuff.
They are merely one of the higher profile companies taking advantage of the situation our congress setup back in 90's or something.
Back then Apple was a struggling computer maker who was continuing to whither away as their market share dipped to 2%. Now they are a fat big punching bag for the hypocritical congress who enabled all of this in the first place.
It's douchebaggy when you pretend intellectual property that was developed in California comes from an Irish company for tax purposes and is subject to no tax. The law may say it's okay for an Irish company to pay no US taxes, but that doesn't mean Apple is really an Irish company. Yes they are dodging legitimately owed taxes through corporate structures that are pure fiction. Why anybody would say that's 'perfectly okay' because its 'perfectly legal' is beyond me. Unless you have a political objection to companies paying taxes at all...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Again, petition to get the laws changed if you don't like it. Having a cry about somebody working within the law to maximise their returns is just sour grapes.
That is bullshit, and it is also bullshit. He who spends the most "petitioning" gets the laws he wants. You propose that he throw away money and/or time to no good end. Legality and morality have never been equivalent and the simple fact that it is legal to do what Apple is doing does not make it acceptable. You are permitting the law to determine your morality, and the law is an ass.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I really would be surprised if Obama does Samsung the same favour he extended to Apple last week and overturns this ban.
I know it's fun to quote the campaign contributions and imply the decision was all about the money or to imply that Obama is protecting the American company from the evil foreign company but the simple reality is Samsung obtained a ban using Standards Essential, FRAND patents. Apple's ban is not related to Standards Essential, FRAND patents.
That is why Obama is not going to step in and overturned the ban on Samsung products.
That, and only that, is the reason.
where do you get 40% from? the US is now running at 40% though in peace time in 2000 we were at 30% and quite happy. France is >50%, and greece at one point was up near 60%, though has fallen to 45% with it's severe budget cutbacks. Australia runs a nearly balanced budget at 34% (these are for all levels of govt).
There is no paticular reason we have to be at 40%, south korea is lovely at 30% (and a large military), and while not very useful for the US, singapore at 17% works great. It doesn't cost nearly as much as we spend, or most western european countries spend. And if 40% is the magic number, it's important to realize that about 75% of the US are no good, leaching, douchebags and really, it's only the top 10% that carry their own weight. In fact, the US is probably the MOST PROGRESSIVE tax system in the western countries I've seen (UK, Japan, US, France). Hell, in the US a person making 175k USD pays >40% in taxes. You need to earn about twice that in the US before the average tax burden gets there (depending on assumptions, but I"m being generous and going with single, no dependents in a place like california , and these calculations were from a year ago, before the recent top income tax hikes took effect.
The patent filing date shows Jan 5, 2007 as per the link below however Nokia N91 from Q2, 2005 did the exact same thing. http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/7912501 http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n91-1154.php
How is that douchebaggy?
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Douchebaggy? Let me try:
1) Big corporations and banks have tons of money to hire legal weasels to weasel them out of paying more than one or two percent taxes and they also use that money to bribe politicians into changing tax laws to lower their tax burden.
2) Joe Sixpack cannot afford to hire self same legal weasels to minimise his taxes nor can he afford to rent corrupt congress critters and make them change tax laws so he pays a way higher portion of his income in taxes than one or two percent by those corporations and banks.
3) There is a financial crisis.
4) Aforementioned corporations and banks get into trouble due to financial crisis and have to be bailed out. Since they themselves hardly paid any taxes most of the money comes out of the tax money paid by Joe Sixpack and a legion of smaller businesses.
That's douchebaggery... If you then consider take into consideration various other things such as... oh... that the moneyed classes in the US and Europe have been manipulating interest rates and raw material prices and I can think of way words words to call these bastards that "douchebags"
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Samsung obtained a ban using Standards Essential, FRAND patents
The substance of the original ITC ban on Apple notes that Samsung offered Apple FRAND access via a standard percentage licence fee for the FRAND patents. What is unusual is that Apple refused to pay that licence fee but then did not return with a counter-offer. Apple basically refused to negotiate and continued importing products using the patents but without paying anything. Given Apple's refusal to even begin negotiating that seems evident bad faith, the ITC had no option but to decide against them
Of course, now that Obama vetoed that decision, now you have the absurd position where a hold of patents essential for the operation of a technology is not getting paid for them by a major patent abuser, and now has limited recourse. Whereas the holder of some minor design and questionable methods patents has a new import ban still standing. So thanks to Obama's protectionism, we've entered topsy turvy patent land, where essential patents become worthless, and design patents become coin.
Da Blog
In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are
US tax rates are ridiculously low compared to other developed nations..
it's only the top 10% that carry their own weight.
Nonsense. As Buffet repeated recently, his tax rate is still less than his secretary's.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html
US taxes are regressive, not progressive.
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.
All nonsense. Apple Ireland is the HQ for Apple's European subsidiary - which makes perfect sense even were it not for the favourable tax rate - it's in the Euro zone, in the closest European time zone to America, and the native language is English. European sales go there. It's not a shell company for the rest of the enterprise. And revenues from elsewhere in the world do not go to Ireland.
It doesn't have any offices in Ireland, it's just incorporated there. The only employees it does have are in the US. That's the very definition of a shell company.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Wrong again.
https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=51.906121,-8.514322&spn=0.12031,0.282898&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=39.456673,72.421875&layer=c&cbll=51.906121,-8.514322&panoid=LFTFnrUcWHfVtrrlkb_5DA&cbp=12,102.13,,0,0.22
No, Ireland, and every other country with these kind of tax structures and which is most every fucking country on the planet, is using tax policy to entice Apple to do business inside their borders. If the EU countries were dead set against as a whole or even a requisite treaty majority, then why are such tax havens allowed? Because it's good business!
'Sides, those politicians are the best money can buy, and the corps gots a lot of money to donate, or slip under the table on legal way or another, so corps can get countries to compete for their bidness. Look at how the US states do the same dirty deal to one another in the name of attracting a Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Genentech, &c. ad nauseum.
So for all those people that are bitching about corps not paying their taxes, well go look at what exemptions were slipped into the various pieces of law and by whom. It ain't (just) the Republicans, or whichever parties are considered pro-business in whatever country you are in right now.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents, which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper makes it pretty clear that percentage of handset price is the norm. The "not more than $1 per handset" Apple was insisting on would be less than 0.2%, which is ridiculously low by market standards.
Errm, read that again. "“a reasonable maximum aggregate royalty for LTE essential IPR in handsets is a single-digit percentage of the sales price." - "“[u]nder this proposal no manufacturer should pay more than 5 percent royalties covering all essential WCDMA patents from all patent holders.”
Not 2% for one out of over a thousand patents. Less than 10% for all of them. That would be less than 0.01% of the handsets selling price per patent. Which makes even 2% royalties from the price of the chip completely unreasonable.
PS: Note that the document nowhere says that licensing fees are computed by the selling price of the device - only what their estimated percentage of the selling price would be.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Again, if you disagree, peition to get the law changed. Morality != legality, and expecting a profit generating entity to be held to moral standards when not legally required, but legally required to act in the best interests of their shareholders is never going to work.
If you want to hold companies accountable for this, make it law. Otherwise, find something else to cry about.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.