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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."
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.
Hammer is coming down ... on foreign companies.
As though Apple were an American company? I've heard they have some sort of design office in California somewhere, but in any meaningful sense they're at least as much of a foreign company as Samsung. At least Samsung has some fabs in Austin and whatnot.
I'm fine with a little protectionism if it means protecting American operations, but people get very confused about the difference between where a company's headquarters are and where it operates. It's like people who say my Toyota is a foreign car. It's 85% value added in the US - a lot more American than almost any Ford or GM model.
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.
From PJ at Groklaw:
But they were given meaning by our beloved economists. In 2008, the definition of GDP was changed to include things like patents and other types of intellectual property. Article here:
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21582498-america-has-changed-way-it-measures-gdp-boundary-problems
So, instead of waiting to see how a corporation (or national economy) actually executes their IP rights and measure the revenue, the GDP calculations attempt to impute a future income stream from them. And then this becomes part of our GDP statistics. IP has become a Potemkin village of value behind which companies (and entire nations) hide the true dire straights of their economy. They are pretty, shiny objects meant to impress investors, who should bee asking whether anyone has the ability to actually produce value with them.
So we aren't going to see a change in the status of patents any time soon. Because now, the economists have a number (fictional though it may be) that pins an amount of GDP to them. And woe to those who attack that and drive us into another recession.
Have gnu, will travel.
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'
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
Do YOU think it's fair to patent gestures, shiny icons, and rectangles? We can go down this rabbit hole all day.
It's normal for 2008 patents to be enforced on 80's touchscreen technology? Just because you were the first to mass-market an idea doesn't mean you deserve a patent. Apple's touch screen patent covers any type of screen technology or touch technology yet to be invented and "other devices, such as personal computers and laptop computers." Basically they have a patent on moving things with their fingers. Is that normal? (I'll be fair and admit it's a patent on using a touchscreen to move digital things and concede some of the included tech might be as recent as 1990)
I don't know as much about the headphone jack detection, but my 2001 phone could tell when I plugged in my headset. Is adding stereo (featured in my 2005 phone) really such a revolution that they need a patent in 2007? It doesn't appear to detail any new method of detection, other than maybe individual channels, but I think my Pocket PC's did that.
I find it infuriating that the US government is just handing rights, an unfair market position, and a lot of business over to Apple with the touch patent, and so many people are defending Apple. Meanwhile, the government is setting a precedent that with enough lawyers, patents, political connections, and stupid jurors you can claim ownership of what you didn't invent and kick competition to the curb. As a small, inventive company, it makes work look like a game of waiting to get squashed.
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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