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'Nobody Cares Who Was First, and Nobody Cares Who Copied Who': Marco Arment on Defending Your App From Copies and Clones (marco.org)
Marco Arment: App developers sometimes ask me what they should do when their features, designs, or entire apps are copied by competitors. Legally, there's not a lot you can do about it: Copyright protects your icon, images, other creative resources, and source code. You automatically have copyright protection, but it's easy to evade with minor variations. App stores don't enforce it easily unless resources have been copied exactly. Trademarks protect names, logos, and slogans. They cover minor variations as well, and app stores enforce trademarks more easily, but they're costly to register and only apply in narrow areas.
Only assholes get patents. They can be a huge PR mistake, and they're a fool's errand: even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can't afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter. Don't be an asshole or a fool. Don't get software patents. If someone literally copied your assets or got too close to your trademarked name, you need to file takedowns or legal complaints, but that's rarely done by anyone big enough to matter. If a competitor just adds a feature or design similar to one of yours, you usually can't do anything. You can publicly call out a copy, but you won't come out of it looking good. [...] Nobody else will care as much as you do. Nobody cares who was first, and nobody cares who copied who. The public won't defend you.
Only assholes get patents. They can be a huge PR mistake, and they're a fool's errand: even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can't afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter. Don't be an asshole or a fool. Don't get software patents. If someone literally copied your assets or got too close to your trademarked name, you need to file takedowns or legal complaints, but that's rarely done by anyone big enough to matter. If a competitor just adds a feature or design similar to one of yours, you usually can't do anything. You can publicly call out a copy, but you won't come out of it looking good. [...] Nobody else will care as much as you do. Nobody cares who was first, and nobody cares who copied who. The public won't defend you.
i wrote like almost exactly the same thing a week ago...
Back 20, 30 years ago he was against patents for hackers trying to protect their hardware products.
Guess he made a lot of sense!
..will defend Apple. That's all.
Many companies, including my own, obtain patents for defensive purposes. I have zero interest in attacking someone, but you will find it virtually impossible to obtain seed (much less VC or strategic) funding without a plan for providing even rudimentary protections for your IP - most especially if you're building something for an existing market (where doubtlessly there are existing patents.)
That doesn't absolutely guarantee you wont be sued by some other asshole who uses patents to attack, but it keeps them from trying to make a quick buck off of you, and it makes it significantly less likely.
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Nobody cares about your shitty app.
Maybe the problem is that everyone is doing the pretty much the same stuff. If there's not a lot of originality in what you're doing and you're not standing out, of course you'll be extremely easy to rip off.
Ezekiel 23:20
File this under "Old man yells at cloud".
So is the problem that one can't just sit back and stop working/innovating and expect to get paid? Because I'm OK with that. Let everyone copy my ideas, I'll just come up with more AND develop a reputation as a "Big Thinker" as a result ( ie: creating my own brand/value which I can then use elsewhere ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This feels unfair when it happens to you, but it’s just how it goes, and the entire ecosystem benefits. Every app — even yours — includes countless “standard” and “obvious” features and designs that, at one time, weren’t. Everything is a remix. A great design or feature can give you a competitive advantage for a little while, but it’s always temporary. Compete on marketing, quality, and what you can do next, not the assumption that nobody can copy what you made.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
With your N.R.A. name and member number on it. Then, mention/bring your friends, Smith & Wesson. We will see how long this HIGHLY ILLEGAL copying continues.
CPAC. Because we live to love America FIRST!
Mickey Mantle makes $100,000 a year. How much does your father make? You don't know? Well, see if your father can't pay the rent go ask Mickey Mantle and see what he tells you. Mickey Mantle don't care about you, so why should you care about him? Nobody cares.
...but not LUDDITES who copy appy app apps by making LUDDITE software that tries to be appy, but requires using LUDDITE technology like LUDDITE keyboards and LUDDITE mice!
Apps!
Who is this guy, and why the heck are we supposed to listen to him?
FTFY
Apple will always claim that they did it first and much better than anyone else before them.
I bet large corporations would love to see patents go away, that way they can copy something for a million dollars vs having to buy out the startup.
creimer is a kiddy fiddler
https://slashdot.org/comments....
There you are spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!
You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.
Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.
How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????
The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!
You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!
When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!
Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!
Bonus:
Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:
The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!
So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!
Signed:
Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!
It's funny because you could just as easily fake all the views, clicks, and subscriptions you're depending on slashdot for. It's such a small small number that youtube wouldn't ever notice. Besides your "subscriber link" trick is already dishonest enough to get you a strike if some minimum wage tubemonkey decides they need to pad their weekly numbers, people routinely get random strikes for insanely minuscule transgressions.
Like why don't you just get all the passwords for your google sockpuppet accounts and game your numbers over a proxy? Or ask your friends to give you that initial bump?
I get what you're doing, a small number of clicks and shit will ensure you're near the top of the list if you generate content on topics that aren't on the social radar yet.... but what you're doing here is building a huge embarrassing internet footprint. If you ever get any sort of popularity the trolls will come. Find what you've done here, and blog about your every tiny mistake. It'll be funny because you'll get eaten alive by other assholes trying to grift for their own clickbait pennies with articles about your child bride fixations and creepy female impersonations.
This! exactly This! One thousand times!
I am an on-line marketer myself and creimer has been burnt for a long time because of what I emphasized in your text above. The fucker is just too stupid to realize it.
You would put the fucker in an extra large boiling tank with warm water and turn on the heat and the fucker would be too dumb to get out if he could when it gets too hot.
creimer already pissed off many of us by bringing attention to friendly advertising plugs on Slashdot, especially when posted as AC and the Slashdot moderators have become intolerant to posts containing friendly links, thus hurting us all. AC posts on Slashdot used to generate more clicks before creimer decided to go crazy.
Everybody hates creimer, especially other online marketers and although I would never do anything illegal, I hear other marketers might when it comes to creimer.
Good luck dumb ass!
Don't click on his homepage link! creimer is trying to get you to subscribe automatically to his youtube channel and make money off you!
CREIMER' SUBMISSIONS UPDATE: /. so make sure to go to:
Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on
https://slashdot.org/~cdreimer
https://slashdot.org/~criss69
https://slashdot.org/~Anonymou...
https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
https://slashdot.org/~ILoveFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IHateFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IAteFatC...
https://slashdot.org/~ITapeFat...
https://slashdot.org/~IApeFatC...
https://slashdot.org/~IPrayFat...
https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!
Yes, believe it or not, creimer owns all the above sock puppet accounts. It is a mystery why Slashdot management tolerates it!
creimer wrote:
I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!
Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.
creimer wrote:
All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."
But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!
Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the king's men
Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
Together again.
Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Creimy's real pictures:
Before the sex change:
https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
After the sex change:
https://ibb.co/gVad65
Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:
App feature duplication is bound to happen.
What you can do about it, is all around be more responsive.
Respond to reviews. People notice that.
Come out with helpful (not just churn) updates frequently. A larger company is going to have trouble keeping up any kind of rapid pace of change.
If my some miracle a competitor does come up with a good idea - well turnabout is fair play. Borg that idea and make it's uniqueness your own.
Charge more. Price of an app is one of the few signals have besides reviews as to quality. Given two apps with roughly the same reviews, one that costs more and looks better will be the winer.
To taht last point, do not be afraid to hire a real designer. Even just some basic help will not cost a ton and will make your app look SO much better (and probably work better too as most mobile designers are also good UX people).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Patents used to mean a lot. Then 9th Circus court over ruled a bunch in favor of rich companies.
Now the USPTO just rubber stamps the paper work and lets the courts decide.
You have to have good proof of your prior art, and $$$ legal team.
Maybe this is telling us all that software apps are not as valuable as the VCs think they are. If it's that easy to copy, and there are effectively no barriers to copying, then what is the value? (The answer is marketing, of course... but that's the point, the software is not the value. Everyone needs to understand that ideas without implementation have no value, and that the value in implementation may come from a non-technical part of the business.)
I work in a nanotech startup. Competitors have bought our products to evaluate (reverse engineer). That's fine by me, copying our technology is ridiculously difficult. They quickly figure out that they're better off simply buying from us, which is what generally happens. We don't have to feel good that we set someone else's roadmap. In our case, the technical implementation is most of our value.
Who cares? If you don't like them, the don't use their products.
I hate fat people.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, when you think about it, ideas are an expense. It is the execution that matters.
This is very true. I had a mentor of mine once point out that if you think you have an idea that nobody else has thought of then you should put down whatever you are smoking. Protecting an idea is very expensive so it had better be a really good one to be worth the bother. Coca-Cola is a multi-billion dollar company and they have a product that is ridiculously easy to knock off. But their business execution is second to none and for most products that is what really matters. This remains true even if you have a product that justifies patents and other idea protection. You still have to execute or someone else will figure out a way to make a buck in your place.
Only assholes get patents? What a stupid opinion.
VC parasites will destroy hosts that have value.
NOT WORTH EMULATING.
Nobody cares, only the content mafia.
Here we have an article that points out that the law can be a joke. It has always been true. Imagine that a poor person seriously wrongs you. The poor are exempt from most civil suits. After all, it costs money to win a suit and if you win there is no money to collect and likely may never be money to collect. That means that a large section of law only applies to people who have something to lose. In a way it is the opposite of criminal law. In criminal law the person who is poor will suffer a lot more than a person who can afford good lawyers. Income and wealth diversity have taken the idea of equal justice for all and dumped them in the trash can.
Sounds like not a lot of thinking went into this article, because real world called and said "bullshit"
Only assholes get patents. They can be a huge PR mistake, and they’re a fool’s errand: even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can’t afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter.
A mere $20k marketing budget is not going to buy you much of a competitive advantage, and certainly not against "any adversary big enough to matter". Their $200k marketing budget (if not $2M or more) is going to crush you. The only defense you have against them is patents.
"But if you try to sue them, they'll bury you in legal fees!"
Yes and no... First, those big cases are the ones firms will take on contingency - look at Microsoft v. i4i and their $450M judgement. Law firms will happily defer fees for a bite at those. So even if they try to bury you, they're not really burying you, but your lawyers who are willing to take on that risk.
Second, you don't have to be involved at all: if you have a giant adversary, then odds are you probably have two giant adversaries. So if one steals your idea, then approach the other with an offer to assign the patent to them (with a royalty-free grantback license to you). They'll go after your competitor for you, you get a chunk of capital (and possibly royalties) that you wouldn't have had otherwise, and you can still practice your invention. At worst, you end up competing with one giant adversary rather than two or more.
Mr. Arment should probably stick to developing apps, rather than offering legal advice.
Fixed that for ya.
Since you can't fight it, use the copy's as a badge of honor. In your app, in help or the about, or splash page, proudly display a list of the other apps that have copied your features. than add something like "Why go with the clones, go with the original.."
I'm just "this guy", you know?
Think carefully. Everything we have- everything- we have because the fundamental ideas could NOT be legally protected. Bill Gates with MS BASIC- that made the early home computers possible. Engineers leaving the inventor of the microprocessor, Intel (4004), to set up their own CPU designing companies. Hardware is software, in a 'frozen' form so the same principles apply both sides.
Try a different reality. IBM in the States, ICL in the UK etc owning all computer linked IP at an abstract level, and Disney re:Mickey Mouse style using their political clout to get ever more oppresive laws to stifle the competition.
In this reality it would resemble the movie 'Brazil' today. But the mainstream media fake news outlets would tell you that these laws had benefited the industry and national profits- and you could not prove otherwise having been denied the opportunity to witness where the industry could have gone wthout these controls.
Now we have a new wave of dribblers- indy 'app' and game designers who 'stand on the shoulders of giants', get lucky, then want to pull up the drawbridge. PUBG, ripping off everything, moaning that Fortnite Battle Royale ripped them off.
To the ordinary punter, trained by the fake news of the mainstream media, these compalints seem 'reasonable', and the masses would actually vote for news laws 'protecting' the designs. This is the very reason 'democracy' must never be the 'wisdom' of the masses. Those that control the fake news (BBC, CNN et al) control that 'wisdom', and then attempt to reap what they have sown- in the name of fake democracy.
PS the Internet, in all its glory, could never have happened outside the USA (and I speak as a non-american). While its key inventors were not yanks, the freedom that allowed the internet to blossom and evolve was entirely protected by the American legal framework and vision of intellectual freedom. Embryo 'internets' had withered on the vine in the UK and France (prestel and minitel) because of authoritarian interfence by agents working for the state.
So, with all your heart and soul, despise the 'app' and game author who complains others can make apps and games in a silmilar vein legally. Their myopic selfish thinking, which never considers the true conceptual origins of 'their' work, would destroy everything if the basis of new IP laws.
Says the man who owns multiple apple products.
Oh wait this isn't how you actually feel it's just an attempt to harvest karma.
There are plenty of ideas that are pretty worthless. Anyone with common sense should be able to come up with them. Trying to protect them with patents or other means are only tools for trolls. Yet, there are other ideas that are extremely valuable. They are worked out through trial and error, sometimes over many years. They are refined and improved until they add significant value to lots of people. After they gain success in the marketplace, only fools then say "That idea is obvious" (completely ignoring that nobody else seemed to come up with it). Unless there are methods to protect such ideas from copycats with or without deep pockets; nobody is going to go through the effort. Edison tried something like a 1000 different types of light bulbs until he found the one that worked well. Would he have done that if everyone could just immediately copy it without needing to do any of the R&D? His patents gave him 20 years of protection and profits from the fruit of his labors. Software developers with great ideas deserve no less.
...if you don't have marketing clout. Your app might be the next Angry Birds, but probably not. Be nimble and be prepared to always live next to the edge.
I was agreeing with you up to this point. They probably have a ceasefire with their competitor over patents and just use jointly use them to keep out the riffraff.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Quick someone tell APK.
If you don't protect the success of businesses you end up like Europe where there are no new companies ever, no new jobs, no new movies, no scientific breakthroughs, no new medical treatments or drugs, and everybody takes periodic steps to impoverishment.
Why are we listening to this guy?
His "breakthrough" in understanding isn't something people would want to steal.
> even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can't afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter
Right, so that's why there's a bunch of nobodies successfully suing fortune 500 companies in Texas.
Because the term "patent troll" doesn't exist.
I was agreeing with you up to this point. They probably have a ceasefire with their competitor over patents and just use jointly use them to keep out the riffraff.
Like Apple and Samsung? ;)
No, in your example, Coca Cola is big enough to crush any copier to dust by simply having their lawyers march in the immediate vicinity of the offender.
Tell that to Pepsi. Coca-Cola didn't get magically huge by having flesh eating lawyers. They got huge because they did a really good job making their product available, consistent, and relevant to their customers. It's not hard to copy the taste of Coke or any of their other drinks and there are countless other brands of cola available some of which arguably taste better. Coke succeeded because they executed the best. Also they aren't as big or as dominant as you seem to believe.
As a matter of fact, there are zounds of similar beverages out there, all over the world, but CC is so entrenched that all copiers combined have maybe 1% marked share compared to CC.
You might want to actually look up some facts before sounding stupid publicly. Coke has about 42% market share in soft drinks. Pepsi has about 30%. ARC Refreshments (the maker of RC Cola) has about 15% of the soft drink market. And the other players split the remaining 8%.
In the United States contingency is almost exclusively for personal injury cases. It is not something you can just plan for and assume you'll have access to. That is idiotic.
How general of a function must it be, there are some real great solutions that people use and they are all pretty much the same. What are the limitations on these. You know DRY... I cant imagine people typing these functions out over and over again.... carpal tunnel :(.
[($)]
But the line between "idea" and "expression" might not like exactly where you think it does. For example, moving and turning falling pieces to fill horizontal lines of a rectangular matrix is not protectable, but doing so where the pieces are made of four aligned squares is. Tetris v. Xio .
Despite earning 50% the average salary for his area he has purchased at least 4 apple products and in the case of his macbook pro he would have bought a new one in under 2 years had it not been so painfully identical to the one he already owned. He's more recently made statements that the same machine he would have replaced so fast in 2008 is just fine for all his needs in 2018.
iPhone 6s
"I'm planning to buy my leased iPhone 6s and reduce my monthly bill from $80 to $50." -- August 29, 2017
iPad2
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11050405&cid=55104759
"The next morning I took pictures with my iPad 2, showed them to the leasing agent at the office" --April 25, 2014
Mac Mini PPC
"What I need the most was a mobile replacement for my aging Mac mini" --January 29, 2010
MacBook Pro
"Now if they'd get around to beefing up the MacBook Pro, I'd sell my current one and buy the new version ASAP. Love my MBP." --January 15, 2008
Creimer is a total apple fanboy but he thinks shitting on apple products might be a good way to get his karma up to 1.. and then normal functioning human beings will see links to his blog and youtube channel.
??????
Profit!!
Did I put my lego bricks together like you did? Did I also make a space-ship out of my bricks? Awww cry me a river
Well, if your patent is worth in the 100's of millions, sure. But I believe they do have a ceasefire over their giant arrays of stupid patents.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I'll never play a game released by the thieves known as King, as they stole someone else's game. I even refused to buy a book because it mentioned them in it on one page, and didn't mention their stealing and sueing of the original programmer.
http://metro.co.uk/2014/02/13/...
So, I care who did things first and who copied who.
In the United States contingency is almost exclusively for personal injury cases. It is not something you can just plan for and assume you'll have access to. That is idiotic.
Well, as a patent attorney at a large law firm, I can tell you you're absolutely incorrect. Frankly, I have no idea where you got this idea. Not only do most firms have contingent fee arrangements, there are also investors who will invest specifically for the purpose of funding a lawsuit.
Where did you get this misconception, and why are you so adamant that the alternative possibility is "idiotic"?
Yeah, and his broad sweeping claims of "nobody" jumbled with intimidating coarse language adds up to: uninformed
At the smaller/individual development shop level, the idea that blowing off reacting to all but the most literal of copies of your work makes sense, and it's been a part of the lives of fashion designers since the beginning of time.
This is likely the primary driver for why fashion and fabrics change so fast, because fashion can't be copyrighted, and a successful design will attract knockoffs before a year is out.
My suspicion, based on the hassles s/w shops large and small have dealing with patent search and lawsuits, is that for the industry and its customers, fashion has it right . It sucks to have popular ideas ripped off, but it sucks even more for just about everyone to be prevented from exploiting ideas at all because of well heeled rent collectors.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Hey! Don't go trying to glam onto the glory of other people's credit snatching! :)
A web / iphone developer shooting his virtual mouth off online about complex legal matters is claiming that people who don't follow his incorrect advice about I.P. protection are "assholes"?
Maybe the asshole is in your bathroom mirror, Marco.
In the meantime, patents are useful in the real world, the extremely small percentage of abuse articles we see on slashdot doesn't change that.
Well we know he doesn't eat apples, despite the fact he looks like a candy apple on sticks!
WP for lardasses.
Unfortunately the majority of people don't understand technology well enough to understand why software patents are EVIL (think Hitler, though not quite as bad).
We should get rid of them already, it's far past time. It may have sounded like a good idea at first, but practice has shown software patents are an unworkable mess.
The second to main problem is that the rules of evidence and the type of evidence that can be used to prove prior art in software patent cases don't get along very well.
The main problem is that judges and juries are not software experts and can easily be fooled into thinking an invention is non-obvious. It's hard to convince a non-tech person that something is obvious when they don't understand anything in.
As it stands, we don't have a "jury of experts" and the software patent system is unworkable.
Software is unique in that it requires massive amounts of background knowledge to understand fully, but each piece of software is actually quite simple if you have the background knowledge.
Software is also much easier to write than to read. A fact is that however complicated something looks on paper, it was about 5 times simpler to write it than jt is for you to read it. Ideas flow more easily from human language to machine langauge, but the reverse is harder for most programmers.
Take an example. I want to write the character 'r' in Javascript in the most complex (and stupid) way I can think of:
([]+[!![]])[+!![]]
Reading that is a pain in the ass, but I know exactly how I made it. I coerced an array into a boolean true and that into a string value and then took the 'r' from the second position of the string "true" by coercing a boolean into an integer (1) and using it as the index to the string.
Inventive? Not really. Simple to write working backwards from the result I wanted. Not so easy to read. Hence it would be relatively easy to convince someone it was 'not obvious' if they weren't familiar with the technique.
The comments on how the public perceives what you do reminds me of the SEA vs PKARC lawsuit back in the day. They ended up settling, and the settlement meant that SEA essential won, legally,but the online chatter about the suit, and people's perceptions about what SEA was attempting to do (IIRC, SEA's attempt to claim proprietary ownership of ARC file formats and (particularly galling) the .ARC extension did not go over well) meant that SEA went from having a defacto monopoly to being an also-ran fairly quickly. The settlement required that PKware come up with their own formats, and they did. As soon as PKZip was considered stable, pretty much the whole online community switched from ARC to Zip formats overnight.
PKware, in light of the community's reaction, didn't make proprietary claims about their format, which eventually made it possible for zip format to be public, and available in free (as in speech) versions.