However, across all of that, 'commercial/noncommercial' isn't an area of distinction.
...
If you can find a way to make money by selling software that is available in source form under the GPL3, rock on.
In the case of software, commercial users - and re-sellers - will usually want some sort of guaranteed support if they're going to build a commercial product or service around somebody's open source project - or even use it in a business-critical role. In a sense, the commercial/noncommercial distinction sorts itself out: commercial users have an incentive to go back to the author. Third-parties selling support are, arguably, doing just that, selling support rather than re-selling the software. There is a very clear opportunities for software authors to 'monetize' their software while still giving away the source.
If the product is a photograph, or a book, or a piece of music then it's not so clear - especially when it has been released in digital form. You'll have a hard time selling "support contracts" for your novel. If you make it fully Open then a large e-book publisher could just take it, sell it for $5.99 per download and pocket several bucks (there will be some 'cost of sales' but that would be pretty small for an ebook download and largely 'crowdsourced' publicity) for anybody too lazy to google for the free version. I think, in that situation, the author might feel entitled to a slice of that money.
However, the main thing is choice: the Creative Commons initiative currently offer a really good choice of licensees from the "Noncommercial/NoDerivs" (which is still one hell of an improvement from 'all rights reserved and I'd sue you for reading it to your kid if I thought I could get away with it' status quo) to full-blown 'copyleft' if you want it. It would be a pity if that was wrecked by idealism.
Making it look as if something was produced with a device even though the device was not used is a fucking LIE.
Useful cut out and keep guide:
If it is on a TV or Cinema screen or even a still photograph it is a lie.
It's not necessarily about dishonesty - it's about practicality. They use simulated pictures in adverts for TV screens because taking photos/videos of TV screens always looks crap - it's nigh-on impossible to get the exposure/colour balance right even if you don't get interference patterns. They use fake food in commercials because real food looks crap on film (especially after it's been under the lights for an hour or two). Making a film/TV program is too bloody time-consuming and expensive to leave anything to chance for the sake of realism when you can fake it reliably and on cue. Interviews get edited because people going 'um' or repeating themselves looks much worse on screen than it does in real life: if they cut away to the interviewer nodding then it's probably to disguise the 'jump' where they cut out the interviewee saying something unintelligible.
With still pictures, you don't even need Photoshop: you've put a spin on it as soon as you've composed the picture and decided when to press the shutter.
"The camera never lies..." should be on the shortlist of most comprehensively inaccurate aphorisms of all time.
Next you'll be saying that that HTC (?) ad with the fashion photographer jumping out of the plane and doing a photo shoot in free-fall wasn't entirely shot on a smartphone?
What next? I'd been planning on buying a can of Red Bull, sprouting wings, and flying to Holland next week: should I change my travel plans?
Manufacture for $.10; sell for $10; sue anyone who copies. Mm...
Pro tip: if you think that operating profit = retail price - manufacturing cost then don't try starting a business anytime soon. Packaging, promotion, logistics, processing payments all cost money...
I'm sure that, at $10 a pop, Apple are making several bucks, but it ain't $9.90.
One non-evil motive for Apple's (alleged) action is to give the new connector a chance to get established before the flood of 3rd party adapters. There are bound to be issues with the new dock and older equipment anyway, having a plethora of potentially buggy 3rd party adapters available on launch day could cause mass confusion.
Long term, Apple would be nuts not to license the connector - all those third-party accessories are a major USP of iOS devices. They're taking a risk changing the connector as it is - if I were them I'd act out of character and throw one adapter in with the phone. Of course, since this is all rumour that might be exactly what they do.
Are you telling me if the BBC said, 'all broadcasts in the UK must be DRM free', no one would take their money?
...what, when they could take money from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, Virgin et. al. instead and still have DRM? No.
I don't know what powers you think the BBC has - I think you're confusing them with the government.
Hopefully, someday, the TV, Movie and publishing industries will learn that the only thing DRM does is pisses off legitimate users while ensuring business as usual for the pirates. The Music industry got the message eventually allowing Apple, Amazon etc. to sell DRM-free music, so maybe there's hope, but currently DRM free == content free.
I'm not sure whether that jibe about RealPlayer was serious or not, but the BBC have been using RealPlayer streams for radio services almost ever since they started putting shows online.
Perfectly serious. When they started streaming radio, RealPlayer was the only game in town - lots of people had it installed (and it was OK to start with until Real realised it didn't have an income stream, made it almost impossible to find the free player on their site and started pushing ads and bloatware). When they started iPlayer the vast majority of browsers already had Flash Player installed.
I believe that the BBC did start work on their own Codec (Dirac) but whatever you favourite conspiracy theory about why that never happened, the least hypothesis is that they looked at the cost of writing and maintaining player software for all available platforms and it didn't add up. Especially since the boom in mobile devices (mostly after iPlayer started) means that (a) there are more platforms to support and (b) mobiles don't all have the grunt to run software codecs - you really need to use the formats that they have hardware support for.
Or they could have just made.mp4 files available for playback.
Yes, in a parallel universe where the BBC didn't have contracts with studios and artists to uphold, didn't have the obligation to raise money from international sales and didn't have Big Media Interests pouncing on any and every opportunity of accusing them of anticompetitive behaviour. Then they wouldn't have had to worry about bloody DRM and could give away.mp4s. Actually, in that universe they could probably have used Ogg. Also, note, that universe is populated entirely by techies who are happy to download a.mp4 from a list of files (then probably run it through ffmpeg to optimise it for their homebrew Linux media centre) and aren't remotely interested in having a nice UI that lets them browse programmes, stream live TV etc.
That would be a nice universe to live in. Maybe the BBC can have Doctor Who visit it sometime.
Yes, because when iPlayer launched back in 2007 everybody had a HTML5-compliant browser that supported a common video format... Oh wait, they didn't... and they still don't... Perhaps they should have tried RealPlayer instead...?
Their silly insistance on Flash has meant that the iPlayer is only available on a limited handful of platforms (including PC, Mac, most new smart TVs TV, most half-decent PVRs...)
Since flash video is a wrapper on a weird, unknown standard called "H264" that nobody else uses, they've been unable to support the most popular mobile platforms such as iOS (the perfectly good iPlayer app on my iPad is clearly just a result of the hallucinogenic drugs with which Apple impregnate their packaging). It's quite clear that the BBC should have gone for "webm" (even though it didn't exist at the time) because everybody uses Firefox.
Everybody derided the introduction of Flash Player on Android when it was launched, with even Fandroids accepting that the lack of Flash on iOS was a good thing. The BBC should have known this and not relied on it.
(At least, with Flash support removed from Android we can go back to the "Flash = spawn of Satan" meme without having to simultaneously believe that "Flash = essential tool for browsing the web").
innovations involve things like the combustion engine or air conditioning
Pah. Obvious variations on the Carnot heat-engine cycle! As for indoor plumbing - that's just a small aqueduct with a lid and rounded corners!
Seriously, though, I think it's useful to have a word for "did not invent but turned into a practical and useful product". E.g. the first internal-combustion engine cars were not exactly user friendly - others adapted them for the mass-market. That takes the foresight to spot an invention with potential, a ton of cash to invest and a willingness to take risks.
The problem with the patent system is that only really works in a nostalgic fantasy world when an engineer declares "Gosh, I've just made an important discovery about thermodynamics - how do I share that with the scientific community without sacrificing my competitive edge in the steam engine market". It relies on the blunt instrument of the legal system to make tricky, subjective decisions on whether or not ideas are obvious, when even the experts in that field would probably argue.
If you could find a suitable genius polymath capable of making such judgements and prepared to work in a patent office, they'd probably get bored with all the bureaucracy and just sit there daydreaming about riding on the beams of light coming in through the window...
When disputes arise, they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard "copycat" narratives.'"
Absolutely. We need these things to be decided by experts like the clever guys at the US Patent Office who granted the patents in the first place, or the judge who originally set the precedent that software was patentable, or maybe the expert lawyers drafting New Zealand's new patent laws.
NB: for the avoidance of doubt - yes, I'm being ironic.
...they still found that many of the patents, on both sides, had not been infringed.
An irrationally pro-patent jury would have decided all the patents, on both sides, had been infringed. They didn't.
An irrationally pro-Apple jury would have found Samsung infringed the iPad and iPhone 3 IP by having rounded corners. They didn't (I know that spoils a lot of jokes, but tough...)
A jury can't fix US patent law - especially in a case where neither of the litigants is going to argue against patents with any enthusiasm - the rules need changing. Some of the patents are being reexamined - that's the best hope but I'm afraid that if they have been properly drafted to match the current (silly) rules then you shouldn't get your hopes up.
They lost the cases in the UK, Netherlands, Germany but win in the US.
Which may have something to do with the major differences in IP law between UK/EU and US. Like - no software patents in the EU (at least in theory).
It would be really, really good if the US patent system didn't grant the sort of silly patents that both sides used in this case (remember folks, don't use an app while playing music without talking to Samsung first). However, it was not the job of this jury to fix the patent system. All of their questions on infringement and validity were of the form "has Samsung/Apple presented sufficient evidence to prove that..." not "is this a bloody obvious patent that the USPTO should never have wasted ink on".
Samsung or Apple - both with big valuable patent portfolios - might have tried to point out specific flaws in specific patents - but would hardly have argued convincingly that obvious patents should be tossed out (see 'turkeys' and 'xmas').
Regarding your #2, you really need to read the quote you're referring to within context,
Especially as the "context" concerned is press write-ups of interviews with jurors, which have already gone through one layer of filtering and possible distortion. Even an impartial journalist will cherry-pick statements that sound interesting when faced with a long transcript of an interview with a maybe not particularly interesting person.
check the patent office. samsung and everyone else have the same design patents on everything they sell.
...and don't forget that the patents in Samsung's counter-claims included continuing to play music in the background while running an App, integrating a phone, camera and email, bookmarking an image in a gallery...
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
When used properly - as in the evolution example - it refers to a sudden change between two states, without any intermediate steps. like an electron that can only jump between two "orbits" rather than gradually change energy. It may look small to you, buster, but that's one hell of a jump for an electron.
When used in an advert for dishwasher tablets (sad but true) it has the same meaning as "fantastic", "incredible", "ultimate" - i.e. "hey! sucker!"
I think you were looking for some word that means the opposite of conciliatory.
No. They'd get a polite little lecture as to how seriously most juries took their work, why judges had to allow both parties to make their case and how throwing something out because it was obviously stupid opened the door to appeals. That's "conciliatory".
Wait, seriously? That's so stupid on so many levels that I honestly don't believe it.
Don't shoot the messenger! I pretty much agree with your points. However, Groklaw was convinced that it was All A Big Plot:
But that's not what it's really about, in my view. What it's about now, stage front and center, is what I told you I suspected the California [Psystar] litigation was really about: it's about first sale. This is, then, I believe, a legal effort to destroy the GPL. This is the second such effort. SCO was the first. Somebody really, really wants to destroy the GPL, not just Apple's business reputation.
Psystar files suit against Apple in Florida - What Are They Thinking?
To be fair, they weren't "supporting" them in the "Huzzah! EULAs FTW!!!" sense, just pointing out that that, although specific terms in specific EULAs might be unenforceable, the EULA concept as a whole was legal in the US.
Groklaw's concern was that Psystar's defence arguments were similar to past FUD attacks that tried to argue that the GPL was invalid:
Also, I thought you'd find it interesting that an antiGPL activist, Alexander Terekhov, has for years been posting comments on the internet that the way to, in essence, steal GPL code is to use first sale and copyright misuse...
EULAs, Psystar, and the Reality Principle - Updated
You do know that anyone can post there, just like on Slashdot, right?
We're not talking about the 'public' comments. We're top-level articles 'by PJ' and posted by the editorial team, not the comments by all and sundry.
And you do know that PJ posts full texts of legal documents there, so the readers and commentators can make up their own minds, don't you?
Except, in this case, she's just collecting snippets of interviews with the jury from other news sites, drawing some huge inferences from odd words and phrases and using them as the basis for accusing the jury of being incompetent (this is from someone who was very reluctant to criticise judges and juries during the SCO case). She's flamed journalists in the past (but usually along with well-written arguments as to why they were wrong), but has always been respectful towards legal processes (perhaps the Chap. 11 phase of SCO cured her of that).
I really think these quotes are being taken out of context.
Indeed, especially as the "context" in this case seems to be second-hand press reports of interviews with Jurors.
The only genuinely worrying comment was the one about the jurors wanting to 'send a message' with the damages, which does seem like a violation of the instructions - but that's based on one press comment by one juror.
Groklaw is not, and has never been, a neutral, unbiassed source of information.
What PJ did in the SCO case, and for which she deserves a huge pile of karma, is to present her pro-Linux, pro-GPL argument in an extremely professional, reasoned way, with copious references and links to sources, and with clear, plain English explanations of the law and legal procedures involved. Essentially, she was presenting the case for the defence the way it should be presented if the court system lived up to its own ideals. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as you don't confuse it with being neutral. Also, the way it turned out, she was robustly vindicated in the SCO case.
She was also very conciliatory towards anybody who fancied slagging off the judge or court system, even when it appeared to be favouring SCO.
Frankly, I don't see any of that in her coverage of Apple vs. Samsung: cherry picking soundbites from press interviews with jurors, openly deriding the process, and claiming fuzzy snaps of tablet-like devices from "Soylent Green" as prior art (maybe it was, the Jury largely junked the iPad design patents, but the PJ of old would have scrupulously backed up that argument with extracts from the patents and case law about what constituted prior art).
I'm not sure what people are hoping for with an appeal/retrial. The parties are both big enough and ugly enough to loose the odd billion. Samsung's patent claims on 'integrating phones cameras and email' and 'listening to music while using an app' are just as poisonous as Apple's - possibly harder to work round if they'd been found to be infringed, and the idea that you can charge both chip makers and device makers that buy their chips for the same patent needed scotching. A korean-style 'you both infringed' verdict would just mean we had two sets of successfully-asserted patents stinking up the marketplace.
Perfection, in my mind, would have been throwing out all the patents, Samsung and Apple, so we could get back to arguing over whether Samsung copied the iPhone or if they had an independent revelation during a SF movie session on a TV with rounded corners, regardless of whether any of it was patentable. I don't think that outcome is likely as long as the US recognises software patents and the USPTO doesn't get held to account for duff patents.
PJ was pretty much rabidly pro-Apple in her assessment of Apple vs. Psystar. So much so you got called a troll if you didn't agree.
That was pretty much a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend": If you go back and read the postings PJ was convinced that Psystar were being bankrolled by the same anti-GPL forces behind SCO (maybe) and that if Psystar's attempts to use anti-trust and "first sale" to overturn Apple's EULA succeeded, they'd be used as precedent to attack the GPL (questioning that logic would get you accused of being a paid Microsoft shill).
I do wonder how many of the changes in form had to do with advancing technology.
If you look at (say) the early days of PCs, when technology suddenly made them possible, then there were a huge number of "sloped boxes with keyboards and monitor connections" (Apple 2, TRS-80, Sorcerer, OSI Challenger, Vic 20...) but they were (a) distinctively identifiable at a glance and (b) were hugely different to use. Ditto, say, digital cameras: several years of weird and wonderful diversity before it settled down into compacts, travel zooms and DSLRs. With smartphones - Apple's "before iPhone/after iPhone" poster is a slight exaggeration but it is a good first approximation to what happened.
Thin rectangular phone with rounded corners and a capacitive touchscreen perfectly describes the Prada.
Which does look like the iPhone 4 spoilt with some fugly chrome buttons, which may be why the the jury in Apple vs Samsung threw out the "thin rectangle with rounded corners" claims for the iPad and iPhone 4. The original iPhone actually had a more distinctive shape than the 4, and used a convex back to make the phone look thinner than it actually was.
It also looks a lot like the infamous Apple what would Sony do drawing, which pre-dates the release of the Prada.
right on. because apple had the first portable digital music player in the world, right? no...
No, you're right, Creative had some clunky MP3 players that nobody wanted to buy, and when Apple came out with a smaller, better, easier-to-use player that sold like hotcakes, Creative claimed a patent on the only sensible way of arranging songs into menus and extracted a $100m settlement from Apple. There are no nice guys in this game.
but they made the first clamshell laptop right? um... okay, okay,
No - and they were famously late to the laptop game, but they did (in collaboration with Sony) "invent" the modern laptop layout with the keyboard set back and the pointing device in the middle of a wrist-rest (Powerbook 100) - subsequently adopted by virtually all laptops.
they certainly were first with the graphical operating system? the mouse?
but certainly they had the first smartphone right? wait...
Ooh look, another straw man. There were smartphones before the iPhone. They had stylus- or keyboard- based interfaces, resistive touch screens, no multitouch, mostly sucked and were only selling to a niche.
Actually, no, you may have a point - Samsung made the GRiDPad in the 1980s. I think that we can safely assume that the Galaxy Tab evolved from a 20-year-old 4lb, inch thick MS-DOS tablet sold to a niche market of delivery drivers and stocktakers and had nothing to do with a hugely successful consumer-oriented tablet that created a new market segment a few years back.
You know, I really don't think that Apple deserves protection for "double-click-to-zoom", but to try and pretend that the current generation of tablets and smartphones weren't deliberate imitations of the iPad/iPhone is complete denial of reality (not to mention a shedload of "how can we make this more like an iPad" memos that turned up in the trial).
This isn't about patents and conceptual design and innovation. This is about blatant copycat ripoff knockoff cloning, right down the the boxes the products ship in, the 30-pin dock connector, and the identical wall wart.
...and I suspect that is what the Jury were thinking of, rather than looking at rounded corners.
The downside is the resulting reinforcement of patents on pinch-to-zoom, bounce scrolling, double-click-to-zoom etc. It's one thing for Samsung to be stung - they knowingly violated a whole tranche of these to produce a directly competing product - but these patents would be a real menace if asserted against individual developers, especially against open source software that can't afford to pay 10c for every user interface element.
How close should a competitor be able to do a "Me Too" copy on a device?
Did anyone complain when IE looked like a clone of Mozilla/Netscape?
Do the research. The design of Both IE and Netscape was predated by NCSA Mosaic.
Netscape was written by former Mosaic developers (and was originally going to be called Mosaic), the original IE was a licensed re-badge of Spyglass Mosaic, which was a licensed re-write of NCSA Mosaic.
Slashdot Mirror
However, across all of that, 'commercial/noncommercial' isn't an area of distinction.
...
If you can find a way to make money by selling software that is available in source form under the GPL3, rock on.
In the case of software, commercial users - and re-sellers - will usually want some sort of guaranteed support if they're going to build a commercial product or service around somebody's open source project - or even use it in a business-critical role. In a sense, the commercial/noncommercial distinction sorts itself out: commercial users have an incentive to go back to the author. Third-parties selling support are, arguably, doing just that, selling support rather than re-selling the software. There is a very clear opportunities for software authors to 'monetize' their software while still giving away the source.
If the product is a photograph, or a book, or a piece of music then it's not so clear - especially when it has been released in digital form. You'll have a hard time selling "support contracts" for your novel. If you make it fully Open then a large e-book publisher could just take it, sell it for $5.99 per download and pocket several bucks (there will be some 'cost of sales' but that would be pretty small for an ebook download and largely 'crowdsourced' publicity) for anybody too lazy to google for the free version. I think, in that situation, the author might feel entitled to a slice of that money.
However, the main thing is choice: the Creative Commons initiative currently offer a really good choice of licensees from the "Noncommercial/NoDerivs" (which is still one hell of an improvement from 'all rights reserved and I'd sue you for reading it to your kid if I thought I could get away with it' status quo) to full-blown 'copyleft' if you want it. It would be a pity if that was wrecked by idealism.
Making it look as if something was produced with a device even though the device was not used is a fucking LIE.
Useful cut out and keep guide:
If it is on a TV or Cinema screen or even a still photograph it is a lie.
It's not necessarily about dishonesty - it's about practicality. They use simulated pictures in adverts for TV screens because taking photos/videos of TV screens always looks crap - it's nigh-on impossible to get the exposure/colour balance right even if you don't get interference patterns. They use fake food in commercials because real food looks crap on film (especially after it's been under the lights for an hour or two). Making a film/TV program is too bloody time-consuming and expensive to leave anything to chance for the sake of realism when you can fake it reliably and on cue. Interviews get edited because people going 'um' or repeating themselves looks much worse on screen than it does in real life: if they cut away to the interviewer nodding then it's probably to disguise the 'jump' where they cut out the interviewee saying something unintelligible.
With still pictures, you don't even need Photoshop: you've put a spin on it as soon as you've composed the picture and decided when to press the shutter.
"The camera never lies..." should be on the shortlist of most comprehensively inaccurate aphorisms of all time.
Next you'll be saying that that HTC (?) ad with the fashion photographer jumping out of the plane and doing a photo shoot in free-fall wasn't entirely shot on a smartphone?
What next? I'd been planning on buying a can of Red Bull, sprouting wings, and flying to Holland next week: should I change my travel plans?
Manufacture for $.10; sell for $10; sue anyone who copies. Mm...
Pro tip: if you think that operating profit = retail price - manufacturing cost then don't try starting a business anytime soon. Packaging, promotion, logistics, processing payments all cost money...
I'm sure that, at $10 a pop, Apple are making several bucks, but it ain't $9.90.
One non-evil motive for Apple's (alleged) action is to give the new connector a chance to get established before the flood of 3rd party adapters. There are bound to be issues with the new dock and older equipment anyway, having a plethora of potentially buggy 3rd party adapters available on launch day could cause mass confusion.
Long term, Apple would be nuts not to license the connector - all those third-party accessories are a major USP of iOS devices. They're taking a risk changing the connector as it is - if I were them I'd act out of character and throw one adapter in with the phone. Of course, since this is all rumour that might be exactly what they do.
Are you telling me if the BBC said, 'all broadcasts in the UK must be DRM free', no one would take their money?
...what, when they could take money from ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, Virgin et. al. instead and still have DRM? No.
I don't know what powers you think the BBC has - I think you're confusing them with the government.
Hopefully, someday, the TV, Movie and publishing industries will learn that the only thing DRM does is pisses off legitimate users while ensuring business as usual for the pirates. The Music industry got the message eventually allowing Apple, Amazon etc. to sell DRM-free music, so maybe there's hope, but currently DRM free == content free.
I'm not sure whether that jibe about RealPlayer was serious or not, but the BBC have been using RealPlayer streams for radio services almost ever since they started putting shows online.
Perfectly serious. When they started streaming radio, RealPlayer was the only game in town - lots of people had it installed (and it was OK to start with until Real realised it didn't have an income stream, made it almost impossible to find the free player on their site and started pushing ads and bloatware). When they started iPlayer the vast majority of browsers already had Flash Player installed.
I believe that the BBC did start work on their own Codec (Dirac) but whatever you favourite conspiracy theory about why that never happened, the least hypothesis is that they looked at the cost of writing and maintaining player software for all available platforms and it didn't add up. Especially since the boom in mobile devices (mostly after iPlayer started) means that (a) there are more platforms to support and (b) mobiles don't all have the grunt to run software codecs - you really need to use the formats that they have hardware support for.
Or they could have just made .mp4 files available for playback.
Yes, in a parallel universe where the BBC didn't have contracts with studios and artists to uphold, didn't have the obligation to raise money from international sales and didn't have Big Media Interests pouncing on any and every opportunity of accusing them of anticompetitive behaviour. Then they wouldn't have had to worry about bloody DRM and could give away .mp4s. Actually, in that universe they could probably have used Ogg. Also, note, that universe is populated entirely by techies who are happy to download a .mp4 from a list of files (then probably run it through ffmpeg to optimise it for their homebrew Linux media centre) and aren't remotely interested in having a nice UI that lets them browse programmes, stream live TV etc.
That would be a nice universe to live in. Maybe the BBC can have Doctor Who visit it sometime.
Yes, because when iPlayer launched back in 2007 everybody had a HTML5-compliant browser that supported a common video format... Oh wait, they didn't... and they still don't... Perhaps they should have tried RealPlayer instead...?
Their silly insistance on Flash has meant that the iPlayer is only available on a limited handful of platforms (including PC, Mac, most new smart TVs TV, most half-decent PVRs...)
Since flash video is a wrapper on a weird, unknown standard called "H264" that nobody else uses, they've been unable to support the most popular mobile platforms such as iOS (the perfectly good iPlayer app on my iPad is clearly just a result of the hallucinogenic drugs with which Apple impregnate their packaging). It's quite clear that the BBC should have gone for "webm" (even though it didn't exist at the time) because everybody uses Firefox.
Everybody derided the introduction of Flash Player on Android when it was launched, with even Fandroids accepting that the lack of Flash on iOS was a good thing. The BBC should have known this and not relied on it.
(At least, with Flash support removed from Android we can go back to the "Flash = spawn of Satan" meme without having to simultaneously believe that "Flash = essential tool for browsing the web").
innovations involve things like the combustion engine or air conditioning
Pah. Obvious variations on the Carnot heat-engine cycle! As for indoor plumbing - that's just a small aqueduct with a lid and rounded corners!
Seriously, though, I think it's useful to have a word for "did not invent but turned into a practical and useful product". E.g. the first internal-combustion engine cars were not exactly user friendly - others adapted them for the mass-market. That takes the foresight to spot an invention with potential, a ton of cash to invest and a willingness to take risks.
The problem with the patent system is that only really works in a nostalgic fantasy world when an engineer declares "Gosh, I've just made an important discovery about thermodynamics - how do I share that with the scientific community without sacrificing my competitive edge in the steam engine market". It relies on the blunt instrument of the legal system to make tricky, subjective decisions on whether or not ideas are obvious, when even the experts in that field would probably argue.
If you could find a suitable genius polymath capable of making such judgements and prepared to work in a patent office, they'd probably get bored with all the bureaucracy and just sit there daydreaming about riding on the beams of light coming in through the window...
When disputes arise, they should be put before an expert tribunal rather than a jury that is easily swayed by schoolyard "copycat" narratives.'"
Absolutely. We need these things to be decided by experts like the clever guys at the US Patent Office who granted the patents in the first place, or the judge who originally set the precedent that software was patentable, or maybe the expert lawyers drafting New Zealand's new patent laws.
NB: for the avoidance of doubt - yes, I'm being ironic.
Of course, with a patent holder as the foreman...
...they still found that many of the patents, on both sides, had not been infringed.
An irrationally pro-patent jury would have decided all the patents, on both sides, had been infringed. They didn't.
An irrationally pro-Apple jury would have found Samsung infringed the iPad and iPhone 3 IP by having rounded corners. They didn't (I know that spoils a lot of jokes, but tough...)
A jury can't fix US patent law - especially in a case where neither of the litigants is going to argue against patents with any enthusiasm - the rules need changing. Some of the patents are being reexamined - that's the best hope but I'm afraid that if they have been properly drafted to match the current (silly) rules then you shouldn't get your hopes up.
They lost the cases in the UK, Netherlands, Germany but win in the US.
Which may have something to do with the major differences in IP law between UK/EU and US. Like - no software patents in the EU (at least in theory).
It would be really, really good if the US patent system didn't grant the sort of silly patents that both sides used in this case (remember folks, don't use an app while playing music without talking to Samsung first). However, it was not the job of this jury to fix the patent system. All of their questions on infringement and validity were of the form "has Samsung/Apple presented sufficient evidence to prove that..." not "is this a bloody obvious patent that the USPTO should never have wasted ink on".
Samsung or Apple - both with big valuable patent portfolios - might have tried to point out specific flaws in specific patents - but would hardly have argued convincingly that obvious patents should be tossed out (see 'turkeys' and 'xmas').
Regarding your #2, you really need to read the quote you're referring to within context,
Especially as the "context" concerned is press write-ups of interviews with jurors, which have already gone through one layer of filtering and possible distortion. Even an impartial journalist will cherry-pick statements that sound interesting when faced with a long transcript of an interview with a maybe not particularly interesting person.
check the patent office. samsung and everyone else have the same design patents on everything they sell.
...and don't forget that the patents in Samsung's counter-claims included continuing to play music in the background while running an App, integrating a phone, camera and email, bookmarking an image in a gallery...
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
When used properly - as in the evolution example - it refers to a sudden change between two states, without any intermediate steps. like an electron that can only jump between two "orbits" rather than gradually change energy. It may look small to you, buster, but that's one hell of a jump for an electron.
When used in an advert for dishwasher tablets (sad but true) it has the same meaning as "fantastic", "incredible", "ultimate" - i.e. "hey! sucker!"
I think you were looking for some word that means the opposite of conciliatory.
No. They'd get a polite little lecture as to how seriously most juries took their work, why judges had to allow both parties to make their case and how throwing something out because it was obviously stupid opened the door to appeals. That's "conciliatory".
Wait, seriously? That's so stupid on so many levels that I honestly don't believe it.
Don't shoot the messenger! I pretty much agree with your points. However, Groklaw was convinced that it was All A Big Plot:
But that's not what it's really about, in my view. What it's about now, stage front and center, is what I told you I suspected the California [Psystar] litigation was really about: it's about first sale. This is, then, I believe, a legal effort to destroy the GPL. This is the second such effort. SCO was the first. Somebody really, really wants to destroy the GPL, not just Apple's business reputation.
Psystar files suit against Apple in Florida - What Are They Thinking?
NB: PJ wasn't necessarily accusing Microsoft: darker forces were afoot .
The idea of Groklaw supporting EULAs, though...
To be fair, they weren't "supporting" them in the "Huzzah! EULAs FTW!!!" sense, just pointing out that that, although specific terms in specific EULAs might be unenforceable, the EULA concept as a whole was legal in the US.
Groklaw's concern was that Psystar's defence arguments were similar to past FUD attacks that tried to argue that the GPL was invalid:
Also, I thought you'd find it interesting that an antiGPL activist, Alexander Terekhov, has for years been posting comments on the internet that the way to, in essence, steal GPL code is to use first sale and copyright misuse...
EULAs, Psystar, and the Reality Principle - Updated
You do know that anyone can post there, just like on Slashdot, right?
We're not talking about the 'public' comments. We're top-level articles 'by PJ' and posted by the editorial team, not the comments by all and sundry.
And you do know that PJ posts full texts of legal documents there, so the readers and commentators can make up their own minds, don't you?
Except, in this case, she's just collecting snippets of interviews with the jury from other news sites, drawing some huge inferences from odd words and phrases and using them as the basis for accusing the jury of being incompetent (this is from someone who was very reluctant to criticise judges and juries during the SCO case). She's flamed journalists in the past (but usually along with well-written arguments as to why they were wrong), but has always been respectful towards legal processes (perhaps the Chap. 11 phase of SCO cured her of that).
I really think these quotes are being taken out of context.
Indeed, especially as the "context" in this case seems to be second-hand press reports of interviews with Jurors.
The only genuinely worrying comment was the one about the jurors wanting to 'send a message' with the damages, which does seem like a violation of the instructions - but that's based on one press comment by one juror.
Groklaw is not, and has never been, a neutral, unbiassed source of information.
What PJ did in the SCO case, and for which she deserves a huge pile of karma, is to present her pro-Linux, pro-GPL argument in an extremely professional, reasoned way, with copious references and links to sources, and with clear, plain English explanations of the law and legal procedures involved. Essentially, she was presenting the case for the defence the way it should be presented if the court system lived up to its own ideals. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as long as you don't confuse it with being neutral. Also, the way it turned out, she was robustly vindicated in the SCO case.
She was also very conciliatory towards anybody who fancied slagging off the judge or court system, even when it appeared to be favouring SCO.
Frankly, I don't see any of that in her coverage of Apple vs. Samsung: cherry picking soundbites from press interviews with jurors, openly deriding the process, and claiming fuzzy snaps of tablet-like devices from "Soylent Green" as prior art (maybe it was, the Jury largely junked the iPad design patents, but the PJ of old would have scrupulously backed up that argument with extracts from the patents and case law about what constituted prior art).
I'm not sure what people are hoping for with an appeal/retrial. The parties are both big enough and ugly enough to loose the odd billion. Samsung's patent claims on 'integrating phones cameras and email' and 'listening to music while using an app' are just as poisonous as Apple's - possibly harder to work round if they'd been found to be infringed, and the idea that you can charge both chip makers and device makers that buy their chips for the same patent needed scotching. A korean-style 'you both infringed' verdict would just mean we had two sets of successfully-asserted patents stinking up the marketplace.
Perfection, in my mind, would have been throwing out all the patents, Samsung and Apple, so we could get back to arguing over whether Samsung copied the iPhone or if they had an independent revelation during a SF movie session on a TV with rounded corners, regardless of whether any of it was patentable. I don't think that outcome is likely as long as the US recognises software patents and the USPTO doesn't get held to account for duff patents.
PJ was pretty much rabidly pro-Apple in her assessment of Apple vs. Psystar. So much so you got called a troll if you didn't agree.
That was pretty much a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend": If you go back and read the postings PJ was convinced that Psystar were being bankrolled by the same anti-GPL forces behind SCO (maybe) and that if Psystar's attempts to use anti-trust and "first sale" to overturn Apple's EULA succeeded, they'd be used as precedent to attack the GPL (questioning that logic would get you accused of being a paid Microsoft shill).
I do wonder how many of the changes in form had to do with advancing technology.
If you look at (say) the early days of PCs, when technology suddenly made them possible, then there were a huge number of "sloped boxes with keyboards and monitor connections" (Apple 2, TRS-80, Sorcerer, OSI Challenger, Vic 20...) but they were (a) distinctively identifiable at a glance and (b) were hugely different to use. Ditto, say, digital cameras: several years of weird and wonderful diversity before it settled down into compacts, travel zooms and DSLRs. With smartphones - Apple's "before iPhone/after iPhone" poster is a slight exaggeration but it is a good first approximation to what happened.
Thin rectangular phone with rounded corners and a capacitive touchscreen perfectly describes the Prada.
Which does look like the iPhone 4 spoilt with some fugly chrome buttons, which may be why the the jury in Apple vs Samsung threw out the "thin rectangle with rounded corners" claims for the iPad and iPhone 4. The original iPhone actually had a more distinctive shape than the 4, and used a convex back to make the phone look thinner than it actually was.
It also looks a lot like the infamous Apple what would Sony do drawing, which pre-dates the release of the Prada.
right on. because apple had the first portable digital music player in the world, right? no ...
No, you're right, Creative had some clunky MP3 players that nobody wanted to buy, and when Apple came out with a smaller, better, easier-to-use player that sold like hotcakes, Creative claimed a patent on the only sensible way of arranging songs into menus and extracted a $100m settlement from Apple. There are no nice guys in this game.
but they made the first clamshell laptop right? um ... okay, okay,
No - and they were famously late to the laptop game, but they did (in collaboration with Sony) "invent" the modern laptop layout with the keyboard set back and the pointing device in the middle of a wrist-rest (Powerbook 100) - subsequently adopted by virtually all laptops.
they certainly were first with the graphical operating system? the mouse?
Who's claiming that? It's always been common knowledge that (a) the inspiration for Lisa and Mac came from a visit to Xerox and (b) Apple paid Xerox (in share options) for the privilege. Before the Lisa and Mac, you could have your people talk to Xerox's people, hand over a few hundred grand and have a minicomputer the size of the filing cabinet. Yeah, you can see where the Mac came from, but there are also huge differences.
but certainly they had the first smartphone right? wait ...
Ooh look, another straw man. There were smartphones before the iPhone. They had stylus- or keyboard- based interfaces, resistive touch screens, no multitouch, mostly sucked and were only selling to a niche.
the first tablet computer?
You mean the Newton in 1993 - right?
Actually, no, you may have a point - Samsung made the GRiDPad in the 1980s. I think that we can safely assume that the Galaxy Tab evolved from a 20-year-old 4lb, inch thick MS-DOS tablet sold to a niche market of delivery drivers and stocktakers and had nothing to do with a hugely successful consumer-oriented tablet that created a new market segment a few years back.
You know, I really don't think that Apple deserves protection for "double-click-to-zoom", but to try and pretend that the current generation of tablets and smartphones weren't deliberate imitations of the iPad/iPhone is complete denial of reality (not to mention a shedload of "how can we make this more like an iPad" memos that turned up in the trial).
This isn't about patents and conceptual design and innovation. This is about blatant copycat ripoff knockoff cloning, right down the the boxes the products ship in, the 30-pin dock connector, and the identical wall wart.
...and I suspect that is what the Jury were thinking of, rather than looking at rounded corners.
The downside is the resulting reinforcement of patents on pinch-to-zoom, bounce scrolling, double-click-to-zoom etc. It's one thing for Samsung to be stung - they knowingly violated a whole tranche of these to produce a directly competing product - but these patents would be a real menace if asserted against individual developers, especially against open source software that can't afford to pay 10c for every user interface element.
How close should a competitor be able to do a "Me Too" copy on a device?
Did anyone complain when IE looked like a clone of Mozilla/Netscape?
Do the research. The design of Both IE and Netscape was predated by NCSA Mosaic.
Netscape was written by former Mosaic developers (and was originally going to be called Mosaic), the original IE was a licensed re-badge of Spyglass Mosaic, which was a licensed re-write of NCSA Mosaic.