Look at the patent is question. It's an idea, not an implementation. I don't imagine Motorola copied Apple's code to implement it. This is the problem with software patents. Even if Motorola's implementation is vastly more efficient... still 'infringing'.
It's not an "idea". It is a user interface element that gives users intuitable feedback about what is happening, and that user interface element didn't exist before Apple invented it. And I thought by now anyone would know that for patents it doesn't matter whether you copy someone else's implementation, what matters is that your implementation does the same thing.
Woz is so cool. If only he were Apple's CEO, we wouldn't be having all these lawsuits, and we'd probably have some REAL innovation from Apple (not catching up to making a 4" screen and including LTE). C'mon, smartphone makers, where's that long-lasting battery power (perhaps with a solar panel on the back to boot)? Where's that built-in holographic projector (a la R2-D2)? Think how useful that would be in the corporate world! (Not to mention gaming!)
If he were Apple's CEO, there would be no Apple anymore.
No the iPhone was first shown and demoed on Jan 2007, the F700 was first shown and demoed at Cebit 2006 (which is in March).
No, the F700 was first shown and demoed at Cebit 2007 (which is in March), but some f***ing idiot published forged reports of the 2007 event where the "2007" was replaced with "2006". Can't blame you falling for it, but you can still google for "Cebit 2006" and find what new phones including new Samsung phones were shown there, and the F700 isn't. Nothing remotely like an F700 or an iPhone is there. You can also google for "Cebit 2007" and you'll find the F700.
It isn't that only Samsung can copy Apple. But if Apple copy Braun and then Samsung copy Braun and Apple sues Samsung from copying Apple, is it really copying Apple and not copying Braun? The times can be in order of "Braun > Apple > Samsung". But the influence can be "Braun > Apple" and "Braun > Samsung".
I know there are photos around on the internet that claim to prove that Apple has been copying Braun. They don't. (I mean the photos don't prove it). For example, there is a Braun radio supposed to look like an iPod, but they had to stand it upright on the edge - which no user would do, because it would be likely to topple over, and the took a photo exactly from the front, so you can't see it is two inches deep and not flat like an iPod. The most blatant is a photo of a Braun calculator that looks almost _exactly_ like what is supposedly the photo of the calculator app on the iPhone, accept that the iPhone photo is just photoshopped and the actual app looks quite different.
Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
Would you want an app on the larger iPhone 5 to display the exact same image as on the iPhone 4, just stretched? That would be crap.
And the whole point of the larger screen is to display more stuff, so anything that automatically doesn't change what the code does would be nonsense.
No, it is quite right. The law states that liability for infringement is on the subscriber of the internet service.
No, he is not liable for infringement. He is responsible for securing his connection so that others can't infringe, and failing to do this is what he was fined for. The infringer is liable for infringement, but since the connection was not secured (for which he was fined), it is very, very hard to prove who the infringer was.
LTE is an international standard. That means that either Samsung's LTE-related patents are covered under a FRAND agreement, or Samsung will lose the right to use all of the LTE-related patents that are covered under a FRAND agreement if they try to sue over LTE. Suing over standard-essential patents is just stupid, and won't help Samsung at all.
_If_ Samsung could stop Apple from shipping the iPhone 5 with LTE in some area, then Apple would need only _one_ valid LTE patent to stop anyone shipping LTE phones in that area. Since Apple has over 400, you could be sure that Samsung wouldn't ship in that area either. (This all won't happen because of FRAND licensing requirements, but that would be the consequence).
Pay above-suicide wages, provide decent work environment and career path maybe?
You are quite frankly talking out of your arse. Suicides at Foxconn have surely been reported widely, however if you look at the actual statistics, the suicide rate at Foxconn is about three times lower than the suicide rate in the USA, and about equal to the rate of retail employees in the USA that are _murdered_ while they are doing their job.
The USA has a high suicide rates especially among males because of the wide availability of guns - the rate of attempted suicides is not especially high, but the availability of guns means that more suicide attempts are "successful". Something similar happened at Foxconn: It turns out that jumping off a high building produces a good chance of making suicide attempts "successful". And Foxconn _took action_ against that saving the lives of some people who had problems with their girl friends, mental problems, any of hundreds of possible reasons to commit suicide. What is especially commendable is that they did this even though they must have fully known that the idiots would take whatever they did and hold it against Foxconn.
So, while the value of what was downloaded is probably about $30, the value of a license legally allowing you to copy and distribute copyrighted material is worth a hell of a lot more than $30.
Well, it's not. Obviously the record company will not sell you a license that covers uploading the dozen songs that people would download from your computer, because the fair value of such a license is much too low for them to bother. But let's say there are 10 million people in the USA who would like to make their music collection available to everyone else. If these 10 million people all purchased a license for $1000 per person, that would be $10 billion for the recording industry. Would you seriously suggest that such a license would be worth more than $1,000?
Case in point - the judgment in this case was less than $10K/song (it is not the court nor law's fault that she did it 24 times). OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33M for the wrongful death of Ron Goldman. So it seems like the 'liability' for murder is approx 33000 times greater than the liability for copyright infringement.
Your number is wrong - about $10,000,000, not $33,000,000. And yor maths is wrong: With your numbers, it would have been 3,300 times the amount, with the correct numbers 1,000 times.
So killing someone is the same as "stealing" 1,000 songs worth much less than $1,000.
This isn't a case of lack of knowledge of the technology. It's a case of the law being absurd, and the judges hands being tied. It's absurd that sharing a couple dozen songs can carry a greater liability than murdering someone (I'm talking civil law here).
The law is not absurd. The problem is that there is a penalty of "up to $150,000" for copying a song, which would probably appropriate if let's say a day after Michael Jackson's death a record company had released a CD "Michael Jackson's greatest hits" without owning the copyrights, and sold millions of that. But the jury doesn't realise that this is the amount for truly amazing cases of copyright infringement, and what Miss Thomas has done is nowhere near this, and therefore doesn't deserve anything near $9,250 per song.
As a comparison, in Apple vs. Psystar it was proven that Psystar made somewhere between 700 and 800 illegal copies of MacOS X, which sold for $129, and was fined $30,000. Compare that to paying $9,250 for making an unproven number of copies of a song that can be bought for $0.99. At the same rate, the $9,250 would only be fair if it was proven that she made about 30,000 copies of each song, or 720,000 songs in total. Or 2,880 Gigabyte of music.
Apple's whole arguement is that it isn't fair becuase the 2.5% is based on the handset cost. Thus the Nokia POS, that costs 50$ pays a licencing fee of 1.25$. However because Apple's phone costs 800$ the fee is 20$. So they have to pay 20x what someone else pays for the same technology.
An iPhone, like many other phones, is much more than a phone. It's a music player, a games console, a video player, and lots and lots of other things. While it may be fair to ask for 2.5% of the phone part, Samsung wants 2.5% of the music player, the games console, the video player, and so on. The iPhone comes with 16, 32, or 64 GB of memory with some price difference. Samsung wants 2.5% of that price difference as well.
but we told them so. WE TOLD THEM. They did not listen. And now? Vindication.
If you read the article, this sounds very much like a Windows-only IT man, who claims without proof that the decision to buy iPads was made by a "fashion-conscious headmaster", and who is either too stupid or not willing to fix problems that turn up.
The article questioned spending the money for an entire TV when you can buy a cable to connect to an existing TV for much less.
An AppleTV is not a TV. It is a device that connects to a TV and that allows you, among many other things, to either mirror whatever the iPad shows on the your TV (without any cables), or to use the TV as a second display for the iPad.
By Steve Jobs own words, and Apple's continued actions, this won't end until Apple is pounded into the ground and nothing but dust is left.
No, that's not what he said. I think this will end when Samsung as a whole figures out that copying Apple is too expensive. Or when the VP for electronic parts beats up his collegues selling mobile phones because they cause him to make less profit.
Or guess what would happen if Apple took five or so of its billions and builds a search engine that does what people actually want: Give them the things that they are looking for instead of serving up paid for websites. That would do wonders for Google's business.
Well there are lots of ways to get your data across the air: light, smoke, ultrasound, you name it - but the LTE design is Samsungs and they think that innovation helps consumers.
Well, no, the LTE design isn't Samsung's. LTE is covered by about 6,000 patents, of which Samsung owns many hundred, and Apple owns several hundred as well. So if Samsung could stop Apple from selling an LTE phone, then you could be one hundred percent sure that LTE is _dead_.
And that's why standards come with FRAND licensing conditions. Because otherwise there would be many, many parties that could kill the standard by refusing to license their patents.
One goal should always be to make an attack expensive. That doesn't help _your_ app very much, but it helps _everyone_. If it was more expensive to attack _your_ app, then the attacker has less money or time to spend on attacking other apps, and if other apps are more expensive to attack, then anyone who attacked those apps has less money and time to attack your app.
The perfect app would be one that is actually safe, but looks as if it could be attacked successfully, making an attacker waste their time. So obfuscation as _first_ line of defense is useful. Not as protection, but as a drain on the bad guys' money.
Anyone who writes mobile apps _must_ have noticed that Apple is removing the APIs to read UDIDs (Universal Device Identifiers) - because of privacy concerns, and because using a device to identify a user is stupid in the first place. IMEI numbers are supposed to be unchangeable, so they are UDIDs as well, so it is obvious that the reasons why UDIDs shouldn't be used apply to IMEI numbers as well.
I don't write Android code, but I would be sure that they have some easy means for an app to generate a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) and stash it away safely, which is what an app should use.
In order to put my own code onto my own device I need to buy a A$2,000 machine as well as $99 per year (yep, you forgot it was a yearly fee) just to put it on a device I already own.
This gets boring. You can get a Mac for under A$1,000, and then you can't just develop code for iDevices, you also have a Mac. If you get upset about $99 per year, are we adults here? Metrowerks Codewarrior would have killed you (usually 3 release per year, $400 each).
We are talking about a device used by a legitimate company, so I would assume that all music would be properly licensed and paid for. I wouldn't think for one second that they would want to pay for 160 GB of music.
On the other hand, Apple went into extreme efforts to encrypt the ipod so that it becomes near impossible to have it run your own firmware. Apple will allow you to write apps, as long as they agree with your app and it doesn't duplicate functionality. Try writing a replacement music player app for your ipod. Good luck.
Only a madman would want to create their own firmware for an iPod. And $99 for the developer license gives you complete freedom to put any code you want on up to 200 iDevices. Apple doesn't look at it whatsoever. So if the guy wants to write a replacement music player app for 200 iPods there is nothing and nobody stopping him.
I don't know where you got this from. Apple has no problems putting open source software on the App Store, for example. Some open source software developers however have a problem with that.
To put your own code onto an iPod Touch, what you need is a Mac, $99 for a developer account, and you can install any software you write on up to 200 iOS devices of your choice. No need for hacking at all. No restrictions on what your code does.
There was a case in Dallas some years ago like this. The guy worked as a window installer.
Some very dangerous criminal (I think the Unabomber, but I may be wrong) was caught because the police found a finger print on a letter that he wrote. Not the criminal's finger print, but the finger print of a completely innocent employee at a copying shop. Which lead them to the shop and from there to the criminal.
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Look at the patent is question. It's an idea, not an implementation. I don't imagine Motorola copied Apple's code to implement it. This is the problem with software patents. Even if Motorola's implementation is vastly more efficient ... still 'infringing'.
It's not an "idea". It is a user interface element that gives users intuitable feedback about what is happening, and that user interface element didn't exist before Apple invented it. And I thought by now anyone would know that for patents it doesn't matter whether you copy someone else's implementation, what matters is that your implementation does the same thing.
The judge probably has no clue the "stolen" feature copied from Apple can be disabled with a software update.
The judge may or may not know that, but it doesn't matter. The point is that the feature _is not_ disabled. Motorola is free to change their phones.
Woz is so cool. If only he were Apple's CEO, we wouldn't be having all these lawsuits, and we'd probably have some REAL innovation from Apple (not catching up to making a 4" screen and including LTE). C'mon, smartphone makers, where's that long-lasting battery power (perhaps with a solar panel on the back to boot)? Where's that built-in holographic projector (a la R2-D2)? Think how useful that would be in the corporate world! (Not to mention gaming!)
If he were Apple's CEO, there would be no Apple anymore.
No the iPhone was first shown and demoed on Jan 2007, the F700 was first shown and demoed at Cebit 2006 (which is in March).
No, the F700 was first shown and demoed at Cebit 2007 (which is in March), but some f***ing idiot published forged reports of the 2007 event where the "2007" was replaced with "2006". Can't blame you falling for it, but you can still google for "Cebit 2006" and find what new phones including new Samsung phones were shown there, and the F700 isn't. Nothing remotely like an F700 or an iPhone is there. You can also google for "Cebit 2007" and you'll find the F700.
It isn't that only Samsung can copy Apple. But if Apple copy Braun and then Samsung copy Braun and Apple sues Samsung from copying Apple, is it really copying Apple and not copying Braun? The times can be in order of "Braun > Apple > Samsung". But the influence can be "Braun > Apple" and "Braun > Samsung".
I know there are photos around on the internet that claim to prove that Apple has been copying Braun. They don't. (I mean the photos don't prove it). For example, there is a Braun radio supposed to look like an iPod, but they had to stand it upright on the edge - which no user would do, because it would be likely to topple over, and the took a photo exactly from the front, so you can't see it is two inches deep and not flat like an iPod. The most blatant is a photo of a Braun calculator that looks almost _exactly_ like what is supposedly the photo of the calculator app on the iPhone, accept that the iPhone photo is just photoshopped and the actual app looks quite different.
Now Apple decides it's time to make a phone with an entirely different aspect ratio. Really, what was the point of bothering with the resolution-independent screen positioning in their API's in the first place if they were just going to go and produce a completely different screen size that the programmer is going to have to write extra code to account for anyways?
Would you want an app on the larger iPhone 5 to display the exact same image as on the iPhone 4, just stretched? That would be crap.
And the whole point of the larger screen is to display more stuff, so anything that automatically doesn't change what the code does would be nonsense.
No, it is quite right. The law states that liability for infringement is on the subscriber of the internet service.
No, he is not liable for infringement. He is responsible for securing his connection so that others can't infringe, and failing to do this is what he was fined for. The infringer is liable for infringement, but since the connection was not secured (for which he was fined), it is very, very hard to prove who the infringer was.
LTE is an international standard. That means that either Samsung's LTE-related patents are covered under a FRAND agreement, or Samsung will lose the right to use all of the LTE-related patents that are covered under a FRAND agreement if they try to sue over LTE. Suing over standard-essential patents is just stupid, and won't help Samsung at all.
_If_ Samsung could stop Apple from shipping the iPhone 5 with LTE in some area, then Apple would need only _one_ valid LTE patent to stop anyone shipping LTE phones in that area. Since Apple has over 400, you could be sure that Samsung wouldn't ship in that area either. (This all won't happen because of FRAND licensing requirements, but that would be the consequence).
Pay above-suicide wages, provide decent work environment and career path maybe?
You are quite frankly talking out of your arse. Suicides at Foxconn have surely been reported widely, however if you look at the actual statistics, the suicide rate at Foxconn is about three times lower than the suicide rate in the USA, and about equal to the rate of retail employees in the USA that are _murdered_ while they are doing their job.
The USA has a high suicide rates especially among males because of the wide availability of guns - the rate of attempted suicides is not especially high, but the availability of guns means that more suicide attempts are "successful". Something similar happened at Foxconn: It turns out that jumping off a high building produces a good chance of making suicide attempts "successful". And Foxconn _took action_ against that saving the lives of some people who had problems with their girl friends, mental problems, any of hundreds of possible reasons to commit suicide. What is especially commendable is that they did this even though they must have fully known that the idiots would take whatever they did and hold it against Foxconn.
So, while the value of what was downloaded is probably about $30, the value of a license legally allowing you to copy and distribute copyrighted material is worth a hell of a lot more than $30.
Well, it's not. Obviously the record company will not sell you a license that covers uploading the dozen songs that people would download from your computer, because the fair value of such a license is much too low for them to bother. But let's say there are 10 million people in the USA who would like to make their music collection available to everyone else. If these 10 million people all purchased a license for $1000 per person, that would be $10 billion for the recording industry. Would you seriously suggest that such a license would be worth more than $1,000?
Case in point - the judgment in this case was less than $10K/song (it is not the court nor law's fault that she did it 24 times). OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33M for the wrongful death of Ron Goldman. So it seems like the 'liability' for murder is approx 33000 times greater than the liability for copyright infringement.
Your number is wrong - about $10,000,000, not $33,000,000. And yor maths is wrong: With your numbers, it would have been 3,300 times the amount, with the correct numbers 1,000 times.
So killing someone is the same as "stealing" 1,000 songs worth much less than $1,000.
This isn't a case of lack of knowledge of the technology. It's a case of the law being absurd, and the judges hands being tied. It's absurd that sharing a couple dozen songs can carry a greater liability than murdering someone (I'm talking civil law here).
The law is not absurd. The problem is that there is a penalty of "up to $150,000" for copying a song, which would probably appropriate if let's say a day after Michael Jackson's death a record company had released a CD "Michael Jackson's greatest hits" without owning the copyrights, and sold millions of that. But the jury doesn't realise that this is the amount for truly amazing cases of copyright infringement, and what Miss Thomas has done is nowhere near this, and therefore doesn't deserve anything near $9,250 per song.
As a comparison, in Apple vs. Psystar it was proven that Psystar made somewhere between 700 and 800 illegal copies of MacOS X, which sold for $129, and was fined $30,000. Compare that to paying $9,250 for making an unproven number of copies of a song that can be bought for $0.99. At the same rate, the $9,250 would only be fair if it was proven that she made about 30,000 copies of each song, or 720,000 songs in total. Or 2,880 Gigabyte of music.
Apple's whole arguement is that it isn't fair becuase the 2.5% is based on the handset cost. Thus the Nokia POS, that costs 50$ pays a licencing fee of 1.25$. However because Apple's phone costs 800$ the fee is 20$. So they have to pay 20x what someone else pays for the same technology.
An iPhone, like many other phones, is much more than a phone. It's a music player, a games console, a video player, and lots and lots of other things. While it may be fair to ask for 2.5% of the phone part, Samsung wants 2.5% of the music player, the games console, the video player, and so on. The iPhone comes with 16, 32, or 64 GB of memory with some price difference. Samsung wants 2.5% of that price difference as well.
but we told them so. WE TOLD THEM. They did not listen. And now? Vindication.
If you read the article, this sounds very much like a Windows-only IT man, who claims without proof that the decision to buy iPads was made by a "fashion-conscious headmaster", and who is either too stupid or not willing to fix problems that turn up.
The article questioned spending the money for an entire TV when you can buy a cable to connect to an existing TV for much less.
An AppleTV is not a TV. It is a device that connects to a TV and that allows you, among many other things, to either mirror whatever the iPad shows on the your TV (without any cables), or to use the TV as a second display for the iPad.
By Steve Jobs own words, and Apple's continued actions, this won't end until Apple is pounded into the ground and nothing but dust is left.
No, that's not what he said. I think this will end when Samsung as a whole figures out that copying Apple is too expensive. Or when the VP for electronic parts beats up his collegues selling mobile phones because they cause him to make less profit.
Or guess what would happen if Apple took five or so of its billions and builds a search engine that does what people actually want: Give them the things that they are looking for instead of serving up paid for websites. That would do wonders for Google's business.
Well there are lots of ways to get your data across the air: light, smoke, ultrasound, you name it - but the LTE design is Samsungs and they think that innovation helps consumers.
Well, no, the LTE design isn't Samsung's. LTE is covered by about 6,000 patents, of which Samsung owns many hundred, and Apple owns several hundred as well. So if Samsung could stop Apple from selling an LTE phone, then you could be one hundred percent sure that LTE is _dead_.
And that's why standards come with FRAND licensing conditions. Because otherwise there would be many, many parties that could kill the standard by refusing to license their patents.
Hmmm, do I see a pattern, Germany not wanting to remember the holocaust,
Excuse me? Where do you get that shit from?
One goal should always be to make an attack expensive. That doesn't help _your_ app very much, but it helps _everyone_. If it was more expensive to attack _your_ app, then the attacker has less money or time to spend on attacking other apps, and if other apps are more expensive to attack, then anyone who attacked those apps has less money and time to attack your app.
The perfect app would be one that is actually safe, but looks as if it could be attacked successfully, making an attacker waste their time. So obfuscation as _first_ line of defense is useful. Not as protection, but as a drain on the bad guys' money.
Anyone who writes mobile apps _must_ have noticed that Apple is removing the APIs to read UDIDs (Universal Device Identifiers) - because of privacy concerns, and because using a device to identify a user is stupid in the first place. IMEI numbers are supposed to be unchangeable, so they are UDIDs as well, so it is obvious that the reasons why UDIDs shouldn't be used apply to IMEI numbers as well.
I don't write Android code, but I would be sure that they have some easy means for an app to generate a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) and stash it away safely, which is what an app should use.
In order to put my own code onto my own device I need to buy a A$2,000 machine as well as $99 per year (yep, you forgot it was a yearly fee) just to put it on a device I already own.
This gets boring. You can get a Mac for under A$1,000, and then you can't just develop code for iDevices, you also have a Mac. If you get upset about $99 per year, are we adults here? Metrowerks Codewarrior would have killed you (usually 3 release per year, $400 each).
Large library size (160gbs), ...
We are talking about a device used by a legitimate company, so I would assume that all music would be properly licensed and paid for. I wouldn't think for one second that they would want to pay for 160 GB of music.
On the other hand, Apple went into extreme efforts to encrypt the ipod so that it becomes near impossible to have it run your own firmware. Apple will allow you to write apps, as long as they agree with your app and it doesn't duplicate functionality. Try writing a replacement music player app for your ipod. Good luck.
Only a madman would want to create their own firmware for an iPod. And $99 for the developer license gives you complete freedom to put any code you want on up to 200 iDevices. Apple doesn't look at it whatsoever. So if the guy wants to write a replacement music player app for 200 iPods there is nothing and nobody stopping him.
I don't know where you got this from. Apple has no problems putting open source software on the App Store, for example. Some open source software developers however have a problem with that.
To put your own code onto an iPod Touch, what you need is a Mac, $99 for a developer account, and you can install any software you write on up to 200 iOS devices of your choice. No need for hacking at all. No restrictions on what your code does.
There was a case in Dallas some years ago like this. The guy worked as a window installer.
Some very dangerous criminal (I think the Unabomber, but I may be wrong) was caught because the police found a finger print on a letter that he wrote. Not the criminal's finger print, but the finger print of a completely innocent employee at a copying shop. Which lead them to the shop and from there to the criminal.