Yes, God personally intervened to save Amazon from Apple. On the other hand He chose not to stop Amazon's one-click patent.
It has actually been rejected as obvious in Europe by using the correct interpretation as obvious. The person to whom an invention would have to be obvious to be rejected as a patent is assumed to have total and complete knowledge and understanding of all published inventions in the field (in other words more knowledge and understanding than even the cleverest slashdotters) and infinite patience and time to try all combinations of obvious things that can be reasonably expected to lead to the desired goal.
So Amazon used browser cookies to implement one-click ordering. While your average juror has never heard of browser cookies and is impressed by the cleverness in using them to implement one-click ordering, the relevant person has total and complete knowledge of anything published how cookies work and what they are used for, so that person _knows_ that browser cookies can be used to hold the information that is needed to implement one-click ordering, so using them is obvious, and with that out of the way there is no inventive step in one-click ordering.
After one angry mail his app got a sprecial promotion and he got 180,000 donwloads in a single day,
180,000 downloads, many of them going to people who most definitely couldn't use the app which Amazon should have known. That's a lot of people annoyed with his app, giving him tons of undeserved bad reviews, destroying his chances of making decent money with the app.
As you said: "What shit treatment they give him, bastards!". Only I am not sarcastic here.
I almost wanted to stop reading after the first point the developer made. Amazon rejected his application because it used an insecure communication channel over the internet. Cry me a river. I actually applaud Amazon for doing that.
You realize that slashdot uses an insecure communication channel over the internet? The developer used http to deliver game levels to the customer. No personal data, no need for security.
Then anyone can. So do you want your internet held to the same free speech standards that you'd find in China or, let's say, Libya? Do you want some Muslim cleric sentencing US or UK site-owners to death by stoning because of their depictions of women? Do you want China issuing arrest warrants on some guy in Minnesota because he was talking about Tibet?
Libya is a bad example, since the population is in the process of overthrowing their dictator, who thinks nothing of killing the people of his country to hold on to power a little bit longer.
But fact is that it would be quite possible for a US site-owner to be convicted to death by stoning if what they are doing is bad enough according to the law of some country, and if that country feels it has jurisdiction. If that happened, it would be unlikely that the site owner would be extradited if the problem was merely "depiction of women", but it would happen if what the site owner did was a crime worth a death sentence according to US law. And it would be very, very unwise of the site owner to visit the country in question.
Technically, I agree with you. But just to play the devil's advocate, should a government employee be expected to give up all rights to individual privacy just because they work for the government? Would you say the same of an office worker who found out they were being secretly recorded by their boss?
If we are in an equal position, they have every right to privacy. However, the fact is that in case there is some disagreement that ended up in court, the policeman's word would be believed over mine, because he is a policeman. Therefore, I must insist that he doesn't have a right to privacy, because I must to be able to record the true situation, to record factual evidence that would be believed over the word of a policeman.
Oh yeah. And actually I think I was thinking of Amelio who nearly killed the company, or maybe he was just the fall guy after Sculley's shenanigans?
I actually have lots of respect for Amelio's work at Apple. When he started, Apple was in big shit. He stopped Apple from getting deeper into trouble, and he called the man back in who then saved the company, fully knowing who would get the blame for everything. There are few people who would have done a better job.
I don't typically defend Apple but how are they "anticompetative" in music players, phones or phone apps?
Lots of people just have problems distinguishing between "competitive" and "anticompetitive". "Compete" doesn't mean "able to beat".
Can I climb in a boxing ring and compete with Mike Tyson? Yes, I can, although it will be a short and painful experience. But I can compete with him. I can't beat him, but I can compete. Keeping me out of the boxing ring would be anti-competitive.
Making a better product is not anti-competitive. It is tough on the competitors, but that's the idea of competition, that you beat your competitors. Things become anti-competitive if you prevent competitors from competing. If Apple sells TVs + other hardware together then other TV makers can compete by selling better TVs or cheaper TVs or bundle them with even better hardware. If you needed a certain box to receive any TV programs, and Apple was the only one building that box, and then Apple decided to sell that box only with an Apple TV, that would be anti-competitive, because nobody would buy other TVs even if they were better and/or cheaper, so other makers could not compete anymore.
A monopoly isn't a requirement for an anti-competitive lawsuit, and neither is a monopoly. You must have abused the market in such a way to force others to compete at a disadvantage.
So what disadvantage would Samsung have selling TVs that work equally fine with or without other Apple products when Apple only sells TVs together with other products? Apple would actually put itself at a disadvantage here, because you couldn't buy the TV on its own.
This would be anti-competitive if the other Apple products were so strong that nobody would want any TV without them.
Multi touch interfaces have been around for quite a while. Hell, I made a 4 inputs custom driver for windows XP in 2003 (that`s all I could manage from the free samples I had ordered, but it could have scaled upward if I had wanted to) and implanted some generic gesture recognition.
Great. Did you publish it? If you published it, is it actual prior art?
That raises an interesting question. If I rip a song using a particular program from a particular pressing of a CD, and you rip it using the same program from the same pressing of a CD, will the two end up with identical hashes? I've always been under the impression that ripping audio data wasn't entirely deterministic from a CD (no error correction), and thus two rips even with identical software and settings won't necessarily byte-for-byte match.
Not identical. The CD drive cannot determine accurately when a song starts, so when you rip a song, and then rip it again from the same CD on the same computer, each rip will have a small random amount of silence at the beginning. Then there is the question whether conversion to AAC or MP3 is deterministic, which depending on the software it might not be. Next anything in a Quicktime wrapper contains the creation date inside the file (which caused paranoia when people figured out that iTunes sets the creation date of files downloaded from the iTunes store to the time the file was created on the computer, so two people downloading the same song would never get identical files). That also means two AAC files created at different times will always be different.
Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
No two files downloaded from iTunes are identical. No two files produced by ripping the identical CD are identical. No two files produce by ripping the same LP twice are anywhere near similar.
Will Apple make more money selling music at $0.99/track, or $hundreds_or_thousands_or_millions selling infringers to the lawyers?
Apple makes billions every quarter selling hardware to their customers. "Happy customers" is worth billions and billions to them. Do you really think they would give one damn about any amount of money the record industry could pay them, when that would turn their customers into "unhappy customers"?
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law. Apple's employees probably care a lot more about not going to jail for contempt of court than they do about getting your business or being cool.
Should any of the record companies try to pull that off, I'll bet that their share holders will receive an offer they cannot refuse, and when Apple has bought them out everyone responsible will be fired. That would be the only way Apple could prevent total damage to their business, so that is what they would do.
Do you ACs get paid to post crap like this? This's The People's Republic of China we're talking about, not just any other "their country."
This is not the People's Republic of China we are talking about, this is the CEO of a not very large company bribing Foxconn employees, and a Foxconn employee working in Research & Development allowing himself to be bribed to give confidential information to outsiders. You'd go to court and probably to jail in any western country for the same crime.
So some Chinee bigshot can tell Steve that his secrets are safe.
Most idiotic thing I've seen posted here. Do you think Apple has no right to ask suppliers to not give details of future products away? And do you think suppliers then don't have a duty to tell their employees? And do you think that employees who are told that part of their job is to not talk about their customers' future products then have the right to sell exactly that information to the highest bidder?
I still think he cannot force them to release their code under the GPL. They can just say "no", and then he has the right to sue them and will win, making them pay damages and making them stop distributing their product.
It is an interesting situation. Mr. Welte cannot force AVM to do something, but he can quite clearly tell them "if you do what you intend to do then you are committing copyright infringement" with the consequence that AVM might be in for some serious consequences.
Actually, I think at this point AVM has already been distributing the software in violation of the GPL terms. So the GPL license doesn't apply here anymore. So the fact is: AVM took some copyrighted code that they have no right to distribute, modified and hopefully improved it, distributed it, and claim to have rights in the resulting code. So what legal rights, if any, do they have in the code? How would the situation be different if the copyrighted code was some code stolen from Microsoft, or some code they could legally distribute after paying a million dollars which they didn't?
It would be reasonable to say in my opinion that the third party, Cybits here, should have the same rights as if AVM had acted in a way that didn't involve copyright infringement. So in the case of GPL'd software, Cybits should stand as if AVM hadn't breached the GPL license. If AVM had stolen Microsoft code, then Cybits should stand as if AVM hadn't stolen the code, so there would be no router software that Cybits could modify.
The real question here is, why did it take the judge so long to reach such a common sense answer? A lot of people have been twisting in the wind waiting for this definitive slap-down.
If you read the judgment, you'll find the answer: Because Righthaven lied to the court. By law, Righthaven had to disclose anyone having a financial interest in the lawsuit, and they didn't do that. It took a while for someone to find out that Righthaven was lying. Now the court knows, and the court knows that Righthaven was withholding information and acting dishonestly in 200 cases in that district alone, and is giving Righthaven 14 days time to explain why they shouldn't be sanctioned.
1. Fistful of sleeping pills
2. Carbon monoxide in the garage
3. It'll be painful at first but jumping in an icy river will do you in quick and you'll go out peacefully.
I am told that in the USA at least, sleeping pills have a small additive that will make you throw up. Not when you take enough to sleep, but when you take enough to kill yourself. There is substantial risk that you wake up with severe damage.
2. Catalytic converter makes this an awful lot harder. There is substantial risk that you wake up with severe damage.
3. Severe risk that someone tries to be a hero, and dies trying to save you. Or saves you, with severe damage to you.
But the biggest problem is this: I value life an awful lot. Even when its quite bad it is still better than the alternative. With a disease like Alzheimer's, or other diseases shown in the program, if I were in a state where I am still capable of committing suicide, I wouldn't want to. If I were in a state where I was incapable of committing suicide, that is where I would consider it.
Fine summary, except that you leave one detail out: Apple always agreed to pay Nokia the same license fees that other phone makers are paying. Apple just disagreed with having to pay more, and allowing Nokia to use iPhone user interface patents on top of that.
From what is publicly known, nobody can say whether this is a win for Nokia, or for Apple, or a compromise. Apple was willing to pay $X + no patents, Nokia wanted $Y + patents, and now Apple is paying $Z + some patents but not the ones Nokia asked for. Since we don't know what X, Y and Z are, we don't know who won. (We can probably find out what Apple was offering and what Nokia was demanding originally; that would be a number X' less than X, and a number Y' greater than Y.
Apple got sued because they didn't want to pay the licensing fees *everyone* else are paying.
A complaint about FUD shouldn't be followed by misinformation. Apple always _agreed_ to pay the licensing fees _everyone else_ was paying. Nokia wanted _more_ from Apple than from others, plus some iPhone user interface patents thrown in, and Apple disagreed with that.
And to remember: Nokia wanted access to some of Apple's user interface IP, probably to use that IP in Symbian. Now Nokia is going to build Windows phones, these patents wouldn't be Nokia's problem anymore, but Microsoft's problems. And the public's perception of the lawsuit may have changed: Two years ago it was the phone giant suing the little newcomer; now it looks more like a desperate move (when you can't succeed in the market you try to "monetize your intellectual property").
The analogue is in somebody buying ipad.com (which AFAIK Apple doesn't own). Just because Apple bought icloud.com doesn't give them a trademark, otherwise the trademark system should just be shut down in favor of the domain name system.
True, buying iCloud.com doesn't give Apple a trademark. Buying the iCloud trademark from the proper owner for $4.5 million however gives Apple the trademark.
Because you don't have to apply for a trademark to have it legally protected. It helps, sure, but it isn't required. If the report is true, and iCloud has been operating under that name since 2005, then Apple is in the wrong.
Apple bought the trademarks for iCloud from Xcerion, which owned them for almost two years. iCloud Communications had lots and lots of time to do something about Xcerion and didn't. Now that Xcerion got 4.5 million dollars for the trademark they want to get in on the deal. It's too late.
Latest news: Anonymous activists broke into Alaska government offices, turned on a photo copier, and copied 24,000 pages of e-mails. They escaped using a fleet of 20 dogsleds.
Why do I have a feeling that the Steve Jobs story is going to end with him and a large number of followers drinking arsenic-laced kool-aid in an effort to travel to the alien home planet of Klatlun?
If that's your feeling, you should seriously ask for medical help.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, God personally intervened to save Amazon from Apple. On the other hand He chose not to stop Amazon's one-click patent.
It has actually been rejected as obvious in Europe by using the correct interpretation as obvious. The person to whom an invention would have to be obvious to be rejected as a patent is assumed to have total and complete knowledge and understanding of all published inventions in the field (in other words more knowledge and understanding than even the cleverest slashdotters) and infinite patience and time to try all combinations of obvious things that can be reasonably expected to lead to the desired goal.
So Amazon used browser cookies to implement one-click ordering. While your average juror has never heard of browser cookies and is impressed by the cleverness in using them to implement one-click ordering, the relevant person has total and complete knowledge of anything published how cookies work and what they are used for, so that person _knows_ that browser cookies can be used to hold the information that is needed to implement one-click ordering, so using them is obvious, and with that out of the way there is no inventive step in one-click ordering.
After one angry mail his app got a sprecial promotion and he got 180,000 donwloads in a single day,
180,000 downloads, many of them going to people who most definitely couldn't use the app which Amazon should have known. That's a lot of people annoyed with his app, giving him tons of undeserved bad reviews, destroying his chances of making decent money with the app.
As you said: "What shit treatment they give him, bastards!". Only I am not sarcastic here.
I almost wanted to stop reading after the first point the developer made. Amazon rejected his application because it used an insecure communication channel over the internet. Cry me a river. I actually applaud Amazon for doing that.
You realize that slashdot uses an insecure communication channel over the internet? The developer used http to deliver game levels to the customer. No personal data, no need for security.
And this beats a portable hard disk with your music on precisely how?
My wife can use it.
Then anyone can. So do you want your internet held to the same free speech standards that you'd find in China or, let's say, Libya? Do you want some Muslim cleric sentencing US or UK site-owners to death by stoning because of their depictions of women? Do you want China issuing arrest warrants on some guy in Minnesota because he was talking about Tibet?
Libya is a bad example, since the population is in the process of overthrowing their dictator, who thinks nothing of killing the people of his country to hold on to power a little bit longer.
But fact is that it would be quite possible for a US site-owner to be convicted to death by stoning if what they are doing is bad enough according to the law of some country, and if that country feels it has jurisdiction. If that happened, it would be unlikely that the site owner would be extradited if the problem was merely "depiction of women", but it would happen if what the site owner did was a crime worth a death sentence according to US law. And it would be very, very unwise of the site owner to visit the country in question.
Technically, I agree with you. But just to play the devil's advocate, should a government employee be expected to give up all rights to individual privacy just because they work for the government? Would you say the same of an office worker who found out they were being secretly recorded by their boss?
If we are in an equal position, they have every right to privacy. However, the fact is that in case there is some disagreement that ended up in court, the policeman's word would be believed over mine, because he is a policeman. Therefore, I must insist that he doesn't have a right to privacy, because I must to be able to record the true situation, to record factual evidence that would be believed over the word of a policeman.
Oh yeah. And actually I think I was thinking of Amelio who nearly killed the company, or maybe he was just the fall guy after Sculley's shenanigans?
I actually have lots of respect for Amelio's work at Apple. When he started, Apple was in big shit. He stopped Apple from getting deeper into trouble, and he called the man back in who then saved the company, fully knowing who would get the blame for everything. There are few people who would have done a better job.
I don't typically defend Apple but how are they "anticompetative" in music players, phones or phone apps?
Lots of people just have problems distinguishing between "competitive" and "anticompetitive". "Compete" doesn't mean "able to beat".
Can I climb in a boxing ring and compete with Mike Tyson? Yes, I can, although it will be a short and painful experience. But I can compete with him. I can't beat him, but I can compete. Keeping me out of the boxing ring would be anti-competitive.
Making a better product is not anti-competitive. It is tough on the competitors, but that's the idea of competition, that you beat your competitors. Things become anti-competitive if you prevent competitors from competing. If Apple sells TVs + other hardware together then other TV makers can compete by selling better TVs or cheaper TVs or bundle them with even better hardware. If you needed a certain box to receive any TV programs, and Apple was the only one building that box, and then Apple decided to sell that box only with an Apple TV, that would be anti-competitive, because nobody would buy other TVs even if they were better and/or cheaper, so other makers could not compete anymore.
A monopoly isn't a requirement for an anti-competitive lawsuit, and neither is a monopoly. You must have abused the market in such a way to force others to compete at a disadvantage.
So what disadvantage would Samsung have selling TVs that work equally fine with or without other Apple products when Apple only sells TVs together with other products? Apple would actually put itself at a disadvantage here, because you couldn't buy the TV on its own.
This would be anti-competitive if the other Apple products were so strong that nobody would want any TV without them.
Multi touch interfaces have been around for quite a while. Hell, I made a 4 inputs custom driver for windows XP in 2003 (that`s all I could manage from the free samples I had ordered, but it could have scaled upward if I had wanted to) and implanted some generic gesture recognition.
Great. Did you publish it? If you published it, is it actual prior art?
That raises an interesting question. If I rip a song using a particular program from a particular pressing of a CD, and you rip it using the same program from the same pressing of a CD, will the two end up with identical hashes? I've always been under the impression that ripping audio data wasn't entirely deterministic from a CD (no error correction), and thus two rips even with identical software and settings won't necessarily byte-for-byte match.
Not identical. The CD drive cannot determine accurately when a song starts, so when you rip a song, and then rip it again from the same CD on the same computer, each rip will have a small random amount of silence at the beginning. Then there is the question whether conversion to AAC or MP3 is deterministic, which depending on the software it might not be. Next anything in a Quicktime wrapper contains the creation date inside the file (which caused paranoia when people figured out that iTunes sets the creation date of files downloaded from the iTunes store to the time the file was created on the computer, so two people downloading the same song would never get identical files). That also means two AAC files created at different times will always be different.
Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
No two files downloaded from iTunes are identical. No two files produced by ripping the identical CD are identical. No two files produce by ripping the same LP twice are anywhere near similar.
Will Apple make more money selling music at $0.99/track, or $hundreds_or_thousands_or_millions selling infringers to the lawyers?
Apple makes billions every quarter selling hardware to their customers. "Happy customers" is worth billions and billions to them. Do you really think they would give one damn about any amount of money the record industry could pay them, when that would turn their customers into "unhappy customers"?
a) Who cares what Apple thinks or their brand (in context of this discussion). If the RIAA or one of it's members files suit and gets access to music stored in iCloud in discovery, Apple has to obey the law. Apple's employees probably care a lot more about not going to jail for contempt of court than they do about getting your business or being cool.
Should any of the record companies try to pull that off, I'll bet that their share holders will receive an offer they cannot refuse, and when Apple has bought them out everyone responsible will be fired. That would be the only way Apple could prevent total damage to their business, so that is what they would do.
Do you ACs get paid to post crap like this? This's The People's Republic of China we're talking about, not just any other "their country."
This is not the People's Republic of China we are talking about, this is the CEO of a not very large company bribing Foxconn employees, and a Foxconn employee working in Research & Development allowing himself to be bribed to give confidential information to outsiders. You'd go to court and probably to jail in any western country for the same crime.
So some Chinee bigshot can tell Steve that his secrets are safe.
Most idiotic thing I've seen posted here. Do you think Apple has no right to ask suppliers to not give details of future products away? And do you think suppliers then don't have a duty to tell their employees? And do you think that employees who are told that part of their job is to not talk about their customers' future products then have the right to sell exactly that information to the highest bidder?
I still think he cannot force them to release their code under the GPL. They can just say "no", and then he has the right to sue them and will win, making them pay damages and making them stop distributing their product.
It is an interesting situation. Mr. Welte cannot force AVM to do something, but he can quite clearly tell them "if you do what you intend to do then you are committing copyright infringement" with the consequence that AVM might be in for some serious consequences.
Actually, I think at this point AVM has already been distributing the software in violation of the GPL terms. So the GPL license doesn't apply here anymore. So the fact is: AVM took some copyrighted code that they have no right to distribute, modified and hopefully improved it, distributed it, and claim to have rights in the resulting code. So what legal rights, if any, do they have in the code? How would the situation be different if the copyrighted code was some code stolen from Microsoft, or some code they could legally distribute after paying a million dollars which they didn't?
It would be reasonable to say in my opinion that the third party, Cybits here, should have the same rights as if AVM had acted in a way that didn't involve copyright infringement. So in the case of GPL'd software, Cybits should stand as if AVM hadn't breached the GPL license. If AVM had stolen Microsoft code, then Cybits should stand as if AVM hadn't stolen the code, so there would be no router software that Cybits could modify.
The real question here is, why did it take the judge so long to reach such a common sense answer? A lot of people have been twisting in the wind waiting for this definitive slap-down.
If you read the judgment, you'll find the answer: Because Righthaven lied to the court. By law, Righthaven had to disclose anyone having a financial interest in the lawsuit, and they didn't do that. It took a while for someone to find out that Righthaven was lying. Now the court knows, and the court knows that Righthaven was withholding information and acting dishonestly in 200 cases in that district alone, and is giving Righthaven 14 days time to explain why they shouldn't be sanctioned.
This might become expensive for Righthaven.
1. Fistful of sleeping pills
2. Carbon monoxide in the garage
3. It'll be painful at first but jumping in an icy river will do you in quick and you'll go out peacefully.
I am told that in the USA at least, sleeping pills have a small additive that will make you throw up. Not when you take enough to sleep, but when you take enough to kill yourself. There is substantial risk that you wake up with severe damage.
2. Catalytic converter makes this an awful lot harder. There is substantial risk that you wake up with severe damage.
3. Severe risk that someone tries to be a hero, and dies trying to save you. Or saves you, with severe damage to you.
But the biggest problem is this: I value life an awful lot. Even when its quite bad it is still better than the alternative. With a disease like Alzheimer's, or other diseases shown in the program, if I were in a state where I am still capable of committing suicide, I wouldn't want to. If I were in a state where I was incapable of committing suicide, that is where I would consider it.
Fine summary, except that you leave one detail out: Apple always agreed to pay Nokia the same license fees that other phone makers are paying. Apple just disagreed with having to pay more, and allowing Nokia to use iPhone user interface patents on top of that.
From what is publicly known, nobody can say whether this is a win for Nokia, or for Apple, or a compromise. Apple was willing to pay $X + no patents, Nokia wanted $Y + patents, and now Apple is paying $Z + some patents but not the ones Nokia asked for. Since we don't know what X, Y and Z are, we don't know who won. (We can probably find out what Apple was offering and what Nokia was demanding originally; that would be a number X' less than X, and a number Y' greater than Y.
Spread some fud will ya?
Apple got sued because they didn't want to pay the licensing fees *everyone* else are paying.
A complaint about FUD shouldn't be followed by misinformation. Apple always _agreed_ to pay the licensing fees _everyone else_ was paying. Nokia wanted _more_ from Apple than from others, plus some iPhone user interface patents thrown in, and Apple disagreed with that.
And to remember: Nokia wanted access to some of Apple's user interface IP, probably to use that IP in Symbian. Now Nokia is going to build Windows phones, these patents wouldn't be Nokia's problem anymore, but Microsoft's problems. And the public's perception of the lawsuit may have changed: Two years ago it was the phone giant suing the little newcomer; now it looks more like a desperate move (when you can't succeed in the market you try to "monetize your intellectual property").
The analogue is in somebody buying ipad.com (which AFAIK Apple doesn't own). Just because Apple bought icloud.com doesn't give them a trademark, otherwise the trademark system should just be shut down in favor of the domain name system.
True, buying iCloud.com doesn't give Apple a trademark. Buying the iCloud trademark from the proper owner for $4.5 million however gives Apple the trademark.
Because you don't have to apply for a trademark to have it legally protected. It helps, sure, but it isn't required. If the report is true, and iCloud has been operating under that name since 2005, then Apple is in the wrong.
Apple bought the trademarks for iCloud from Xcerion, which owned them for almost two years. iCloud Communications had lots and lots of time to do something about Xcerion and didn't. Now that Xcerion got 4.5 million dollars for the trademark they want to get in on the deal. It's too late.
Latest news: Anonymous activists broke into Alaska government offices, turned on a photo copier, and copied 24,000 pages of e-mails. They escaped using a fleet of 20 dogsleds.
Why do I have a feeling that the Steve Jobs story is going to end with him and a large number of followers drinking arsenic-laced kool-aid in an effort to travel to the alien home planet of Klatlun?
If that's your feeling, you should seriously ask for medical help.