[bmdavi3]

If it were any other company I'd get depressed and say it's another victim of the tragedy of software patents. But Apple deserves every post-Creative Labs patent victory ruled against them.

For anyone that doesn't know, in 2006 Apple was caught off guard and sued by Creative Labs over the iPod, resulting in a $100 million settlement. It was total nonsense and Jobs was right to be pissed, but what does he do? Does he get fired up to bring about patent reform? No! He doubles down on software patents himself and goes on to sue Samsung in the same shitty way in 2011.

I mean, it's too late now to turn the ship around on software patents. It's never going to change. But 2006 - 2011 were prime growth years for Apple, where they could have made a great case to the public for how software patents were bad and used in a totally bogus way against a well liked American company.

And if he didn't want to do that, he could have built up a library of patents to squirrel away for defensive purposes on a rainy day.

But no. He got burned by Creative Labs, hated the experience, and turned around and did the same exact thing to a totally unrelated company.

When it comes to software patents, fuck Steve Jobs and Apple.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/creative-pushed-stev...

[lilyball]

I think you're confusing software patents and design patents, because the latter is what Apple famously used against Samsung.

[bmdavi3]

Thank you. You're correct, I've wondered why this isn't mentioned more often, and maybe that's why.

However even after realizing that, I personally still consider a design patent about rounded corners to be on the same level of B.S. as a software patent, and still stand by my conclusions. But I'd be interested to know why I shouldn't do that, and if you have more information I'm honestly all ears

[nodamage]

You make it sound like Samsung was quietly doing their own thing and then were blindsided by a lawsuit from Apple. But actually after the iPhone was released Samsung deliberately went through it screen by screen and produced a 132-page report on what features and interface elements they should steal from the iPhone.

https://archive.org/details/436142-samsung-relative-evaluati...

I don't have a great opinion of the patent industry in general but in this situation Samsung's behavior was pretty blatant and unethical (IMO), and went well beyond "rounded corners".

[serverQuestion]

I mean any competitor would right? see how the other products are better and how you can use those insights to improve your own?

everybody has reports like that.

[sangnoir]

> But actually after the iPhone was released Samsung deliberately went through it screen by screen and produced a 132-page report on what features and interface elements they should steal from the iPhone.

Did you know competitive analysis is something that is frequently done across many industries? GM/Mercedes/Toyota are among the first customers to buy[1] their competitors latest models and they disassemble them to the last bolt to figure out/estimate materials, methods and costs per component, sub-assembly and unit level. I see nothing unethical or nefarious about that.

1. Often they pay companies like Munro & Associates (https://leandesign.com/) do the analysis on their behalf

[lilyball]

Competitive analysis is different than cloning the look & feel of something. "They have a unified design style with very nice rounded corners throughout the OS, we should have our own unified design style with our own nice touches" is not the same thing as "we should copy their style wholesale". GM isn't making cars that look like Toyota's.

[nodamage]

Competitive analysis is one thing, point for point copying of another company's user interface is unethical. Apple put in the R&D to make the iPhone interface more intuitive and easy to use compared to other phones at the time. Samsung copied Apple's homework.

[wtallis]

Design patents are basically like trademarks. They're not meant to embody useful new inventions the way utility patents are, and they always involve a greater degree of subjectivity. Even if you believe Apple's iPhone design patents to have been too obvious and unoriginal to warrant protection, they aren't as an egregious perversion of the purpose of the law as the most notorious software patents.

[cma]

They sure them for multitouch software as well didn't they?

[grecy]

> It was total nonsense and Jobs was right to be pissed, but what does he do? Does he get fired up to bring about patent reform? No! He doubles down on software patents himself and goes on to sue Samsung in the same shitty way in 2011.

I realize Jobs and Apple were/are big, but what makes you think he had any hope in hell of doing anything about patent reform?

[derf_]

The America Invents Act was signed into law in September 2011. This was exactly the time to do something about patent reform. There was a lot of discussion about it among tech companies at the time, but little leadership and no unified message on anything beyond, "Trolls are bad." Congress was not likely to (and did not) revisit the issue for some time afterwards.

[vvanders]

Yup, I've got stories of some really shady shit Apple pulled with the FTC around their "design" patents.

Put them in the same class as Oracle as far as I'm concerned. After it happened I swore off developing another piece of software for Apple or supporting any of their products.