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by talmand
5033 days ago
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The Lodsys dispute has nothing in common with what I was saying. Lodsys overstepped by trying to sue individuals for patent infringement when they were covered because Apple already licensed said patent for their platform. Plus the fact this isn't Apple using a patent defensively, or in fact has anything to do with Apple having patents in the first place, they are defending developers that are part of their ability to generate profit. You can say they are stepping up to do the right thing by getting involved but it doesn't excuse their antics with being aggressive with their patent lawsuits. I agree that Samsung copied aspects of Apple products, my dispute is whether there was anything technically wrong with them doing so. I say in many cases it was not, regardless of whatever patents they may have. I like Moogle better but I'm betting Rowling would sue since it's so close to her creation. |
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This whole patent mess is, as I was trying to imply, complicated. A lot of it is up for interpretation. As I understand it, a lot of people are focusing on two things supposedly from the Apple-Samsung trial result: the obviousness of pinch-to-zoom and the trade dress stuff.
Regarding pinch-to-zoom being 'obvious', Steve Wildstrom[1] covered this nicely two days ago—it wasn't asserted at the trial. Nilay Patel also pointed out[2] that Apple doesn't have an exclusive patent for all pinch-to-zoom implementations, just theirs. So, the patents (ignoring, for the moment, the trade dress patents) that Apple asserted are in question. Apparently, there are alternative implementations in Android, but for whatever reason, Samsung decided to implement something else that was ultimately found to infringe.
On the trade dress…as I understand it, we don't allow copyright on object shapes, nor can you trademark it, so to allow for distinctive object appearance the concept of trade dress patents was created. Agree or disagree with them, these exist. There are some fairly interesting tablet and phone designs out there, and Samsung, for at least a couple of versions of tablets and phones, fairly slavishly copied Apple's appearance. They deserved to be slapped for this. There's a term for this: knockoff. Most people who recognize a knockoff deride it—yet Samsung was praised.
I am…slightly more in favour of trade dress patents than I am in favour of software patents in general (my general opinion on those is that they're bad or that at a very minimum they require both a deeper prior art search and/or a stricter test for non-obviousness).
Getting back to the whole "it's complicated" bit…Apple isn't an innocent here, and I think they are taking a risk with this sort of litigation that simply kicking competitors' asses in the marketplace (like taking the majority of the profit out of the smartphone market…) would do just as well. I think Apple's risk is brand tarnishment (they really don't want to be seen as the 400 kilo gorilla) and increased governmental oversight (look at what happened to Microsoft).
[1] http://techpinions.com/pinch-to-zoom-and-rounded-rectangles-... [2] http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...