It is highly significant to me that Apple switched its general counsel this past September by bringing in Intel's general counsel, Bruce Sewell, to fill the role.
Intel has been notoriously aggressive over the years in using its patent portfolio as a hammer against rivals, including AMD, to keep its competitive advantage, and Mr. Sewell is, among other things, a leading patent litigator by background, training, and experience. His fit for the role of leading protector of Apple's treasure chest of patents is, to me, an obvious one, and it is a fit precisely because Mr. Sewell has lots of experience in fighting patent fights on both sides of a case. For a pretty good write-up discussing Mr. Sewell's appointment as Apple's GC and some of these implications, see http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/apple-snaps-up-bruce-sewe....
Another point to note here: Mr. Sewell replaced Dan Cooperman in the GC role. I worked with Dan years ago at a prominent San Francisco law firm and he is a splendid lawyer but he is not a litigator and never has been. He is said to have "retired" in stepping down from the Apple GC role but he in fact moved back to his old firm, where is once again doing corporate work (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202446350729&rss=...).
Now, a switch in general counsel can happen for many reasons but the circumstances here would suggest that one very important reason for the switch that occurred last September with Mr. Sewell's appointment is that Apple intends to be very aggressive about patent enforcement. While we can't know this for sure from the outside, we can know that it has certainly armed itself well to pursue that goal should it need or desire to do so.
I'm looking forward to this. I want to see Apple try and claim they invented touch phones in court against a company that's been doing them for longer than it has. And I wanted to see them smacked down by a judge for doing it.
Apple has had a history of thinking it invented something (when it, itself, was inspired by another product) and believing they own it 100%
A good example is Keynote. Sun/Lighthouse developed a great presentation app called Concurrence that ran on NeXT's set of computers. When Steve sold NeXT to Apple and they went on to develop Keynote, he thought that was his invention, when really it's rather obvious where he got his inspiration from.
Plenty of other stories like these with Apple (and for that matter, all the other giants)
Another example is their patent on unlocking a device with a gesture. Asides from Windows Mobile already using gestures for unlocks prior to iPhone beind released, achieving tasks with gestures has been around for years and adding a particular task 'unlocking a phone' doesn't make that novel.
Apple has no patent on the general concept of "unlocking a device with a gesture". They have a patent on their implementation. You can't patent a concept.
This would be clearer if patent titles were prefixed with "A", as in "A method...", etc. Most people seem to read them as "The method...", which when combined with the linear format (even though claims are dependent), makes almost all of them sound much more broad than they actually are.
You might might get a better idea of what the patent is intended to cover by noting the differences between implementations, rather than the similarities. I won't speak to that myself, as I have never seen the Windows Mobile implementation.
> Apple has no patent on the general concept of "unlocking a device with a gesture". They have a patent on their implementation. You can't patent a concept.
You're right, but:
a) I didn't say the word concept (or the word implementation for that matter).
b) the standard wording on any modern patent is 'this is but one embodiment of the concept' meaning other implementations that meet the language described (which is designed to be as broad as can pass a patent examiner).
I'm sorry, but you are mistaken. You cannot patent a concept, only inventions. You don't have to actually build the invention, but it does have to be a concrete thing and and not a wholly abstract idea. This is why patents have specific claims, descriptions, and diagrams associated with them, and not just titles.
For instance, you can obtain a patent on a self-cleaning cat box by describing one and how it works[1], but if someone comes along and invents another self-cleaning cat box that works via some totally different method[2], your patent does not apply. You do not own the patent on the concept of a self-cleaning cat box, only the subset of all possible self-cleaning cat boxes that work more or less the way yours does.
Apple has had a history of thinking it invented something
The original claim was that they were "getting out of hand in assertions of ownership". An anecdote about something that is supposed to have happened privately 7 years ago (which doesn't even support your interpretation[1]) doesn't really answer to that. You'll note that Schwartz himself does not characterize Apple's recent actions as out of hand, but as an act of desperation.
I should have been clearer that I was asking specifically what was being referred to as "out of hand". Inter-CEO dickery seems like business as usual, and I don't think that's what the parent poster was referring to.
[1]: There is nothing in Schwartz' blog post to suggest that Steve Jobs thought anything in Keynote derived from Concurrence was his invention. In fact, for the anecdote to parse, you have to assume that Jobs found Schwartz' threat of using Concurrence IP against him to be credible. Unless you're privy to other information, I don't see where you get the idea that Apple asserted ownership over anything in Concurrence.
That sounds a lot like your interpretation of Apple/Jobs and not anything Apple/Jobs actually said or did, unless you have a quote of Jobs saying he invented Keynote and all the technology it uses.
Read the news much? Apple's been doing this all over the place. It's not only technology.
Apple has gone after companies that used the letter "i" in their name, like DOPi, which is a iPod case maker. That case was just thrown out by the courts.
Are you trying to insult me for asking you to be more specific? I'm sorry if I offended you, but I did not think it was an unreasonable question.
Apple's been doing this all over the place.
I'm sure you would agree that "all over the place" is not very specific, just as "getting out of hand" is. I'm asking what exactly you mean by this, not trying to debate you on points that you haven't even made.
DOPi
That's was a trademark case. The HTC suit is patent case. Trademarks have very different rules than patents, most relevant among them they can be lost if not enforced by the owner.
Surely you realize that "DOPi" does not simply have an "i" in the name, but is in fact "iPOD" in reverse. I am not a lawyer, but I don't think it's entirely "out of hand" for that to be the basis of a trademark infringement claim, especially in the context of iPod accessories. Perhaps not as clear-cut as something like "iPob" or "iDop" or "Apel", but not frivolous, either. It certainly isn't, as you characterize it, a case against the use of the letter "i" (which Apple does not hold a trademark on), and indeed there are many companies that use prefixed "i" in names without such claims being made on them.
Again: Apple could literally lose the "iPod" trademark if it could be shown they were too lax in asserting it. It is obvious where the name came from, but not obvious that it is infringing. Hence, filing a trademark infringement claim and letting the court decide. This seems reasonable to me.
To come full circle: this is why I ask people to be specific. Now that I know what you were referring to as "out of hand", I know that I disagree with you and have the opportunity to explain why. Before, it was unclear, which makes it difficult to have an intelligent discussion. Had I commented on the patent situation right off, without asking for clarification, we would simply be talking past each other, with little chance for insight.
To be fair everything that DOPi makes is nastily cheap Chinese garbage. I would want to sue for punitive damages if they were using ANY of the letters in my brand, let alone iPOD spelled backwards.
HTC [spent a week checking that Google had it's back and then] disagrees with Apple's actions and will defend itself.
At the moment I can only see this battle doing 2 things:
A: free press coverage [read "advertising"] for both Apple and HTC regardless of outcome.
B: driving a wedge between die hard fans of both Apple and Google/HTC
This press release didn't say anything. It could have been one line long. "We feel Apple's case has no merit, and we will fight it" or something of the like. That's the only interesting thing it said. Then it just went into "HTC is awesome", which has nothing to do with the case.
The case is about using gestures to unlock phones, bouncing when a menu is scrolled too far, and other items. If Apple managed to get patents on multitouch (which was close 40 years old by the time iPhone came out) they're not involved here.
Considering this: HTC is a Taiwanese company. Taiwan has sane patent laws, unlike the US. So they're unlikely to have a large arsenal of frivolous patents.
It's petty to take sides in either end of this - I doubt anyone is well read enough on the patent portfolios of either company to pass a legitimately informed comment.
I'm not suggesting that at all - you should always buy whatever is best for you regardless of politics. (Loyalty is for suckers.)
However I hope there is a total blood shed and all out patent war. I don't personally agree to the current method in which patents are used. It's a system desperately needing an overhaul. (Which is simply not going to happen.)
I think the telling part is that don't have anything to hit back with. Apple came at them with 20 patents and only has to make 1 stick. Apple and Nokia will probably settle (it seems more about price and licensing then winning), but HTC needs to win and that is extremely difficult with these patents. Check the Sun/Kodak history for an example.
Can someone explain to me why is this a top story on HN, and why should i care?
This sounds exactly just like celebrity gossip, just substitute people with big companies. I just can't grasp why is this interesting and why people are upvoting this?
I care deeply about it because we have to live in a world where companies can say they own your product because it looks like theirs. They will make broad claims and see what sticks. If the company attacking you is big enough, that usually means doom for you.
companies can say they own your product because it looks like theirs
What are you referring to specifically? Is there a specific one of the patents in the Apple/HTC case that you feel is purely cosmetic, or are you referring to something else?
The most basic one is the "one-click" Amazon patent. Most of Apple's patents on forms of interaction with touchscreens or other touch-sensitive devices are little more than reflections of physical interaction with objects.
The most basic one is the "one-click" Amazon patent.
I'm unclear on how that relates, aside from being a patent.
Most of Apple's patents on forms of interaction with touchscreens or other touch-sensitive devices are little more than reflections of physical interaction with objects.
What objects? This is software. Just because an interface element behaves in a way that feels, to your senses, realistic, does not mean that there exists in the real world an obvious and patent-invalidating object of prior art. If a menu scrolls one way but not another, you might have an intuitive grasp of what it is doing, but that does not mean it is a copy of a real thing. (Or if it is, where is the real object? Where is the prior art? Where is the obviousness?) If a menu bounces, it isn't a actual thing that is actually bouncing: it's a conscious decision by the programmer or designer to make it behave in a way that happens to be read by your senses as a "bounce".
And why is that, in your view, not patentable? If Apple had made physical objects that behaved the same way but via mechanical means instead of electronic, that would be patentable, too. Should that not be the case?
Yes. Before Amazon, if you asked any software developer of average competence to create a one click order process, they'd have it for you in a few days. Yes it was a clever idea, but ideas by themselves are not supposed to be patentable.
This is the key point. Many inventions are 'obvious in retrospect'. The Amazon 1-click patent is one of those annoying things where it seems obvious, but no one had ever done it and it's a huge boon to businesses (it makes impulse buying almost automatic).
For many of these patents, people will say it's obvious, but it's only obvious now that we've seen it all. No one else had ever done it before, so what's obvious about it?
I noticed Apple's shareprice had dropped slightly yesterday. I searched for Apple news an wasn't surprised to find a story like this reported on the same day.
