Apple Counter-Sues Motorola Over Touchscreen Patents 201
Earlier this month, we discussed news that Motorola had sued Apple, alleging infringement of 18 patents involving the iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. In response, Apple has now launched a pair of lawsuits alleging that Motorola is the infringing party, pointing to a number of patents involving touchscreen displays and multi-touch technology, and also methods for interacting with settings and data on a device. Apple wants the court to award them damages and prevent Motorola from continuing to sell the offending devices, which include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, BackFlip, Devour i1, Devour A555, Cliq, and Cliq XT.
And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole patent war reminds me of the famous computer science analogy: the dining philosophers [wikipedia.org].
If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
Poor lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
The companies are doing fine. Now you know why iPads are 500 dollars. The only loser is the customer.
Re:Begun, the clone war has (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what I'm hoping, an all out patent war. Maybe some good would come out of it because things can't get bad any more.
Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just glad to see another example of patents promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts [wikipedia.org].
Because we all know that without these patents, Apple would never have bothered to produce devices with multitouch, nor would Motorola, nor would anybody. And really, the whole idea of using compound gestures like pinching is completely non-obvious. And we wouldn't want little startup companies to make multitouch products; we only want big companies with lawyers to be able to do it.
Can't you just feel the Progress?
Go, Apple! Cry havoc and let slip the lawyers of litigation!
steveha
Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
Is there a reason this still makes the news every time?
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money. Sometimes the price might be too high, of course. But there's always a price.
Fight to the Finnish? (Score:0, Insightful)
We represent Nokia and we're going to sue Apple too.
Oops, we already are.
Fine, we're going to sue Motorola
Armchair "Expert" Progress (Score:2, Insightful)
What's your point? Your particular "winner" didn't get picked? Patents have always been about a particular winner. The whole "advancing society" comes with the expiration of the patent much like with copyright. During the patent any benefit we gain comes from how well the patent holder executes their idea. That's the way it has always been. As for the obviousness of it, are you by any chance an expert in the particular field the patents are in? Seems that's one of the requirements, not "armchair expert" who slept at a Howard Johnson's.
Re:Yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
That happens all the time.Not to the Apples and Motorolas of course, but for small to medium size companies a patent lawsuit can be a huge deal: It's not just license, it's also the legal costs. The price can easily be large enough that the only sane option is to abandon that technology..
In a lot of cases the patents seem to only function as barriers to market entry.
No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple has long over charged for their hardware. Notice their massive profits? Reason is they have massive margins. They charge much higher margins than other electronics makers. They get away with it because their products are trendy, fashionable, and fashion is one area where consumers' normal price sensitivity doesn't apply. You'll notice that the iPod was not the first MP3 player, nor the first portable music device. What it was was a fashion accessory, you had to own one to be cool. The white earbuds were very much a status symbol, to the point that high end earbud makers suddenly had requests for white earbuds, something they'd not had before (black is less visible, more understated). People wanted better quality IEMs, but wanted the status symbol of white/iPod earbuds.
That's the reason the iPad is as much as it is. Not patents, Apple's business plan. So long as people continue to buy their stuff to be trendy, they can keep doing it.
Re:Yawn (Score:2, Insightful)
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money.
Large companies often have to pay penalties and modify their products. Small companies, however, go out of business when this happens. The patent system basically creates an oligopoly where only companies with lots of lawyers and resources (=tons of money) manage to survive the inevitable patent lawsuits.
Re:Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
And do you know why we see now the multi-touch technology used everywhere and every company is so aggressive to push it? Because the multi-touch technology was developed in the 1980/1990 years and now all the patents on the basic technologies are expiring. What all the companies are now doing is to improve on the expired patents and get their own patents to sue the competition.
It's like why the price for pills and medicine is dropping significant after the patents expired and you start to see only slightly different pills and medicine in the pharmacy to buy instead of the generics. That's also the reason why the pharmacy industry put so much money into advertising the new pills, so the people think that the slightly different pills are so much better instead of the now really cheap generics. For more information visit Wikipedia on Generic Drugs [wikipedia.org]
What patents basically did was to make the multi-touch technology so expensive that the devices were on hold for about 20 years.
Re:get rid of multitouch already (Score:2, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? If multitouch is eliminated from Android, there's very little reason for me to keep using Android. The problem isn't with the apps that support it, it's with the apps that don't support it. Multitouch adds a lot of power to the UI for those apps that can make use of that power.
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like you care more for hardware, so check these examples out:
Unibody laptop case. These are much stiffer for their weight than any other manufacturer's laptop.
Magsafe power connector. Eliminates the number one cause of laptop damage/PSU damage. No one else has it.
Mac Mini - When launched by far the smallest desktop computer on the market. Now copied by others, but most copies still aren't as small.
There are many many more hardware innovations, and of course many software ones too.
Clearly you don't like Apple, and that's your prerogative. But the claim that they aren't innovative is demonstrably pure bullshit.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem with claiming that Apple overcharge for the iPad is that in the days before the iPad launch, blogs had pretty much guessed the form factor and specification, but they were estimating the price point to be $999.
$499 isn't overpriced. It's just that some people will say Apple products are overpriced whatever the actual price is.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
MS has stellar profit margins because they are in software. Software has the advantage of having nearly zero unit cost. Even if you aren't just selling licenses, as MS often is, the cost of making and distributing a box is a buck or less. The unit cost of software is nothing. Means all you have are your fixed costs, your R&D, support, that kind of shit.
With hardware, you have that too, but then you have a unit cost. This is actually higher than the raw parts you put in it because you have to deal with failures. As such software has the potential for much higher margins.
More or less the only problem with software is if you don't sell enough copies, if your fixed costs in making it can't be made back. For MS, this is not a problem. Windows is THE OS for computers and Office is THE Office suite. While new versions don't always fly off the shelves, they get steady sales. People want new computers and 90+% of them want them with Windows. Even Macs are usually a win for MS because so many Mac users buy Windows and either use an emulator or bootcamp.
Re:Yawn (Score:3, Insightful)
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course;
Kodak by Polaroid over instant film.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
if the ipad is over priced why isn't their a single competitor with a similarly priced device? Every single device that matches specs is $700 plus. now don't go find a resistive touch screen, I said match specs.
You can't I have tried they don't exist yet. Acer CEO stated that they were expecting the ipad to be $999 HP stated they were expecting a $999 ipad. The $499 price made every single tablet vendor CEO shit their pants. The only thing close when the ipad was released was the crunchpad, which can't match features. The only superior product in the works is the current vaporware notion ink adam. (the one I am personally waiting for)
If the ipad is overpriced, then why hasn't anybody been able to duplicate it in less than a years time? Just try to find a capacitance touch screen with an OS designed for touch screen use(windows 7 isn't a touch screen OS, it has touch elements but still needs a mouse to work right, and is way over priced) For $500 find one you can buy right now.
Apple has been competitively priced for the last decade. You get less processor options, but overpriced they are not, stop trying to compare them to dell, but instead to thinkpads.
Re:Progress (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, because every product produced in the US market is 100% totally unique and no one ever copies anything from anyone.
Seriously. Every invention ever was copied, and it didn't stop innovation from coming. Quite the opposite - because if you're re-building something anyway, you might as well improve the issues you're seeing.
Did Sony crumble because other companies produced portable cassette players?
Did Ford go down because other companies started manufacturing cars?
Was Xerox ended by other photocopier producers?
Being copied might dent revenue a bit, but it doesn't kill innovation, and, if anything, it encourages research, to put yourself a step ahead of the copycats, and still get the market.
Re:get rid of multitouch already (Score:3, Insightful)
The point of a multitouch screen is to create UIs which can more accurately draw on extablished metaphors. Were it not for the multi-touch screen, you'd need multiple buttons for the same purpose. So for a touchscreen device:
How in your single-touch technology do you implement music apps, which need keyboard say on-screen keyboard, guitar or drum kit representations?
You can't do a worthwhile DJ mixing UI without multi-touch.
Most arcade games won't work - for example where you need to be able to move and shoot at the same time. Given that games are the biggest selling category of apps, this is vitally important.
Even the humble on-screen QWERTY keyboard is far superior with multi-touch. Think! People naturally want to do shift for capitals, and that requires two touches. Single touch screens require the user to use a caps-lock style interface or some other hack.
Most of the time, in most apps, multi-touch isn't needed. But when it *is* needed, it's important. It makes the natural UI for an application possible. And in some cases it makes apps possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
This isn't an insane Jobs obsession. He's just thought it through, and you haven't.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple doesn't overcharge for their hardware. They charge what the market can bear (i.e. what people are willing to pay). To do anything else would be ridiculous for any company.
Er, WHAT?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Every tried gaming on a non-multitouch phone? Since the screen can not report two locations at once, you can't hold down two virtual buttons at once - making the whole thing useless.
Don't even get me started on pinch to zoom.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, why do people get their panties in such a bind over these arguments? Every time there is an Apple article on slashdot, the conversations quickly devolves into a flamewar over whether Apple is ripping you off or not, how good or bad their products are, and so on. I mean with your reply--who gives a crap? If you like the Acer--buy the Acer. If you like the MBA--buy the MBA. Think of this as an optimization spectrum with points such as price, weight and size, appearance, computing power, software, flexibility, build quality, and so on. Believe it or not, not everybody is going to optimize in the same directions!
I just don't get why it seems to bother some people so very much that different people might like different products. If somebody likes Apple products, what's the big deal--why are they automatically a fanboy who you seem to hate?
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of these are marketing innovations, not hardware innovations.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Every piece of hardware that Apple uses, anyone else can get, minus a few tiny customizations, and the price is actually higher than their competitors for the same price. If you took a competing arm based tablet and stripped it of all of it's peripherals, and then reduced the price accordingly you'd end up with a cheaper tablet. The thing is that other tablet makers actually add more value for the money by giving you the ability to use SD cards, USB input, and mabey even a camera (or at least the ability to attach one). Apple's value is not necessarily in the product but more in the COA (cult of Apple).
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
I wasn't trying to wow anyone. They are not the greatest innovations of Apple, but they are certainly very concrete, specific and unquestionably the first to do each. And that is enough to prove the GP wrong.
Yes, Apple did invent a new process to pull it off. In the days before Apple unveiled the unibody process, the secret was leaked. And virtually everybody said it was impossible to do mass production of laptop bodies that way. And they were wrong. They were wrong purely because no one else had ever done it before for a product anywhere close to a laptop. That's unquestionably innovation.
Saying "Just a hollowed out piece of aluminum" is either being flippant, or not realising the significance of the innovation.
Innovation *IS* a clever new idea made concrete in an actual product. That's exactly what Magsafe is.
Mac Mini isn't a thin client. It's a full desktop PC in a tiny box. Again NO ONE had put a PC in a box that small till Apple did it. That's innovation.
I agree thatApple have more important examples of innovation in their software , in integration of system and business practices. But for the GP who clearly values hardware innovation more, the ones I gave were better examples.
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:3, Insightful)
To insinuate that the iPhone is comparable to the smartphones that came before it is dishonest. Would you really choose to go back to the set of smartphone UI's that existed before the iPhone?
Not really matching specs (Score:3, Insightful)