'Nobody Cares Who Was First, and Nobody Cares Who Copied Who': Marco Arment on Defending Your App From Copies and Clones (marco.org) 169
Marco Arment: App developers sometimes ask me what they should do when their features, designs, or entire apps are copied by competitors. Legally, there's not a lot you can do about it: Copyright protects your icon, images, other creative resources, and source code. You automatically have copyright protection, but it's easy to evade with minor variations. App stores don't enforce it easily unless resources have been copied exactly. Trademarks protect names, logos, and slogans. They cover minor variations as well, and app stores enforce trademarks more easily, but they're costly to register and only apply in narrow areas.
Only assholes get patents. They can be a huge PR mistake, and they're a fool's errand: even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can't afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter. Don't be an asshole or a fool. Don't get software patents. If someone literally copied your assets or got too close to your trademarked name, you need to file takedowns or legal complaints, but that's rarely done by anyone big enough to matter. If a competitor just adds a feature or design similar to one of yours, you usually can't do anything. You can publicly call out a copy, but you won't come out of it looking good. [...] Nobody else will care as much as you do. Nobody cares who was first, and nobody cares who copied who. The public won't defend you.
Only assholes get patents. They can be a huge PR mistake, and they're a fool's errand: even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can't afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter. Don't be an asshole or a fool. Don't get software patents. If someone literally copied your assets or got too close to your trademarked name, you need to file takedowns or legal complaints, but that's rarely done by anyone big enough to matter. If a competitor just adds a feature or design similar to one of yours, you usually can't do anything. You can publicly call out a copy, but you won't come out of it looking good. [...] Nobody else will care as much as you do. Nobody cares who was first, and nobody cares who copied who. The public won't defend you.
hey (Score:5, Funny)
i wrote like almost exactly the same thing a week ago...
Nobody Cares (Score:1)
Mickey Mantle makes $100,000 a year. How much does your father make? You don't know? Well, see if your father can't pay the rent go ask Mickey Mantle and see what he tells you. Mickey Mantle don't care about you, so why should you care about him? Nobody cares.
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i wrote like almost exactly the same thing a week ago...
hey, I wrote like almost exactly the same thing a week.... hold on there's a knock at the door... ARRRRRGHHHHHH, you can't do that (smack) (biff) (bam) (pow!)
++NO CARRIER
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i wrote like almost exactly the same thing a week ago...
hey, I wrote like almost exactly the same thing a week.... hold on there's a knock at the door... ARRRRRGHHHHHH, you can't do that (smack) (biff) (bam) (pow!)
++NO CARRIER
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Nobody cares if you were first, or only copied yourself.
No, Groucho said it first (Score:2)
Hey! Don't go trying to glam onto the glory of other people's credit snatching! :)
Only Apple FanBoys... (Score:2)
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Only Apple FanBoys will defend Apple. That's all.
Ahh the old "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" strategy. Well played.
"Only assholes get patents" - stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
Many companies, including my own, obtain patents for defensive purposes. I have zero interest in attacking someone, but you will find it virtually impossible to obtain seed (much less VC or strategic) funding without a plan for providing even rudimentary protections for your IP - most especially if you're building something for an existing market (where doubtlessly there are existing patents.)
That doesn't absolutely guarantee you wont be sued by some other asshole who uses patents to attack, but it keeps them from trying to make a quick buck off of you, and it makes it significantly less likely.
Re:"Only assholes get patents" - stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
that's true, but it also means VC and other funding entities simply neglect how useless some types of patents are. Independently of patent strength, VC is always looking for previous value - money already spent. And patents, like existing human resources or other tangible and intangible assets, are effectively a future cost removed, i.e. money that will not enter future accounting and depreciate their potential position.
In the end, like many those other assets, patents are as volatile as employee exodus or asset depreciation, and I expect the importance VC puts in those is not much different. They already know it's a gamble from a lot of factors, but it's one they have to place trust in mildly less volatile stuff, and that's patents.
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Fact of life:
Patents *in realty* only serve to protect the RnD budgets of already-established dominant players in the market.
They absolutely *DO NOT* protect the independent inventor's ability to invent something and take it to market himself. In theory, they can be used in this case. In practice, they cost too much to obtain, and after that they cost a fortune to enforce. If some big rich company rips you off, and you engage in patent litigation against them, you go bankrupt while the proceeding are sti
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On Shark Tank the sharks always ask if they have a patent
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The author was speaking specifically of software patents. Shark Tank entrepreneurs rarely if ever have those. The patents you usually see on Shark Tank are utility patents on a physical invention of some sort.
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Exactly. We would much rather not have to expend the time/energy/legal effort to file for and get patents. For many years we did not actively pursue this at all. Then a competitor sued for infringement and it became obvious that patents were another way of competing in the software business. Ideally we'd have a market where the best product could win on technical merits alone and we wouldn't need lawyers but we don't live in a perfect world. So now we have an active program to protect things we develop and
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Creating their own problems... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Also, for a good number of things, wildly different or original don't necessarily mean a better product as far as I'm concerned. My morning oatmeal doesn't need to be a custom and unique experience. It's goddamn oatmea
Right...and? (Score:2)
File this under "Old man yells at cloud".
So is the problem that one can't just sit back and stop working/innovating and expect to get paid? Because I'm OK with that. Let everyone copy my ideas, I'll just come up with more AND develop a reputation as a "Big Thinker" as a result ( ie: creating my own brand/value which I can then use elsewhere ).
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You are in the wrong market, slaving away creating while others get rich off your effort, inhaling it into their clone manufacturing warehouse.
Have they said thank you? No?
How do I attach my cart to you so you will pull it, too?
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You wouldn't be the first idiot to think his ideas were original, that's for sure!
Re:Right...and? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that if you come up with a great app, a company will come along, copy it, and put marketing dollars behind it. You won't "not continue to make money", your app won't have time to go viral before someone else's does. Look at Farmville - it was a pretty direct clone of an existing game. However, Zanga was able to copy it and market it such that more people saw Farmville first than the original. So the original developer didn't "develop a reputation", Zynga did. So the original developer didn't "stop getting paid", Zynga took all the money.
It repeats again and again. It's fine to say that don't like 95 year copyrights (we agree). It's another to say "your work will be ripped off by someone with a PR budget, and fuck you."
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Naw, I'm filing this under "drunk teenager yells at cloud."
Pithy advice (Score:3)
This feels unfair when it happens to you, but it’s just how it goes, and the entire ecosystem benefits. Every app — even yours — includes countless “standard” and “obvious” features and designs that, at one time, weren’t. Everything is a remix. A great design or feature can give you a competitive advantage for a little while, but it’s always temporary. Compete on marketing, quality, and what you can do next, not the assumption that nobody can copy what you made.
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You don't? If that is your concern the you're clearly not the right person for the job.
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What makes you think you get to be a tiny startup and be competing with giant multinationals who own their own factories?
That is like when an undergrad asks you, as a serious question, "How do I compete with Einstein?" or "How do I compete with Famous Guy Who the Publishers Love and get more papers published in big journals?"
The question is not well answered with information that the person asking desires. The question is based on false and absurd assumptions. The existence of the question implies that the
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What makes you think
Because I worked there. Production tools are a multi billion dollar industry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Say you're working for a tool manufacturer and come up with an idea to save hundreds of hours per year (machines can cost thousands of dollars an hour to operate. You go to your boss who says it would never work. You manage to elevate it up the company, but everyone says either it wouldn't work or that nobody would buy it.
So you quit your job, mortgage the house, buy a thousands of dollars of
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Only apps can app apps! (Score:1)
...but not LUDDITES who copy appy app apps by making LUDDITE software that tries to be appy, but requires using LUDDITE technology like LUDDITE keyboards and LUDDITE mice!
Apps!
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What could be more appy than a new app that apps just like the old app, but with a different, appier name?
What are you, some sort of LUDDITE using the Original software?! App an app, apper, if it is an appalike then it is just appier.
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I hate to break it to you, but that's a copycat. A fairly poor knock-off, actually.
Oh, well, that's the troll ecosystem for you.
Only assholes get patents. (Score:4, Informative)
I bet large corporations would love to see patents go away, that way they can copy something for a million dollars vs having to buy out the startup.
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Not if you have the patent. Been there before.
Until they find a half-dozen patents in their portfolio that you have also infringed. Sure, they're all obvious and none of them should have been patented at all, and for a few million dollars each you can prove that in court. At least, that's how it works in software.
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Nope/ I don't know why people woth so much hate for large corporations want to give them so much more power.
Not sure what you're talking about. I neither hate large corporations nor want to give them more power.
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I bet large corporations would love to see patents go away, that way they can copy something for a million dollars vs having to buy out the startup.
Growth through acquisition is a corporate goal, it is not something they're reluctantly forced to do.
Solution is to be more responsive (Score:2)
App feature duplication is bound to happen.
What you can do about it, is all around be more responsive.
Respond to reviews. People notice that.
Come out with helpful (not just churn) updates frequently. A larger company is going to have trouble keeping up any kind of rapid pace of change.
If my some miracle a competitor does come up with a good idea - well turnabout is fair play. Borg that idea and make it's uniqueness your own.
Charge more. Price of an app is one of the few signals have besides reviews as to
call me crazy... (Score:2)
Maybe this is telling us all that software apps are not as valuable as the VCs think they are. If it's that easy to copy, and there are effectively no barriers to copying, then what is the value? (The answer is marketing, of course... but that's the point, the software is not the value. Everyone needs to understand that ideas without implementation have no value, and that the value in implementation may come from a non-technical part of the business.)
I work in a nanotech startup. Competitors have bought
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You might have read about this [wikipedia.org] (possibly via this site that you're browsing right now) almost 20 years ago, in the Halloween I and Halloween II documents.
Microsoft knew (mostly correctly!) the world we were heading for. My computers all run "commodity" software and with the exception of a few games, I didn't pay for any of it. Software is freely available and abundant. If I need anything, I can search the repo and
Same Thing for Music and Movies (Score:2)
Nobody cares, only the content mafia.
Limp Law (Score:2)
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Finally someone willing to take a bold stance against the free ride that the poor have enjoyed for far too long.
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Finally someone willing to take a bold stance against the free ride that the poor have enjoyed for far too long.
I suppose you were being sardonic with that. Why don't you get back to us after you've been injured in a car crash with a poor, uninsured driver.
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Hey if you want to rail against uninsured drivers, go right ahead. It's totally unfair to others to drive a car around without the means to make someone else whole if you cause an accident. However, I would argue that is a very different complaint than "those poors sure have it easy because they have no money for the rest of us to take away from them with lawsuits".
Patents are too expensive, so spend on marketing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only assholes get patents. They can be a huge PR mistake, and they’re a fool’s errand: even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can’t afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter.
A mere $20k marketing budget is not going to buy you much of a competitive advantage, and certainly not against "any adversary big enough to matter". Their $200k marketing budget (if not $2M or more) is going to crush you. The only defense you have against them is patents.
"But if you try to sue them, they'll bury you in legal fees!"
Yes and no... First, those big cases are the ones firms will take on contingency - look at Microsoft v. i4i and their $450M judgement. Law firms will happily defer fees for a bite at those. So even if they try to bury you, they're not really burying you, but your lawyers who are willing to take on that risk.
Second, you don't have to be involved at all: if you have a giant adversary, then odds are you probably have two giant adversaries. So if one steals your idea, then approach the other with an offer to assign the patent to them (with a royalty-free grantback license to you). They'll go after your competitor for you, you get a chunk of capital (and possibly royalties) that you wouldn't have had otherwise, and you can still practice your invention. At worst, you end up competing with one giant adversary rather than two or more.
Mr. Arment should probably stick to developing apps, rather than offering legal advice.
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I was agreeing with you up to this point. They probably have a ceasefire with their competitor over patents and just use jointly use them to keep out the riffraff.
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I was agreeing with you up to this point. They probably have a ceasefire with their competitor over patents and just use jointly use them to keep out the riffraff.
Like Apple and Samsung? ;)
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Well, if your patent is worth in the 100's of millions, sure. But I believe they do have a ceasefire over their giant arrays of stupid patents.
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In the United States contingency is almost exclusively for personal injury cases. It is not something you can just plan for and assume you'll have access to. That is idiotic.
Re:Patents are too expensive, so spend on marketin (Score:4, Interesting)
In the United States contingency is almost exclusively for personal injury cases. It is not something you can just plan for and assume you'll have access to. That is idiotic.
Well, as a patent attorney at a large law firm, I can tell you you're absolutely incorrect. Frankly, I have no idea where you got this idea. Not only do most firms have contingent fee arrangements, there are also investors who will invest specifically for the purpose of funding a lawsuit.
Where did you get this misconception, and why are you so adamant that the alternative possibility is "idiotic"?
Turn it on its head (Score:1)
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According to this, nobody cares, you're only giving them free advertising. You're basically saying, "Hey, I was already here but lots of people went out of their way to choose these other apps that are similar!" You're using attention directed at your app, to call attention to other apps.
If you want to say you're the original, that might be fine, but it isn't some sort of powerful magic that makes it OK to talk about the competitors. The only time you should talk about a competitor is when you're the clone,
Riiiiight (Score:3)
> even if you get one ($20,000+ later), you can't afford to use it against any adversary big enough to matter
Right, so that's why there's a bunch of nobodies successfully suing fortune 500 companies in Texas.
Because the term "patent troll" doesn't exist.
Apps, Meet Fashion World (Score:2)
At the smaller/individual development shop level, the idea that blowing off reacting to all but the most literal of copies of your work makes sense, and it's been a part of the lives of fashion designers since the beginning of time.
This is likely the primary driver for why fashion and fabrics change so fast, because fashion can't be copyrighted, and a successful design will attract knockoffs before a year is out.
My suspicion, based on the hassles s/w shops large and small have dealing with patent search and
Who is the asshole, Marco Arment? (Score:2)
A web / iphone developer shooting his virtual mouth off online about complex legal matters is claiming that people who don't follow his incorrect advice about I.P. protection are "assholes"?
Maybe the asshole is in your bathroom mirror, Marco.
In the meantime, patents are useful in the real world, the extremely small percentage of abuse articles we see on slashdot doesn't change that.
Reminds me of SEA vs PKARC (Score:2)
The comments on how the public perceives what you do reminds me of the SEA vs PKARC lawsuit back in the day. They ended up settling, and the settlement meant that SEA essential won, legally,but the online chatter about the suit, and people's perceptions about what SEA was attempting to do (IIRC, SEA's attempt to claim proprietary ownership of ARC file formats and (particularly galling) the .ARC extension did not go over well) meant that SEA went from having a defacto monopoly to being an also-ran fairly q
Pretty depressing (Score:3)
Who is this guy, and why the heck are we supposed to listen to him?
Re:Pretty depressing (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Pretty depressing (Score:5, Informative)
You need to make it easy for companies to buy you out rather than to pursue the legal route. Sell out to a large corporate, and all of a sudden the legal instruments hold validity.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, when you think about it, ideas are an expense. It is the execution that matters. What can you build in a short space of time, and what can BigCorp provide you to expedite that process.
In an era of easy replication, it is nigh on impossible to protect the angle of the corkscrew for your wine bottle. Execute quickly, take the market using your lead, or watch the clones come into play. Same with software.
Re: Pretty depressing (Score:3, Insightful)
Shitty ideas are dime a dozen. People with no ideas say ideas are worthless.
People who actually make something new deserve protection from leeches, vampires, copy cats and other assorted scum both big and small.
The fact that the patent system makes it hard to prosecute IP theft means we need to fix the system.
And some asshole declaring other people are assholes for using existing established law to protect their ideas is asinine.
What great ideas has this jerk ever come up with?
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"What great ideas has this jerk ever come up with?"
The aqueduct?
Execution matter most (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideas are a dime a dozen. In fact, when you think about it, ideas are an expense. It is the execution that matters.
This is very true. I had a mentor of mine once point out that if you think you have an idea that nobody else has thought of then you should put down whatever you are smoking. Protecting an idea is very expensive so it had better be a really good one to be worth the bother. Coca-Cola is a multi-billion dollar company and they have a product that is ridiculously easy to knock off. But their business execution is second to none and for most products that is what really matters. This remains true even if you have a product that justifies patents and other idea protection. You still have to execute or someone else will figure out a way to make a buck in your place.
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Coca-Cola is a multi-billion dollar company and they have a product that is ridiculously easy to knock off. But their business execution is second to none and for most products that is what really matters.
No, in your example, Coca Cola is big enough to crush any copier to dust by simply having their lawyers march in the immediate vicinity of the offender. As a matter of fact, there are zounds of similar beverages out there, all over the world, but CC is so entrenched that all copiers combined have maybe 1% marked share compared to CC.
If you're the Sun, you don't care about the new comet drifting in the Solar System, but if you're Earth and that comet comes your way, there's not much you can do about it eithe
Dominance (Score:5, Informative)
No, in your example, Coca Cola is big enough to crush any copier to dust by simply having their lawyers march in the immediate vicinity of the offender.
Tell that to Pepsi. Coca-Cola didn't get magically huge by having flesh eating lawyers. They got huge because they did a really good job making their product available, consistent, and relevant to their customers. It's not hard to copy the taste of Coke or any of their other drinks and there are countless other brands of cola available some of which arguably taste better. Coke succeeded because they executed the best. Also they aren't as big or as dominant as you seem to believe.
As a matter of fact, there are zounds of similar beverages out there, all over the world, but CC is so entrenched that all copiers combined have maybe 1% marked share compared to CC.
You might want to actually look up some facts before sounding stupid publicly. Coke has about 42% market share in soft drinks. Pepsi has about 30%. ARC Refreshments (the maker of RC Cola) has about 15% of the soft drink market. And the other players split the remaining 8%.
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I admit I should have brought up more detail, or better defined what I was thinking.
I defined "copiers" as the small companies which create cheap, similarly-tasting drinks with generic names containing "Cola" in them. I was also focusing on Coke and its derivatives, rather than take into consideration market share of someone like ARC who produce other beverages as well.
In 2015, worldwide, CC had 48.6% market share, with Pepsi around 20.5% and everyone else at 30.9%, but that's for all drinks.
Anyway, since i
Re:Pretty depressing (Score:5, Funny)
App developers can make money out of live performances instead. Imagine some guy on stage with XCode projected onto an enormous screen. He is silent but occasionally curses Apple. The audience hold up lighters.
Rock and roll!
Re:Pretty depressing (Score:4, Informative)
I know you're joking, but you should take a look at twitch when you have a chance. You'll find a number of developers on there.
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I wanted to say exactly that.
Twitch Creative it's called.
https://www.twitch.tv/director... [twitch.tv]
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Happens with my with any IDE ... because we are cursing about the code of our predecessors.
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Yes. That's life.
If all you have is some 'unique feature'' then you ain't got nothing. Every 'unique idea' I've ever come across turned out to be either shit or obvious, or both. So perhaps try building a sustainable business that doesn't rely on a false feeling of originality.
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Yes, your ideas suck therefore everyone's ideas suck. Got it.
Ideas are not protectable. Only the specific expression of those ideas are. If an idea is all you have, you have nothing. The suckiness value of anyone's particular idea is irrelevant.
Line between idea and expression (Score:2)
But the line between "idea" and "expression" might not like exactly where you think it does. For example, moving and turning falling pieces to fill horizontal lines of a rectangular matrix is not protectable, but doing so where the pieces are made of four aligned squares is. Tetris v. Xio [slashdot.org].
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If not being a "sustainable business" or not actually being all that new makes ideas "suck," then my advice is to expand your personal value system.
The idea that a lack of "true" originality means that art sucks is a failing of the philosophy that things have to be "original" to have value, it is not any sort of failing in the art. That should be totally obvious by simply looking at which claim was found to be wrong; the claim about art having value, or the claim about originality being a prerequisite. If w
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I think the precident for this is the Apple vs Microsoft suit in the 80's when Windows came out, Apple claimed "look and feel" was too similar.
They lost.
I'd say both companies are doing ok now, so when a competitor copies you, your only real option is to keep innovating.
Innovate or DIE!
-yy1
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I think the precident for this is the Apple vs Microsoft suit in the 80's when Windows came out, Apple claimed "look and feel" was too similar.
They lost.
True, but the reason they lost was that Apple had basically licensed their "look and feel" to Microsoft. Apple didn't think they had done that, but the court thought otherwise.
The court didn't say that Apple couldn't protect their "look and feel" with patents and the like--only that, in this case, they had given Microsoft the license to copy them.
That said, you're right. The best way to solve this problem is to come up with something better. Of course, you will always lose sales to cheaper competitors wh
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No, that's not even true.
Court rulings aren't the sort of blah-blah you posted. You weren't mis-remembering anything other than whatever blather your friends spew about the subject. Not the same thing as having looked it up, and then decided to talk about it. Maybe in the future you could preface these types of wild guesses with something like, "Some guy at the bar told me..." instead of just saying it cold as if it is knowledge you have.
You looked up something as obscure and irrelevant as "As-Easy-As," but
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No, that's not even true.
Court rulings aren't the sort of blah-blah you posted. You weren't mis-remembering anything other than whatever blather your friends spew about the subject. Not the same thing as having looked it up, and then decided to talk about it. Maybe in the future you could preface these types of wild guesses with something like, "Some guy at the bar told me..." instead of just saying it cold as if it is knowledge you have.
You looked up something as obscure and irrelevant as "As-Easy-As," but you didn't bother to look up Apple vs Microsoft [wikipedia.org] to find out if the guy at the bar was even correct before repeating it. The court didn't say MS already had a license, the court said mainly, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]..."
Ideas can be copied. It is allowed.
Abstract ideas can be copied. Specific implementations cannot - as the Federal Circuit noted recently, upholding an Apple GUI patent as directed to patent eligible subject matter [ipwatchdog.com].
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Who is this guy, and why the heck are we supposed to listen to him?
Marco Arment is the former CTO of Tumblr, and was the original developer of Instapaper. He is the present developer of Overcast.
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He was the first employee and the original developer for tumblr. He made a few million whenit was sold to Yahoo. He created Instapaper that was eventually sold to PInterest. His current project is Overcast - the best podcast player for the iPhone. He is also one of the cohosts of the popular Apple centric podcast Accidental Tech Podcast.
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He is the developer of the overcast podcast app and a host on the ATP, which is widely successful.
Until someone copies it, or did he copy it from someone else?
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FTFY
Apple will always claim that they did it first and much better than anyone else before them.
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Except the guy who copies it, and those who buy it from him so he makes bank.
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Well, make it better then. I don't actually know what you are proposing. Are you suggesting there should only ever be one of each type of app? So as soon as the first guy knocked out a 'contacts' app everyone else should be forbidden from making another? An automatic patent on any idea? Please elaborate.
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My company doesn't bother with patents. We have competitors, and many of the apps have many of the same features. We compete on quality and service (and maybe price but I don't know about that). Somehow it's still worth improving our app even though our competitors are free to take our ideas and implement them independently.
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Innovation is just a buzzword. None of your thoughts were "new." Like any other second-hand items you come to possess, they may be "new to you," but they're not actually new.
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I never said we were the first to ever come up with anything. No idea where you got that from my comment actually.
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That is a very bad translation indeed, but hey it's always fun on the internet to pretend you know more about someone's life than they know themselves, so have at it.
You seem to have two different narratives about patents going on. One is that they're completely worthless, and the other is that only stupid or venal companies don't use them. Seems like a contradiction.
On the whole I'd say your comment is overrated even at -1.
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If it is that easy to copy you, it might not have even been "hard" work.
If you can't compete with somebody new who literally just saw what you were doing and roughly copied your motions, it might not have even been "work."
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sounds like you suck at marketing, if you didnt suck you would be making bank