Second win for Apple as Galaxy Nexus sales banned in US Apple has scored its second legal victory of the week with a court ruling on Friday that effectively bans sales of Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone in the US. Fresh from her ban on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 earlier in the week, US District Judge Lucy Koh has issued a pre-trial injunction against Samsung over the Android …
It's the hypocrisy which stinks the worst - this is almost at Prescott levels. You can absolutely guarantee there will be no problem when Apple bring out a large, flat, black, rectangular device for watching moving pictures on with sound, powered by a remote, which looks and feels identical to the ones Samsung and a zillion others have been selling for the past 10 years.
Its only a pre-trial injunction, these things happen just in case the other party 'may' suffer financial loss before a ruling is made. It is just precautionary for the courts.
The outcome may well be different, could even be turned on its head.
Let's hope it is sorted before the iPhone 5 na iOS 6 rears its head, then even if Samsung etc win if it is after the release of the new iPad mini or iPhone 5 and iOS 6 the nexus and Tab may find themselves yesterday's products and will suffer sales.
Could this be the reason of this court case?
> Its only a pre-trial injunction
When is the trial? The reason I ask is because if the trial was next week then a pre-trial ban wouldn't be an issue. If the trial is in six months (and that would be quick) then the hardware will be "old" by the time any ban is lifted. Apple can use legal manoeuvres to delay any trial, possibly by years, which would make the hardware obsolete when any ban is lifted.
The problem is this is another example of how the patent system makes no sense for software and modern electronics. According to the story, the trial is likely to take place after the holidays, so that's 6 months away. A six month sales ban essentially kills a cellphone dead. Who the hell is going to want to buy a Galaxy Nexus at full price in six months? No-one. By that time it's obsolete.
A six month injunction might be fine for a product with an expected sales lifetime of ten years. If the product's expected sales lifetime is about a year, with half of that at deep discounts, it's ludicrous; the system just doesn't work.
Here's the thing.
Firstly this is not about look and feel. So arguments about Apple making a TV in a few months are irrelevant. There are 4 Patents up for grabs and make no mistake Samsung just got in the way these four patents infringements lie heavily at the feet of Google and Android.
Also this is the Galaxy Nexus phone that has been banned which was released in November last year and not the new Galaxy SIII which also infringes but has not as yet had an injunction against it.
The thing is if Apple does win this case then ALL of Android will be culpable.
It might be simpler for Google to code around this stuff or take features out, like Motorola made Apple remove push emails from iOS5 in Germany.
When Judge Koh is dishing it out to Apple or prosecuting them she's a smart judge of the highest morals. When she sides with Apple she's a moron.
It all seems very convinient [sic].
...it's starting to become time to ask if the US market is worth it. Patents are being used to wage a commercial war with scant regard to decent competitive practice. Plus patents are being handed out for things such as rounded corners and slide-to-unlock (gee, those are novel ideas...) seemingly with the idea of "oh well, let 'em fight it out in court". Now, however, it has turned nastier with patents being used to block sales of a product in the country. NOTE WELL: The devices barred have not been proven to infringe upon any patents. If it infringes, fine, punish them for it. But what we are seeing here is a punishment before such legal process has occurred.
So, yes, non-US companies ought to think long and hard about their position in such a marketplace.
"If the patent was just for a single piece of wire then bicycle spokes, springs, staples and many other things that are manufactured from a single piece or wire would be infringing."
With the massively broad definitions used in modern patents, that's the sort of scenario we are now looking at.
My my. Let me see....
* I believe it's "novel and non-obvious", not practical.
* Black is a color. Colors cannot be patented, though it's possible the specific chemical composition of a material with that color might be.
* Location of controls is not patentable, or at least should fail hard for being too broad. So no requirement for them to be on the front, can be on the sides where lots of stuff (tvs!) have them.
* Standard geometric shapes are not patentable, so the rounded rectangle can't be patented. Also, according to http://www.uiandus.com/blog/2009/7/26/realizations-of-rounded-rectangles.html , Jobs took his inspiration for the shape for OSX's rounded rectangle interface from stuff already in existence, such as the "No Parking" sign. So prior art there anyway.
* Screen in the middle - Form factors are pretty standardized, borrowed from existing monitor
The point of all that? Mostly me being utterly gobsmacked at the fact that the US patent system can be used to force a company to put some sort of pointless tat on their design, and/or prevent them from simplifying its appearance/construction.
I heard it was to do with swipe to unlock. It's another crappy american patent that apple are using to hurt competition. Why the nexus? They must be embarrassed about their poor showing at their mobile show compared to android. Apple had innovation once in 2005 now they are just patent trolls.
Following the link, it appears that there are multiple examples of prior art and prior patents. So essentially this is a "... on a phone" patent. This, plus the fact that Google's search engine predates the filing of this patent by almost 10 years (yes I know it's evolved, but that's essentially what they're trying to target and that doesn't wash) makes me wonder if this wasn't granted just so the injunction could be reversed once funded, casually sweeping nearly $100M onto Samsung's balance sheet in under a week.
in the quality of some of the posts here.
Firstly there are those who blame the judge or the legal system. For the most part they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do - settling commercial disputes based on evidence and the law. Sometimes they come down in favour of one side, sometimes the other. If a particular decision comes down against your side of choice that doesn't imply bias, mostly it implies that you're not in possession of the full facts and/or bias of your own.
Secondly the patent system. While it is far from perfect, it doesn't let you do things like take an existing invention, slap the words "on a mobile device" on the end and call it your own. There has to be an inventive step of your own that makes it work on a mobile device (it's actually ONLY that bit that's covered, the previous inventor(s) own the prior bits). A patent that references many others doesn't make it invalid, it just limits what is being claimed. It is saying "we acknowledge this prior art, we are doing something patentable above any beyond what it covers".
Next bothering to check the detail of a patent. The number of commenters who don't bother to check what it patented, or who scan it only briefly and come up with a ridiculously simplified view of what's covered. This patent is a prime example. It actually covers how to take the results from multiple search sources and, using heuristic methods, filter and order them to give the most likely results first.
Finally failing to realise that most patents can be worked around. Companies can find other ways of solving a problem (some actually better than the patented method). Many of the best invention of the past were work-arounds for other people's patents, so no, they don't stifle invention, quite the opposite.
It's to do with unified search from a simple UI. You type your query into a box, which then goes on to search multiple places for your results.
Sounds like how all searches are performed to me. Where did I leave my keys? On the table? No. In the bowl? no. In the front door? Yes. Time for Apple to sue me for searching.
At the very most patents last for 25 years. That's the whole point of a patent. The deal is that a company provides full details of how an invention works in exchange for a limited time, government backed monopoly in the use and/or licensing of the invention. The data detectors patent that Apple has used against HTC has only 4 more years of life for example.
"At the very most patents last for 25 years. That's the whole point of a patent. The deal is that a company provides full details of how an invention works in exchange for a limited time, "
And there is one problem when it's applied to technology/software... When the steam engine was invented, 25 years was well beyond the time an invention would be used. Steam train locomotives for example started becoming common in the 1830's, and were still being built over 100 years later.
Software on the other hand. Well, when was the last time you used some software older than around 5 years (excluding Windows XP)? Now try and pick something that was more than 25 years old....
Samsung produced the Galaxy Nexus on behalf of Google, primarily as a developer device. In that role it has already served its purpose. It is not Samsung's flagship product, that role has been taken by the Galaxy S3. The main result of this is increasingly bad PR for Apple as more people start to believe that they are competing in the courtroom because they are no longer capable of competing in the open market. The whole thing is a joke, imagine if cars, hi-fis or TVs had such ridiculous patent encumbrance. Apple appear to be the biggest comedians of them all.
There's a precedent of sorts; Edison managed to collect sufficiently many patents for film equipment that he was able to force a ridiculous array of rules on the nascent industry, including permissible running times, subjects that could be covered and a bunch more. The net effect? American filmmakers moved to Hollywood, about as far as they could get from Edison, and ignored him.
I guess skipping the US would be analogous here.
Cars, HiFis and TVs _HAVE_ that ridiculous level of patent encumberance. A single modern car diesel engine has anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand patents protecting it. It is rather unsurprising that there are a handful of sources for them nowdays. Even those have to cross-license a lot of IPR to be able to produce them.
The reason why you do not often hear about silly lawsuits is because all big players:
1. Always do FTO (freedom to operate) analysis before entering a market and quite often do fto just for new products. The standard IT industry practice of "ignore patents during development" is an absolute No-No there. You will get fired if you try to develop a new car without checking for IPR first. In IT you are likely to get fired if you do the opposite - actually check for IPR when developing.
2. Have portfolios in their main product areas sufficiently big for a mutual self-assured destruction.
3. There are very few patents by organizations which fail to monetize them so end up selling them to trolls. The up-front cost of R&D is very high so anything it produces is monetized. It is impossible for the car, Hi-Fi and TV industry to produce the car, TV, HiFi equivalents of the designs for the iPhonesque touchscreen UI, patent them and sit on that for 10 years doing totally nothing (no comment why).
>designs for the iPhonesque touchscreen UI, patent them and sit on that for 10 years doing totally nothing (no comment why).
It invented by a small company who made multi-touch keyboards and trackpads before Apple bought them. I guess Apple were waiting for battery and mobile CPU technology to get to where it needed it to be - even then, the first iPhone had to forgo 3G in order to get an acceptable battery life.
Quote: "It invented by a small company who made multi-touch keyboards and trackpads before Apple bought them. "
That is where Apple got the tech, it is not where it got the IPR. Most of the IPR is from one well known place where a lot of stuff got invented and none of it got implemented. I am tempted to say why, but I will not.
Hint - look at the original assignees of the patents used by Apple to sue people over touchscreen stuff.
"Apple has made a clear showing that, in the absence of a preliminary injunction, it is likely to lose substantial market share in the smartphone market and to lose substantial downstream sales of future smartphone purchases and tag-along products," Judge Koh said in Friday's ruling.
So let's get this straight, Apple can get anything banned from sale in the US, delay a court case into the new year so the busiest sales periods are missed, just by saying whatever product which hasn't been found to be, or even looked at yet could damage sales?! Screw the patent system, this is guilty before before being proven innocent. Really shows how the US justice system is utter screwed in favour of a US company!
Except it isn't being tilted in favour of a US company. Any company with a patent in dispute can ask for the same, with similar reasoning.
The injunction isn't there to punish samsung - let me stress that again - it isn't there to punish samsung. It is there to limit potential damages if their opponents are found to be acting illegally. Without it, if this case was won by apple, the loser would not only gave a ban (and many angry customers who need repairs or replacements) but a huge damages bill, payable to cuppertino, to boot.
This really isn't anything that iFans or Fandroids (who are just as bad) to claim the moral high ground over. If the situation was reversed, you can be assured their opponents would do the same.
"So let's get this straight, Apple can get anything banned from sale in the US, delay a court case into the new year so the busiest sales periods are missed, just by saying whatever product which hasn't been found to be, or even looked at yet could damage sales?! Screw the patent system, this is guilty before before being proven innocent. Really shows how the US justice system is utter screwed in favour of a US company!"
No.
It makes great flame material in Internet comments, of course, but the reality is a bit more complicated than that.
In order to get a preliminary injunction in an intellectual property case, you have to show considerable evidence that you are likely to win the case. You ALSO have to put up a bond that will be given to the other party to compensate them for their financial losses if you DON'T win the case.
If Apple loses at trial, Samsung will get a nice, hefty wad of cash to make up for the projected lost sales, as well as court costs, attorney's fees, and so on.
The good old US of A shows once again that it has the best justice that money can buy.
Fortunately I will not buy any more Apple hardware (only got an old 2nd gen ipod) and will now close down my iTunes account as I've already ripped everything I've bought to a more usable format.
Goodbye and good riddance to Apple, rotten to the core.
How can Apple claim that they'll lose significant sales when they are dominating the market (certainly in tablets) to such an extent. These Samsung products have already been out for some time and I can't see Apple sweating much. If the Galaxy Nexus was going to make a big impact then it would have done so by now.
Accually from q1 2011 to q1 this year they lost the smartphone market share lead and its funny how apple has only been suing 1 company to keep their phone's outta the market? Sure you can go on to guess who has taken over the top spot in smartphone market share. Just show's how scared apple is cause they know they are totally screwed after Steve died
I am really confused.. while I can't stand Apple at all any more for the ongoing ridiculous lawsuits.. I can *almost* accept the Tablet 10.1" cause it does look very close to the ipad. But the Galaxy Nexus does NOT look like the iphone at all. In fact, there are a LOT more phones that look almost identical to the iphone before the Galaxy Nexus does. I don't understand how a 16:9 4.65" screen size device with a countoured body can be considered identical in appearns to the much smaller/less curvy iphone.
So please.. can someone for the love of all that is Holy explain how the hell this is possible? Let's put all fanbois aside (both sides) and be fair and honest. Yes, the Samsung Tablet 10.1" looks very close to an ipad. But the Nexus Galaxy.. come on? Are they going to ban the S2 and S3 now too? What about the hundreds of other manufacturers.. I mean.. why can they ban one phone from one company here right now and it doesnt hold up anywhere else for any other manufacturer? Shoot, Samsungs Fascinate looks FAR more like the iphone than the Nexus does.
I can't, because it doesn't.
"Friday's ruling centers on U.S. Patent 8,086,604, which covers a user interface for conveniently retrieving information from a computer system. The patent was filed by Apple in 2004."
(Google search 'Galaxy Nexus' and filter by 'News': the pcworld.com story carries links to the patents in question. Confusion is understandable because there are several devices and patents being slung about)
The situation may possibly become rather more richly ironic and costly for Apple than they are expecting. It is frankly impossible to judge what kind of impact in the tablet-pc market that Win8 and/or Win RT may or may not have. However, if either MS with it's Surface offerings and/or MS' OEMs actually produce something the public want then the net result of Apple's behaviour may be to create space for Redmond in the tablet market which might otherwise not have been there without Apple's legal assault on the Android os in general and that operating system's leading OEM, Samsung, in particular. Apple may in fact end up being badly damaged in the war with their "auld enemy" by virtue of their patent trolling attacks on Mountain View. History is after all littered with examples of the workings of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Why do most journalists seem to assume that US law applies world wide.
Leave the US alone to their judicial nightmare.
Americans no longer innovate
Americans no longer produce.
American industry and business owners are decimating the US middle-class so they wont even be an interesting market for much longer.
Just build and sell the stuff that the rest of the world wants. Ignore the US market and their broken IP and USPTO patent regime.
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They were being huge jerks, blatantly - and badly - copying what Apple did feature by feature, except where it didn't suit them like their addiction to plastic. This is a company that changes Android's standard characteristics - like text wrap in the browser, icons and buttons - to match iOS's. At one point Samsung even hired the same child actress for their ads!. Just doesn't get more shameless, really.
Then, instead of toning it down they went around and mocked Apple - the same company they've been copying all along. All the while Apple was pumping billions into Samsung Electronics as their biggest customer (well, in great decline now).
Finally, still not satisfied with that they went ahead and used FRAND standard patents to attempt injunctions against Apple products - getting investigated by the FTC and EU commissions in the process.
The patent might be a technicality but they had to pin them on something. A bit like catching Al Capone for tax evasion.
I don't want an actual injunction, but it would be good for everyone if Samsung finally got the message and moved on to to doing things differently.
Samsung cannot win, in the long run. Samsung's solution to "missing the boat" in the phone and tablet market was to copy the mindshare leader and darling of the MSM, blatantly and attack the market. They deserve everything they get.
And what they will get is this, and pointed out on these forums by more than one over the past year or more. APPL will simply source their hardware components from alternative sources. Samsung is not the only capable supplier of electronic componentry. APPL has plety of alternatives and they will exercise that option. Personally I doubt whether Samsung can sell enough tablets or phones to compensate for the revenue (and perhaps profit) generated by supplying to APPL. I wonder what iSuppli has to say?
At one point Samsung even hired the same child actress for their ads!
Jezus Christ, so that's it, appear in a crApple advert and you career is over!!!! You can ever act again unless its in another crApple ad. That really says a lot about the mentality of the fanbois.
Sad really when you think about, but the one good thing is that all fanbois are eventually going to disappear up their own ass holes.
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Is going after the gigantic and horrible Galaxy Nexus the best Apple can do? I thought Apple had good taste in design.
Meanwhile Samsung's best ever phone, the Galaxy Ace Hugo Boss edition, is still out there for all to buy.
It may never get Android 4.0, let alone 4.1, but who cares, it goes amazingly well with a nice couture suit.
OK seriously when are people going to learn that apple and the name apple for this computer company is just a over priced over hyped rip off, i mean its a joke ill never touch apple ever. give me a android phone anyday cause Steve jobs isn't around to save apple this time eh.
no, Bad week for consumers.
Apple is using legal tactics to keep itself in a position which it acheived because no other
companies blocked their entrance...its called an Open Market. they are now sticking it to the other companies. If there were legitimate patents (ie ones that arent obvious, arent prior arent and are really cool and novel ways of doing things) then yes, they would have a case. ...talking of cases, I cant believe it will be next year when the case goes to court, the phones will all be old generation by then, Apple will have used this legal method to basically block any free competition.
as others have said, I expect Apple to start taking litigation against these same companies the moment
they launch a TV screen...probably along the lines of claiming all rights to high resolution screens
or a screen which has a motion detector built into it in a certain way.
my next phone is Android, my next tablet is Android - where I can choose which model and which manufacturer I like.
What Philip said above, but also: from where have you got this crazy style of breaking up sentences over multiple lines with no punctuation?
Take it from me, it does not help your point to be understood. Further, when asking a question, one normally indicates such by the use of a question mark, as demonstrated above.
Finally, the fact that you aren't intelligent enough to write your own name with capital letters does not do wonders for your credibility.
Hasn't the phone been on sale for eight months already? It's so out of date, it uses a full size SIM card instead of a Micro SIM. It would be more of a competitive concern had the S3 been banned. Unless you're Apple, it's actually a very fast moving market so I don't see what Apple gains competitively here.
after searching, I find that one of the main patents that the phone is banned for is to do with searching in multiple sources from a single interface.....
I remember when I first started to use the internet, I had some difficulty searching because the internet crawlers for the search engines weren't as good as the ones employed today. So I used a program that would search multiple search engines for me. If I remember correctly, one was called Dog Pile and another was called Web Ferret (not sure if I spelled them correctly).
can those programs be considered as prior art?
" searching in multiple sources from a single interface"
"So I used a program that would search multiple search engines"
This is the patent in question:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8,086,604.PN.&OS=PN/8,086,604&RS=PN/8,086,604
Notice the 'input by a user' clause - so it's for searching data that the user has entered themselves (such as their contacts, documents, calendar items).
However note also the reference to patent:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F5404295
…which is dated 1995. Dogpile was started in 1996, Webferret.com is dated 2002.
So in answer to your question, 'no'.
Google too aren't going to be happy with the ruling either. It had high hopes for the handset and handed out 6,000 of them at this week's I/O developer's conference as a platform for people to design applications around.
Google was handing out the Nexus 7, a different device produced by Asus and not Samsung, at the conference and not covered by this court case.
No one likes to be shut out of a market but historically the US market for mobile phones has been distinct. In the years where Nokia reigned supreme, it had only a paltry market share in the US. Initially, sales of the I-Phone in the US did allow Apple to kick start the app and content eco-system but now the US market is neither numerically nor financially as important as it was a few years ago as the effects of commodifying the hardware and focussing on software ripple through the industry.
I don't know how this ban is being enforced, if it is at all. I just ordered a HSPA+ unlocked Nexus yesterday to put on Straight Talk's service so I can dump Verizon and Google didn't have any problem taking my money for the order. And they are still actively taking orders as of this morning too (at least it looks like it).
Apple can simply kiss my ass. I wish Samsung would cut the bastards off on SoC supply if this is enforced. Since they fab Crapple's chip supply, dry them up and sell the excess wafers to someone else.
I'll be seriously pissed if my phone doesn't ship out in the next day or 2 because of this patent trolling crap from Crapple.
Samsung copies Apple - bad Apple. If Apple copied Samsung it would also be bad Apple. Apple are only doing what any other company would do in the same position - protect it's IP. Roll back about 4-5 years and a Nokia N95 was considered pretty much a top-end phone. iPhone comes out and now almost every phone is a full screen touchscreen - even if you do not buy an iPhone you are benefitting from them massively moving the market for phones and mobile data forward.
Same applies for tablets. If it were not for Apple you would probably not be using an iPad, Fire, Tab or whatever else. I'm not saying they invented tablets but they certainly revolutionised both phones and tablets as we know them now.
And Apple is not actually "protecting its IP" (that childish concept from the IP moaning industry again). As is evident from the patent in discussion here, it's just locking out competition by co-opting state power.
Btw, why do you think I'm using an iPad, Fire, Tab or whatever else?
"As is evident from the patent in discussion here, it's just locking out competition by co-opting state power."
So how do you explain that they are only blocking the devices that look like their products / infringe their patents and not all competing products?
You can't because you are talking crap.
The Nexus is nothing special, its the S2 and the S3 which make the iphone look like an obselete brick.
More than anything this is a waste of corporate resources and money, all that will happen is they will develop a work around approach and the injunction will get dropped.
Litigating against your competitors doesnt make your own product any better.
I find it really annoying and funny at the same time that a judge would ban the sale of a product without the product being found, to infringe on any of the patents etc and only ban it for 1 of the companies within the court case.
I really think that until this is resolved then both parties products should be banned from being sold, because as I see it apple are gaining sales because people have really no other option because the best tablets around the same price range are banned from sale, because apple know if they don't stop them being sold most people would rather buy a samsung tablet than a ipad.
I would love to see the person who decided to portray the use a tablet styled device in 2001: A Space Odyssey take, every company to court over the fact that they own the copyrights to such a device regardless of the fact of whether it worked or not.
All this sueing people over the way "it looks & feels" is complete nonsense, I mean what is next are apple going to sue the creaters of the eye pads that are used for covering your eyes after a operation or something, because eye pad sounds the same as ipad.
Why why WHY are there so many ignorant morons commenting on El Reg these days? Samsung has infringed on a patent that covers Apple's "Spotlight" search. For those saying that Dogpile or Google has prior art, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There are several sources of data on iOS, including emails, text messages, application names, etc. Just as Spotlight on OS X searches through more than just file names, Spotlight on iOS searches through those multiple sources. It is not an aggregator, which would be compiling the results of multiple disparate searches, but rather it is searching those multiple data streams and then producing a segregated output of the results. In the honorable Judge Koh's opinion, there is a violation of the patent on the part of Samsung. Apple only get the injunction once they've paid a $95 million bond, that they will forfeit if they lose the trial. I think the $95 million Samsung could potentially make if they win is more than the profit that the Galaxy Nexus would've made over its lifetime. Either way, this is a pretty clear infringement, and I find myself siding with Apple in this instance.
What the hell is this judge thinking? Preliminary injunctions are supposed to only happen if the product in question stands to do more damage to the plaintiff by being on the market than the defendant stands to loose from the injunction. There is no way in hell that Apple stands to loose more from any patents that the Nexus may infringe than Samsung stands to loose by being locked out of the market with it.
So Apple can fail to license the 3G technology they conveniently stole - and it's FRAND so cheap as chips if done before a complaint has to be raised. But whoa these Android boys are up to sh*z because they use a touchscreen (invented in the 70's),
Never mind the fact that both devices are clearly different: shiz, one even says Samsung right up on the grill. Not only that, but one is clearly a rectangle while the other is almost a square.
Lastly, asking a lawyer to tell you the difference between two devices when clearly they have some bias (even if it's bias in their favour) is so stupid it beggars belief that she even pulled that rubbish.
As for the Apple Fanboi's crowing that "oh you thought she was great when Android won"... not so fast. There is no "winner" here. No matter what happens, one product will die and the other will survive. Back in "the day", stopping a product for six months might hurt a little. Might cause some ruffled feathers. Today, that's how long the device is likely to be sold over.
I vote Samsung and other Android manufacturers stop selling in the US: the network is a shambles and in typical Merkin attitude is out of spec for the rest of the world. It's more expensive to support them especially when stupidity seems to win over sensibility in this case. Take Android away from them. See how the public copes with just Apple there to "look after them". I give it a year tops before Apple unveils Master Plan One.
Spawn of Steve indeed.
"So Apple can fail to license the 3G technology they conveniently stole"
If Motorola are not willing to license 3G or other 'essential' technologies, then perhaps they should not have signed up for FRAND.
As it happens, any company that requires the use of such essential patents must be granted a license to use them. It is not possible legally for Apple (or any company who can pay the 'reasonable fee') to 'fail to license' an essential patent covered by FRAND such as 3G, so you are talking crap.
"As it happens, any company that requires the use of such essential patents must be granted a license to use them. It is not possible legally for Apple (or any company who can pay the 'reasonable fee') to 'fail to license' an essential patent covered by FRAND such as 3G, so you are talking crap."
Surely it is possible, if they don't pay the reasonable fee? However in the case to which you are referring, memory suggests that the argument was over the definition of what does and does not constitute 'reasonable'. If Motorola are seeking to get the same terms from Apple as they give to everyone else and Apple refuse to pay because they want to pay less, even for a FRAND patent, then they have not legally licensed that patent.
If Motorola, on the other hand, are seeking to charge Apple more than they charge everyone else, then Motorola are in the wrong and Apple should quite rightly refuse to pay it, and would have a substantial leg upon which to stand when they go to court.
"Surely it is possible, if they don't pay the reasonable fee? However in the case to which you are referring, memory suggests that the argument was over the definition of what does and does not constitute 'reasonable'. If Motorola are seeking to get the same terms from Apple as they give to everyone else and Apple refuse to pay because they want to pay less, even for a FRAND patent, then they have not legally licensed that patent."
Of course, however the likes of Apple and Microsoft have deep pockets. The FTC are investigating Motorola Mobility for abuse of the FRAND agreements, and of course guess who owns Motorola Mobility.
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/07/02/ftc-to-investigate-motorola-over-patent-abuses/
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/04/03/european-commission-begins-investigation-into-motorola-patent-lawsuits/
…so really it's Google trying to screw over Apple and Microsoft for access to 'essential' patents, but of course as it's not Apple on the accusing end that's just fine isn't it.
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Here you have the guyz over at apple who have managed to merge all these existing technologies (accelerometer, touch interface, dock, swipe - a UNIQUE experience at the time) into a phone and tab only to be copied by world and dog. I cannot tell most modern phones from one another, they all look the same. Even when they put their brand on there, they still look the same. Before Apple entered the market, all phones had nasty keyboards, reduced keyboards (where you had to press the 1 key seven times to get a 1!!!!!) or styluses, tiny screens with ridiculous resolutions etc. I have an old Fujitsu Siemens tablet, it looks like 1970's crap (grey, buttons all around) but was manufactured in 2005!!!
Copying the looks of a Ferrari and putting the Ford logo on it doesn't make it "legal"!
Apple revolutionized the phone/tab market so much that we had iphone killers come up and plummet for years until they copied the phone 1:1.
Besides, I would like to see a new design, I am tired of the iphone looks, come on Google, Samsung et al, bring out a new design if you dare, oh wait, you can't ... just waiting for the new apple design ...
>Besides, I would like to see a new design, I am tired of the iphone looks, come on Google, Samsung et al, bring out a new design if you dare, oh wait, you can't ... just waiting for the new apple design ...
have you actually seen the Samsung Nexus phone, it looks nothing like the iphone, so perhaps you should buy one of those (that's asssuming you are not in the USA of course)
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