Samsung Infringed On Apple Patents, Says ITC 274
The U.S. International Trade Commission has ruled that certain models of Samsung phone violate Apple patents, and are likely to be blocked from import to the U.S. From the article: "The patents in question are U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949, which relates to a touch screen and user interface and U.S. Patent No. 7,912,501 which deals with detecting when a headset is connected. The ITC said Samsung didn’t infringe on the other two patents. In a statement on the matter, the ITC said the decision is final and the investigation has been closed. ... As was the case with the previous ruling that saw Apple devices banned, the ban on Samsung devices won’t go into effect until 60 days but can be blocked by a favorable ruling following a presidential review. That seems unlikely as such a block has only been issued once since 1987 – last’s week’s ruling in favor of Apple."
not again (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:not again (Score:5, Insightful)
They are both just companies doing the same stuff that companies normally do. None of it so far has really affected the consumers much. Neither of them is getting one up on the other either, so in the end they are just wasting their money. If people are unhappy with the way that corps work, we should be rallying to change the laws regulating them rather than wasting our energy debating the relative merits of common place aggressive troll lawsuits.
Check out the new Slashdot iPad app [apple.com].
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Check out the new Slashdot iPad app [apple.com].
The description doesn't really say much, does it support posting? And if so, how?
Re:not again (Score:4, Interesting)
They both blatantly copied each other constantly, misused patents, misused lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All these individual little patent disputes are really annoying. They should each be barred from suing each other for anything that happened prior to a certain date so we can be done with this. Then, if they want, they can just duke it out in a paintball game or Mario Party 9 or something.
This is not just about the past. They are both selling phones in the present that each of them claims is infringing on their patents.
The courts should examine the patent, determine how fundamental it is, assign an economic value to each of the patents as a price per phone sold; and then force the two to allow the other's use of the patent: require them to pay each other a royalty of their sales based on the court's valuation of each of their patents, and prohibit any further litigation between the two based on those patents, so long as they pay as required.
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Sounds too idyllic. It would be nice to silence the lawsuits and countersuits for a while all the same.
Re:not again (Score:5, Insightful)
They both blatantly copied each other constantly, misused patents, misused lawsuits and injunctions, etc. All these individual little patent disputes are really annoying. They should each be barred from suing each other for anything that happened prior to a certain date so we can be done with this. Then, if they want, they can just duke it out in a paintball game or Mario Party 9 or something.
And they are together keeping all other competitors out of the race through fear of being sued. They have no reason to stop. Together they are winning.
Re:not again (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxes mean nothing. Ask yourself this, who 'contributed' more to the party? Who supplies better drugs and hookers?
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I wish I had mod points for funny.
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I wish slashdot had mod category of Sour Grapes.
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'Sides, those politicians are the best money can buy, and the corps gots a lot of money to donate, or slip under the table on legal way or another, so corp
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Apple is playing US tax laws off irish tax laws to avoid paying taxes. Just because its technically 'legal' currently doesn't make it any less douchebaggy or wrong.
Just another case of privatized profits and socialized losses. And you're defending it... So you too are a scumbag..
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How is that douchebaggy?
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Re:Apple has not dodged any taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
The douchebaggy comes in when company A gives a million dollars in political contributions on the understanding that the tax laws will be changed to save company A a billion dollars in taxes. It's all legal bribery.
Re:Apple has not dodged any taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
It's douchebaggy when you pretend intellectual property that was developed in California comes from an Irish company for tax purposes and is subject to no tax. The law may say it's okay for an Irish company to pay no US taxes, but that doesn't mean Apple is really an Irish company. Yes they are dodging legitimately owed taxes through corporate structures that are pure fiction. Why anybody would say that's 'perfectly okay' because its 'perfectly legal' is beyond me. Unless you have a political objection to companies paying taxes at all...
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How is that douchebaggy?
Everybody everywhere does whatever they can to pay the fewest taxes possible and get the highest return possible. If a corporation does it too, that is somehow wrong? It's neither illegal, unethical, nor immoral. In fact, I'd say what's unethical is the fact that US tax rates are as unfairly and insanely high as they are, and everyday Joe Sixpack has to pay somebody just to figure out what he has to pay the government.
Douchebaggy? Let me try:
1) Big corporations and banks have tons of money to hire legal weasels to weasel them out of paying more than one or two percent taxes and they also use that money to bribe politicians into changing tax laws to lower their tax burden.
2) Joe Sixpack cannot afford to hire self same legal weasels to minimise his taxes nor can he afford to rent corrupt congress critters and make them change tax laws so he pays a way higher portion of his income in taxes than one or two percent by those c
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it's only the top 10% that carry their own weight.
Nonsense. As Buffet repeated recently, his tax rate is still less than his secretary's.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html [cnn.com]
US taxes are regressive, not progressive.
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Re:Apple has not dodged any taxes (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, but Apple's "no declared tax residency anywhere in the world" bullshit is tax dodging, pure and simple. The fact that they can't avoid things like sales tax or income tax doesn't excuse the vast amount they do get out of paying.
Apple has found the holy grail of tax avoidance schemes. They claim not to be resident in any nation, for tax purposes. It works by having a shell company in Ireland. Irish tax law says that companies pay tax from where they are run, which in Apple's case is the US. US tax law says that companies pay tax where they are incorporated, which is Ireland. So neither Ireland nor the United States gets any tax revenue from that company, except for what it can't avoid by having US employees and offices. Profits are funnelled to it from subsidiaries around the world. Tens of billions coming and and stored in untaxable bank accounts.
It goes way beyond not just moving profit back to the US to be taxed "twice". In the case of the UK subsidiary it wouldn't be taxed here anyway because corporations only pay tax on profits, and Apple UK doesn't make any due to having to pay huge fees for using the Apple branding. It's the same trick that allowed Starbucks to make a loss in the UK and pay zero corporation tax, despite clearly being very successful and having huge revenue.
Apple are not the only ones to dodge tax. Google does it in the UK, I'm sure if you look you will find Samsung does everything it can to minimize what it pays. Apple is both the worst and largest offender though, especially for a company that tries so hard to maintain a good public image and attract the idealistic hipster crowd.
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All setup by our do nothing congress. Weren't they the ones who fronted the money to make this all possible?
Yippie for the stooges on Capital Hill.
I haven't heard any real new laws being passed on how to set things to rights from the grand-standers who made this all possible.
As for any company making use of the laws congress passes... they should ... they owe it to their shareholders to make as much money as they can. To do any less would be negligent. I don't fault any company from making use of a loophole
Re:Apple has not dodged any taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't fault any company from making use of a loophole unless they wrote the actual law to create the loophole they are using.
And this is the problem with the American system. Politicians need fantastic amounts of money to win elections and it is cheaper for company A to make campaign contribution on the understanding that they can write a new tax loophole then to actually pay the tax. Of course companies B to Z also take advantage of the new loophole and then make campaign contributions so they can also write new tax law which company A also takes advantage off. Rinse and repeat a few times and you have the current system where companies A to Z all claim they're just taking advantage of existing loopholes.
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Yep.
And companies and individuals with large amounts of money can claim they are doing everything legally when they offshore their investments because the laws are written that way after all. Only congress would be able to remedy the problem, but they are paid not to.
But at least in this case, I don't think Apple had any hand in writing the legislation that seeded the money to pay consultants for Ireland to setup this offshoring stuff.
They are merely one of the higher profile companies taking advantage of t
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Actually not quite. Google the words "transfer pricing".
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Apple has found the holy grail of tax avoidance schemes. They claim not to be resident in any nation, for tax purposes. It works by having a shell company in Ireland. Irish tax law says that companies pay tax from where they are run, which in Apple's case is the US. US tax law says that companies pay tax where they are incorporated, which is Ireland. So neither Ireland nor the United States gets any tax revenue from that company, except for what it can't avoid by having US employees and offices. Profits are funnelled to it from subsidiaries around the world. Tens of billions coming and and stored in untaxable bank accounts.
All nonsense. Apple Ireland is the HQ for Apple's European subsidiary - which makes perfect sense even were it not for the favourable tax rate - it's in the Euro zone, in the closest European time zone to America, and the native language is English. European sales go there. It's not a shell company for the rest of the enterprise. And revenues from elsewhere in the world do not go to Ireland.
Wrong (Score:3)
Why are you shilling for Apple?
Yeah, no dodge there. They just have a non-existent office that also -- just by sheer a
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If america needs to fix this, then america should fix this. Having a cry about a business
I've seen you say "having a cry" about this issue twice in this conversation so far. You are being a cheap little fuck today. The only reason I'm even commenting about that is that you are a cheap little fuck who is also a mercantilist whore. Apple's refusal to pay taxes makes them part of the problem (and their officers downright evil) even if everyone else is doing it and/or it is legal. Legality != Morality; HTH, HAND.
Re:Apple has not dodged any taxes (Score:4, Informative)
The US corporate tax rates are by no means the highest on the planet. Here's a list, but I'll explain it to you in text in case you don't decide to look.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
First, the US corporate tax rate varies, from 15% to 51% (including both federal and state taxes - federal alone is 15% to 39%). On the low end, 15% is on the lower side of the list (the only large, developed countries not known as tax havens with a lower rate on the low end are Canada and Russia), and well below the highest flat rate, which is Cameroon at 38%. Notable countries with rates higher than our lowest rates are Germany, Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Poland, Turkey, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Australia, France, the UK and Chile. Bangladesh has a rate that ranges from 0 to 45%, which is the highest single rate on the list - obviously above the 39% federal tax highest rate.
So, no, the US doesn't have the absolute highest corporate tax rate. It has among the highest possible corporate taxes for the largest entities, but it is not the "highest worldwide" by a wide margin for the vast majority of corporations who will fall lower on the spectrum than a giant like Apple.
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Actually the corporation that pays the highest US taxes (both effective tax rate and total taxes paid) also happens to be the ones that Democrats hate the most: Wal-Mart.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1004/gallery.top_5_tax_bills/ [cnn.com]
Apple pays more total tax dollars, but that goes to other countries during transfer pricing, not the US. And no, it isn't other corporations combined - Exxon for example pays more than twice as much in total taxes than Apple does with Chevron coming in second place, and A
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Re: not again (Score:4, Informative)
To be fair, apple started the iProduct meme with the iMac. Not saying it should be a trademark, but giving props.
Well, there's the ipaq, which someone else pointed out. There's also Sony i.LINK and iSCSI. There are probably a lot more.
Seriously? (Score:2)
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Hammer is coming down (Score:2, Interesting)
... on foreign companies. I think we'll see more of this in the future, U.S gov getting at the foreign companies. Samsung should just stop supplying U.S companies and see how they start feeling about things. Don't just lie there waiting to get kicked again.
Re:Hammer is coming down (Score:5, Insightful)
Hammer is coming down ... on foreign companies.
As though Apple were an American company? I've heard they have some sort of design office in California somewhere, but in any meaningful sense they're at least as much of a foreign company as Samsung. At least Samsung has some fabs in Austin and whatnot.
I'm fine with a little protectionism if it means protecting American operations, but people get very confused about the difference between where a company's headquarters are and where it operates. It's like people who say my Toyota is a foreign car. It's 85% value added in the US - a lot more American than almost any Ford or GM model.
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Case in point: My Ford Fusion was assembled in Mexico. My Honda Odyssey was assembled in Alabama.
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Globalization: making borders fuzzy and customers confused...
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Didn't you get the memo? Globalization is for corporations only. You still need the masters to agree if you want to work off the plantation.
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Was talking about geographical borders.
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This is the bullshit that foreign car companies came up with after the domestic went full on patriotic heart-tugs to sell cars.
They are assembled in the US. You can measure value added in any wonky way and come up with 85% value in the US.
The fact is they are engineered, designed outside the US and the main operations of the company are done outside the US. That is
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Giving local companies preferential treatment isn't a bad thing.
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Giving local companies preferential treatment isn't a bad thing.
Yes, it is. It might not look bad in the short term, but you're both depriving your population of better/cheaper imported goods and removing incentives for innovation in local companies.
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Giving local companies preferential treatment isn't a bad thing.
It isn't bad for the companies getting preferential treatment, but its bad for everyone else (even all the people you wouldn't expect to be effected.)
Protectionism is, at its core, inefficiency.
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If the prez doesn't let Samsung off the hook as well you can expect the US to be taken to the WTO. One possible remedy would be to ban US exports, or charge US companies hefty fees to import the South Korean technology they rely on.
Even for the US there are consequences.
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If the prez doesn't let Samsung off the hook as well you can expect the US to be taken to the WTO.
This are patents, which are national laws. However there is a WTO treaty for them; TRIPS [wikipedia.org]. I agree things may turn quite bad at WTO for the US
Patents (Score:2)
Re:Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
But they were given meaning by our beloved economists. In 2008, the definition of GDP was changed to include things like patents and other types of intellectual property. Article here:
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21582498-america-has-changed-way-it-measures-gdp-boundary-problems [economist.com]
So, instead of waiting to see how a corporation (or national economy) actually executes their IP rights and measure the revenue, the GDP calculations attempt to impute a future income stream from them. And then this becomes part of our GDP statistics. IP has become a Potemkin village of value behind which companies (and entire nations) hide the true dire straights of their economy. They are pretty, shiny objects meant to impress investors, who should bee asking whether anyone has the ability to actually produce value with them.
So we aren't going to see a change in the status of patents any time soon. Because now, the economists have a number (fictional though it may be) that pins an amount of GDP to them. And woe to those who attack that and drive us into another recession.
Re:Patents (Score:4, Funny)
IP has become a Pokemon village of value behind which companies (and entire nations) hide the true dire straights of their economy.
Fixed that for you...
A wild FRAND appears.
Apple: Job's Design, I choose you!
Job's Design used Rounded Rectangle.
IT’S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
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Makes no difference. GDP, Gross Domestic Product is supposed to be a measure of ..... product. Stuff that's made and sold.
In the case of patents or movies, investment in R&D or cheesy scripts makes absolutely no contribution to GDP. Until something is produced. Either fancy iPhones or butts in theater seats. With movies, the effect of investment is easy to measure. No scripts written or actor paid. No popcorn sold. Not so with patents. Would Apple still build an iPhone even if the touchscreen gestures
Which phones are getting banned?? (Score:4, Informative)
OK... I broke with Slashdot tradition and actually read TFA. That said, I STILL cannot figure out exactly which Samsung phones are being specifically banned in this ruling? Is it a top seller like the Galaxy S3 or Note II, or some older phones that only the prepaid carriers offer now?
Not that it really matters... 60 days is probably enough time to come up with a workaround to get around the infringement.
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I don't know the exact model either but I can remember some news site saying that the impact is expected to be small as it should only affect some 2010 models.
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It's only old ones from a couple of years ago. The danger is that Apple will try to have more models added to the list. Of course Samsung was going to do the same after winning their case against Apple, but then Obama pardoned them.
Gee (Score:5, Informative)
I assume the ungodly ridiculous amounts of verbiage [uspto.gov] is not to be legally clear, but be legally obfuscating, wearing down patent examiners and causing days of study just to begin to get a handle on what they are claiming.
The one or two cool little tricks being patented, if any, are deliberately obfuscated.
Does anybody even know what little bit is supposedly infringed?
One of the "claims":
6. The computing device of claim 1, wherein, in one heuristic of the one or more heuristics, a contact comprising a finger swipe gesture that initially moves within a predetermined angle of being perfectly horizontal with respect to the touch screen display corresponds to a one-dimensional horizontal screen scrolling command rather than the two-dimensional screen translation command.
So if you drag left or right witihin some predefined angle, it shall be considered a horizontal swipe rather than a 2D arbitrary angle swipe. And nobody ever did this before?
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CAD and DTP packages from the 1980s had a feature like this, but back then you had to use a mouse or a pen... Although there were touch screens about, so maybe you could use a finger too.
As well as prior art it does seem incredibly obvious. I know someone who recently wrote some code that handles touch gestures and implemented this feature, presumably in violation of the patent. It's just so... well, obvious. If you don't do it your touch input system sucks.
kindergarten valid (Score:4, Insightful)
As you can read in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patentability [wikipedia.org]
the US patent office pretends that one of the conditions for granting a US patent is non-obviousness.
Considering that it is very unlikely that someone swiping a finger across a touchscreen achieves a movement that is 100% horizontal and 0% vertical, it is obvious that any solution of the problem would tolerate a certain amount of vertical movement, and this is what that patent claim is about.
US american companies are promoting politicians with a kindergarten understanding of science, so that they can profit from that bullshit:
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/13/07/12/1645228/google-raises-campaign-funds-for-climate-change-denier [slashdot.org]
Also, the invention of input gestures is not as novel as you seem to believe, because the patent was filed 2008, while for example the video game Black and White had gestures in 2001. Okay, it was mouse gestures, but there is no big difference to a touch screen regarding movement.
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I don't know of any touch screens before that even could detect angle of input
Are you seriously that ignorant of geometry?
Anything that returns more than one (x,y) coordinate pair (not even at the same time) is inherently returning an angle. In other words, every touch screen ever made.
Re:No, no-one did that (Score:4, Insightful)
The patent is obvious bullshit. The designer and engineer of the touchscreen incorporated within the design the ability to detect motion on the screen. To then layer an additional patent on there that particular motions are total complete and utter USPTO patent bullshit. It's like saying that touch screen designer didn't design in the ability to detect where on the screen you are touching or what motion you make post touch basically a touch screen that doesn't work at all. That the US Patent passed that is total and complete corruption of the patent system.
As for detecting what is plugged in, seriously what the fuck passed for obvious with the USPTO, seriously. Again a blatantly lawyer titled patent designed to run up fees.
patent x but with pc/internet//touchpad (Score:2)
I know the US patent office has given up on this, but they are supposed to not grant obvious patents, and doing anything on pc/internet/touchpad that has been done on paper/pc/touchscreen(yes, they existed before Apple) before most of the time sounds pretty obvious, especially when you consider that patents are usually formulated in legal language designed to stake a claim as broad as possible and as devoid of technical information as legal.
Winning (Score:4, Informative)
If you cannot win in the market, the next step is to win using the law - this is business 101 in the USA today.
Apple, Obama ... (Score:2)
and You?
Well, Obama? (Score:2)
Apple gets the presidential blessing [slashdot.org] for no good reason, how about Samsung?
Patents in both directions are bullshit anyway.
Obama's blatent protectionism (Score:5, Informative)
From PJ at Groklaw:
Its political patronage, not protectionism (Score:2)
...because none of these actors^H^H^H^H^H^Hclowns care about where the factories and the jobs are located. This is about politicians granting favors to extremely rich corporations, who in turn help the politicans pay for their campaigns and give them and their appointees revolving-door jobs.
Re:Obama's blatent protectionism (Score:5, Insightful)
it is neither fair nor non-discriminatory for the holder of the FRAND-encumbered patent to require licenses to non-FRAND-encumberd patents as a condition for licensing its patent/quote?
And why not? Patent for patent seems like the most reasonable form of trade to me.
Anyway, so far as I can see, from Samsung's (and everyone else's) perspective, what this story shows is that if you play nice - i.e. FRAND your patents - then this will cost you in long term when assholes like Apple come with a bunch of effectively essential, but legally non-FRAND patents of their own. So I suspect that future telecommunication standards created by corporate committees will drop the FRAND requirement, and form patent cartels instead. Which, of course, we're all much worse for. Thanks to the only kid in the room who insisted on not letting anyone play with his toys...
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The terms of FRAND is only that you give everyone a fair and reasonable deal. What's unreasonable about a tit for tat arrangement? Especially when that is the case with virtually every other licensee?
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PJ is a paid Samsung PR blogger.
That should be modded Funny, not Troll.
Detecting when a headset is connected????: (Score:5, Informative)
You mean, like a mechanical switch that comes built in to the jack chassis?
For crying out loud, I built an amplifier in high school in 1980 that could detect when a headset was detected. Making software detect the same thing would amount to merely polling on a physical line the switch is on and converting the voltage on it to a digital signal of true or false.
Well, I'm not sure about US 7912501 B2 (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm sorry but no. This is not even remotely original. Switched sockets detecting the presence of headsets have been a staple accessory to any device which has a headphone socket for MANY years. In fact they were original created for mono cassette recorders so that reporters couldn't drain down their batteries while the microphones weren't plugged in. These switched types have existed for all varieties of 2.5mm, 3.5mm or 1/4" sockets and even power sockets.
In addition since mobile phones were giant bricks wi
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There's no way that any sane person would grant them patent protection on the general concept
We're not talking about sane people, we're talking about the USPTO.
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This should be easy to find prior art for. 4 pin 3.5mm jacks were standard for headsets long before 2007 (I had a Motorola phone from about 2003 that used this type of jack), and the pins were deliberately arranged so that a normal stereo 3.5mm jack would just connect the mic pin to ground, making it very easy to detect which type of jack was inserted. Even if other phones did not implement the detection and just used the fact that a mic pin that was grounded would not produce unwanted noise, so there is
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It didn't. "Free market" is just a propaganda term.
When filthy Obama sets aside ITC rulings... (Score:3, Insightful)
Moronic Yanks have given their president absolute power - Obama is a dictator for his period in office like all new presidents now. Free to create any laws he wishes. Free to imprison or release any person he wants without oversight. Free to ignore ANY aspect of the Constitution or Common Law.
Now King Obama, with a giant Apple cheque in his family bank account (fully legal under the Law that allows all Washington US politicians to engage in insider-trading or to accept bribes from US companies), freed Apple from the consequences of negative ITC rulings (against all principles of International Law). A Law that is selectively applied is no law whatsoever. So, King Obama is choosing to punish Samsung on behalf of his Apple sponsors. The ITC ruling is irrelevant because the US no longer respects the ruling of this body.
Are you Yanks happy with this situation? Well you were happy when you murdered two million people in Iraq, and destroyed that secular society. You were pleased when Obama the butcher murdered the people protecting their secular regime in Libya. You are happy when Obama the genocidal war criminal sends the greatest terrorist army ever seen in Human history into the secular society of Syria, in order to create an extremist Islamic horror story run by the depraved women-hating, gay-hating beasts that rule in Saudi Arabia.
Hitler had to pretend to be a nice guy at home, because the German people felt they had very high moral standards. By contrast, Obama simply has to say "let's murder those dirty foreigners" and you Yanks stand up and scream "F**k yeah, America is the best". Where the hell do you think this is going to end up?
Does Apple really have to cheat, steal and bribe in order to have great success? Obviously not. But, given no reverse pressure from the moral climate in America, Apple simply gives in to temptation, and allows its wealth to achieve whatever it can, without regard to what is right or decent. But how the hell do you think the rest of the world views your despicable companies, and your despicable presidents? The world has always admired the business success of the USA, and the entrepreneurship of the US people. This alone ensured the US a position at the top table. But this repugnant evil that infests the USA today ensures the US has no long term future - you Yanks want another World War, and everything you do is in preparation for this. Why the hell do you idiots think you are growing your military power so obscenely, and engaging in as many murderous wars against defenceless nations as you can arrange?
These ITC shenanigans are the tiniest symptom of an infinitely greater problem.
Oblig (Score:2)
I hope Apple and Samsung implode at the same time.
Obama Got $308,081 from Apple, $1,000 from Samsung (Score:5, Informative)
Obama got $308,081 from Apple in 2012 [opensecrets.org]
Obama got $1,000 from Samsung in 2012 (as $250 [opensecrets.org] and $750 [opensecrets.org])
Even disallowing the home team advantage, I really would be surprised if Obama does Samsung the same favour he extended to Apple last week and overturns this ban.
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t has nothing to do with bribes, Koreans don't vote in US elections.
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Apple doesn't pay so much in bribes as it does in customer data.
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and got told they wouldn't get non-discriminatory terms
False. Apple was told that they'd get the same terms as anyone else licensing them (the definition of "non-discriminatory") but considered the percentage too high since it was based on a percentage of selling price or revenue per unit, or something like that; in a nutshell, the licensing costs were higher for Apple because their products were more expensive.
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The Russians are pissed enough to harbour Snowden.
The Russians aren't pissed about anything special - they're just harboring him to annoy and embarrass the US.
The Chinese aren't backing the US in the North Korea talks.
The Chinese have always pretended to be above the fray vis-a-vis N. Korea.
The Japanese just sailed their first war ship in 50 years.
Then where did all those other ship in their fleet come from? Japan has had a substantial navy for decades.
I can think of a dozen wars that started with this sort of trade embargoes and tariffs.
So you think China was wrong to embargo opium from British ships?
Just the precedent itself is enough to block US made goods in half the world.
So? It's not like we export much of anything anymore anyway.
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So? It's not like we export much of anything anymore anyway.
You were OK until here. US exports in 2012 were $1.5T, only topped by China at $2T and the EU at $2.1T. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports [wikipedia.org]
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Don't take my statement so literally. Our exports seem high in dollar terms, but they're still much less than our imports. Moreover we've stopped making many things that in a balanced trade scenario we would have continued to make.
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The Russians are pissed enough to harbour Snowden.
The Russians aren't pissed about anything special - they're just harboring him to annoy and embarrass the US.
I'm guessing they don't want to appear to be following instructions from the US. And giving Snowden to the US might also be seen as supporting the snooping (whether or not they do it themselves on the same scale). Annoying and embarrassing may also be factors, but is perhaps less valuable to them..
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It's not like we export much of anything anymore anyway.
The US is the #2 exporter in the world. $1.6 trillion worth of goods last year, according to Wikipedia.
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Considering that Samsung sell a lot more phones than Apple you would think that any import ban would piss off more US voters than it would please.
Re:Unlikely? (Score:4, Informative)
Why would it be unlikely?
It's the same exact situation, just with the roles revers.. oh.
Yeah, exactly the same - only Samsung has standard essential patents they didn't offer under FRAND terms, while Apple's patents are, well, normal patents.
Re:Unlikely? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's normal for 2008 patents to be enforced on 80's touchscreen technology? Just because you were the first to mass-market an idea doesn't mean you deserve a patent. Apple's touch screen patent covers any type of screen technology or touch technology yet to be invented and "other devices, such as personal computers and laptop computers." Basically they have a patent on moving things with their fingers. Is that normal? (I'll be fair and admit it's a patent on using a touchscreen to move digital things and concede some of the included tech might be as recent as 1990)
I don't know as much about the headphone jack detection, but my 2001 phone could tell when I plugged in my headset. Is adding stereo (featured in my 2005 phone) really such a revolution that they need a patent in 2007? It doesn't appear to detail any new method of detection, other than maybe individual channels, but I think my Pocket PC's did that.
I find it infuriating that the US government is just handing rights, an unfair market position, and a lot of business over to Apple with the touch patent, and so many people are defending Apple. Meanwhile, the government is setting a precedent that with enough lawyers, patents, political connections, and stupid jurors you can claim ownership of what you didn't invent and kick competition to the curb. As a small, inventive company, it makes work look like a game of waiting to get squashed.
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It's normal for 2008 patents to be enforced on 80's touchscreen technology?
Are you saying Samsung phones use 80s touchscreen technology?
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Nice try.
Samsung demanded cross-licenses to Apple's non-FRAND patents. That puts the D back in Discriminatory.
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This is ridiculous. FRAND patents MUST BE SHARED and in exchange a company gets to have their component used in all devices; Samsung gets to have that bit in nearly every phone so we can have some kind of a standard If we didn't have standards, you'd have to have a different set-up on every tower for phones from every vendor OR the phones would cost too much to buy. Either way, it would be a mess.
Because Samsung has the privilege of FRAND, it does not allow them to extort the ability for more than the curre
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Ummm... Apple devices are made in sweatshops in China and elsewhere. Samsung phones are made in Korea. South Korea had an average wage in 2011 of 31,051 USD (disposable income). The US was $42,050.
So... what????
http://www.itproportal.com/2012/11/27/china-labor-watch-hits-out-at-samsung-over-poor-working-conditions/ [itproportal.com] - what indeed.
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Cross licensing standards-essential patents is the usual way to get access to standards-essential patents.
FTFY.
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But Apple don't want to pay what others paid for it.
You DO know the definition of "FRAND" is not "Better deal for Apple than anyone else gets" right?
Yes, I do, but neither you nor Samsung know that it means "the same deal as anybody else".
Re:Unlikely? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not the exact same situation.
The Samsung owned patents that Apple was found to have infringed are FRAND patents. This indicates that Samsung is willing to licence those patents out to anyone willing to pay the appropriate licencing fees.
The Apple owned patents that Samsung was found to have infringed are not FRAND patents. Apple made no implied or express promises to licence them.
Both sides sought equitable remedies in the form of sales injunctions and import bans. Equitable remedies are by their very definition appropriate only when financial remedies are insufficient to make the plaintiff whole.
Since the Samsung patents were available for licence under FRAND terms, there's no reason to believe that Samsung could not be made whole through monetary remedies. The ITC ordered the import ban on the iPhone devices not because they infringed on FRAND patents, but because Apple had made little to no effort to negotiate a licencing agreement.
The opposite is not automatically true for the Apple patents as they are not available for licence under FRAND terms.
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Yes, I am aware that it doesn't stand for FREE.
If Apple doesn't want to pay up, then they can settle it in court. However, an injunction is not appropriate unless the party seeking the injunction can demonstrate that they will suffer irreparable harm without an injunction. That's the whole purpose of an injunction, to stop something before it causes irreparable harm. By licencing the patents in question to over 30 other companies under FRAND terms, Samsung had almost no way to demonstrate that Apple's infri
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Do you think it's Fair for Samsung to demand 2.4% of the total price of the phone -- somewhere around $16 per unit -- for a tweak to the standard implemented by the Infineon baseband processor? Do you think it's Fair that Samsung is demanding this fee despite the fact that Infineon paid for a license to manufacture a part that used that patent? Do you think it's Fair that Samsung is essentially double-dipping here?
Fairness? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do YOU think it's fair to patent gestures, shiny icons, and rectangles? We can go down this rabbit hole all day.
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Do YOU think it's fair to patent gestures, shiny icons, and rectangles? We can go down this rabbit hole all day.
People are getting stupider and stupider by the day. Claiming that someone patented rounded rectangles is stupid, but claiming that someone patented rectangles is stupider.
Samsung has a _design patent_ on the design of their phones which includes, among other things, rounded rectangles as part of the design. To infringe on the design patent, it's not enough to use the shape of a rectangle with rounded corners, you have to copy _all_ the details of the design patent. That's why Samsung doesn't sue Apple f
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Based on what I've read about the industry and patents, yes it's fair. Here's a PDF on licensing fees for LTE patents [investorvillage.com], which are also standards-essential patents. Licensing rates for each company's patent portfolio ranges from 0.8% to 3%. And yes that's a percent of the handset price, not for the radio - the paper
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