In this sense the competition caused by Apples's growth is good for game developers

I disagree - fragmentation and increased development costs are rarely, if ever, good for software development.

Watch the news report at 1:18 where they talk about Samsung producing a document to essentially make their phone work the same way as Apple's

http://www.channel4.com/news/apple-wins-1bn-damages-from-samsung

If you saw that on a product you had made would you not want to take action ?

Legally, patents allow people/companies to own ideas, so Apple/Samsung are right to sue each other over their use of each other's "owned" ideas.


Morally, owning an idea is an incredibly slippery slope that amounts to accusing people of thought crimes, so a righteous person should distance themselves from the patent system and view anyone supporting it as morally bankrupt.

If you saw that on a product you had made would you not want to take action ?

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

Also different devices working the same way is what's known as a human-computer-interaction convention, and it's a good thing. It's what lets you know that "double click" is a thing, or that a few striped lines on a corner of a window mean you can grab there to resize, etc... Apple invented great conventions, and benefited by being first-to-market with them. It's a damn good thing if that new HCI culture can spread freely.

There's a huge difference between imitating a publicly known idea and plagiarizing someone else's work.

Why can't they just get along... this makes me die inside. I understand that the goal of a company is to make as much money as possible, and allowing competition to use novel ideas is incompatible with that goal, but, gee, we're all humans, surely there must be a point where even CEO's will step back and say "what the hell, this has gone far enough"... right? Right?

What have we become

... anyway, back to the real world. Patenting as it is now is flawed from the very beginning, because it is fundamentally impossible to fully innovate. As human beings, we necessarily build on previous ideas (combining them in new and exciting ways) and a good patent system should reflect that. The current one doesn't, as it allows someone to indiscriminately prevent the use of a concept, idea, or tool - no matter how basic - which drives a spear straight through innovation, as nobody is allowed to build on the patent's object until the patent expires.

Imagine if somebody had patented the hammer, or patented the use of imaginary numbers in mathematics? Or fire? Electricity? The current system has a certain amount of sanity in that it prevents one from patenting public-domain and trivial stuff (thank god) but it's still not good enough and has far too many loopholes.

[size=2]Guys, I just patented the atom, I'm going to sue you for all you're worth (literally)

Watch the news report at 1:18 where they talk about Samsung producing a document to essentially make their phone work the same way as Apple's

http://www.channel4....es-from-samsung

If you saw that on a product you had made would you not want to take action ?

I've looked at the document. Have you? It's not a document that says "How can we copy the iPhone." The entire focus of the document is "What areas are the iPhone better in, and why?" It's about product comparison and looking for ways to improve your own product, which every company does. On each page, the writers came to conclusions about what it was about the iPhone that made the user experience better, and how Samsung could improve it's own user experience. It wasn't about blatantly copying specific details. The conclusions were broad, like "The iPhone alarm tone creates a feeling of nostalgia, ours is just generic sounding, we should try to make an alarm that relates to humans better." That's far from copying the iPhone. A "copying" conclusion would've been more like (making up the details here): "We need an alarm tone like their's: C major, pentonic scale, 120bps, 5 seconds, with midi synthesizer that sounds like theirs." That would've been blatantly copying.

The thing that really gets me is that Apple is being such hypocritical douche bags. Was it not Steve Jobs who quoted Picasso in saying that great artists steal, and that Apple had no shame in stealing the works of others?

I don't think Samsung, Google, or any other company out there is perfectly innocent from doing wrong. I think all the companies have done things that are hurting the industry as a whole, in some way. But Apple is taking this to a new level. Apple must be forgetting that in a thermonuclear war, which they've declared, there are tons of innocent (i.e. consumers and the industry as a whole) casualties. Actually, no, they haven't forgotten. They just don't care about anything or anyone except their pockets.

+1 I fully agree with Cornstalks.
They never gave anything to charity, hence unless they give that full 1bn. I'm done with a company that himself only copied stuff from
Linux and BSD.

Apple won a claim with respect to each of its technical patents 7469381, 7844915 and 7864163, which among other things describe the rotation and enlarge objects by touch screen gestures, and a programming interface for scrolling. Even with design patents D593087, D618677 and D604305, it convinced the jury of a violation by a number of Samsung smartphones.
Now that's Android stuff as well...so we shall see Apple vs Google soon.

Patents should expire after 5-10 years to not avoid competition. Design patents are a joke, but Samsung are jerks to copy some other things in Android. And hey 1bn would not be possible anywhere but in silicon valley.- Narrow-minded...

I once read a statistic which said that if all the lawyers in the world were laid end to end around the equator, the world would be a better place.

Apple won a claim with respect to each of its technical patents 7469381, 7844915 and 7864163, which among other things describe the rotation and enlarge objects by touch screen gestures, and a programming interface for scrolling. Even with design patents D593087, D618677 and D604305, it convinced the jury of a violation by a number of Samsung smartphones.

Wasn't there similar stuff in Microsoft's touch interfaces for windows for quite a while?

Hi, Heath

Several misunderstandings by you toward my post can be resolved by me if you are willing. My responses to your post are in [color=#993300]orange.

@3Ddreamer, reducing litigation would not contribute towards a cure for cancer. [color=#993300]Reducing litigation would not directly contribute towards a cure for cancer but you completely missed that I was only using one example of the many things which could benefit from the money saved by avoiding litigation, hence you missed the meaning of what I wrote. Also, I detest it when people use that as if it's really an alternative.[color=#993300] I never said that anybody must consider it as an alternative, but only used it as an example of how money could be better spent (for the sake of humanity). Unless, of course, there really is a cure that's being suppressed by litigation somewhere. Not everyone is Jonah Salk.[color=#993300] Many billions of dollars worldwide are spent on civil court fights each year including fines, so it is obvious that such money is going toward fighting rather than solving the massive problems which effect everybody. My earlier post was only using cancer as one example of the many things which would be better for spending the money (in the sense of world well being.)


[quote name='3Ddreamer' timestamp='1345944417' post='4973380']
It should be a worldwide mandate to greatly reduce the number of lawyers, laws, civil courts, and the need for them.

Now you're just expecting the world to make sense. [color=#993300]No: Obviously I was enouraging others with the possibility of this mandate in the future.
[/quote]

[color=#993300]Better ways of doing things will continue to be discussed around the world and the opposition only serves as good publicity for solutions to world problems.

[color=#993300]The huge corporate lawsuits such as between Apple and Samsung are symptoms of a system which is wrongly structured, resulting in massive shifting of billions of dollars which could be better spent on things which directly benefit humanity.

[color=#993300]Here is my post which you, Heath, misunderstood:

[color=#000000]

[quote name='derda4' timestamp='1345878560' post='4973213']
Seems very narrow-minded about protecting US industries and about patents.
I don't think such would be possible in Europe or elsewhere! Really I feel sorry and sickening with you US guys.
I'll stop supporting Apple...

There are far too many lawsuits, I feel - so I agree with the guys who are appalled by the stream of them which seem to be increasing and not decreasing.
It should be a worldwide mandate to greatly reduce the number of lawyers, laws, civil courts, and the need for them.


[color=#000000]Last time I knew Apple was the most capitalized company in the world, beating past holders such as Microsoft and General Motors. Apple is a gigantic power in the world now and its influence will likely increase at least in the coming several years. Expect Apple mobile based and OS X compatible games to increase if they have their way, which will give Microsoft a long needed toe to toe fight in software competition in general. We wlll probably see more cross-platform games in the future because of the surge of Apple. In this sense the competition caused by Apples's growth is good for game developers but in order for Apple to keep growing I expect to read about many more huge lawsuits between Apple and other companies.


[color=#000000]Couldn't the billions of dollars spent on lawsuits and IT lobbyists at local, state, and federal levels be better spent elsewhere, such as finding a cure for cancer or providing health insurance for all employees?

3Ddreamer
[/quote]

[color=#993300]Notice that the term in the last sentence above here is "such as" which indicates one or more examples to follow in this context. Having right discernment depends much on acknowledging the details, so perhaps you simply read my post too quickly. I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

[color=#993300]

[color=#993300]3Ddreamer

@3Ddreamer, I gather all of that. The world won't accept such a systematic reboot, if only because that would depend on everyone being in agreement over the issue, and on mankind being able to handle that and getting it right. I kinda made that last comment about the world making no sense in jest, and alluding to this pivotal fact.

About litigation, again, it's a turf war. That's what all this amounts to.

tldr: its not gonna happen.