Marco Arment, reacting to Andy Ihnatko’s thoughts that the consumers lose as a result of Apple’s win over Samsung:
What’s really going to disrupt the iPhone is going to be something completely different, not something that tries so hard to clone the iPhone that it hits Apple’s patents.
Unoriginal manufacturers will need to pay for their unoriginality. The most reasonable course of action, therefore, is to truly innovate and design products that aren’t such close copies.
I fail to see how consumers lose.
I completely agree that what will end the iPhone’s run is something totally different, not a copycat. Maybe Apple will make that product, or maybe someone else will. This case does nothing to stop that. It simply stops people from copying the current iPhone.
What does worry me about this lawsuit is that it’s going to lead to many more. And it makes patents even more important, and as such, more valuable. That could end up hurting many companies, both large and small. And it could distract from innovation because everyone will be so preoccupied with filing patents, looking for ones that they might be infringing upon, or in court.
“We’re going to touch this with our fingers. And we have invented a new technology called multi-touch, which is phenomenal. It works like magic. You don’t need a stylus. It’s far more accurate than any touch display that’s ever been shipped. It ignores unintended touches, it’s super-smart. You can do multi-finger gestures on it. And boy, have we patented it.”
Steve Jobs, on January 9, 2007 unveiling the iPhone.
“We’ve been innovating like crazy the last few years on this, and we’ve filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone. And we intend to protect them.”
Steve Jobs, on January 9, 2007, introducing the iPhone.
Samsung owes Apple more than $1 billion in damages for violating Apple hardware and software patents, a California jury ruled on Friday.
The jury found that Samsung infringed upon Apple patents having to do with physical design and user interfaces, often willfully, and that several of the South Korean company’s products diluted Apple’s trade dress, especially as it related to various iPhone models.
Apple Inc licensed its prized design patents to Microsoft Corp but with an “anti-cloning agreement” to prevent copying of its iPhone and iPad, an Apple executive said on Monday.
That executive was Apple’s director of patent licensing Boris Teksler who is testifying in the Apple/Samsung lawsuit. And he went on to note that “he could count on ‘on one hand’ the instances Apple has licensed those patents.”
As expected, most of the money paid, $5.5 billion, was for patents and IP. What’s curious is the $2.6 billion paid for “goodwill”. In other words, that’s the amount Google paid above what they considered the fair market value to be because they think the combination will be fruitful down the road.
If you’ve heard the term “goodwill” recently, it’s because that’s how Microsoft categorized their $6.2 billion aQuantive write-down. Microsoft ended up eating shit on all those billions because expected synergies didn’t exactly work out as planned. Okay, they didn’t work out at all. And remember, aQuantive was a successful, money-making company at the time Microsoft acquired them. Motorola? Not so much.
So far, it looks like Google’s billions acquired an asset that is dragging down their bottom line. Maybe that changes, maybe it doesn’t — it’s obviously too early to tell. But the recent history of Motorola certainly doesn’t look good. Right now, that sure looks like a very pricey $2.6 billion.
Twitter’s decision to implement the Innovator’s Patent Agreement could not have been an easy one. While it’s refreshingly straightforward and an obvious crowd-pleaser, it potentially puts the company in a bit of a vulnerable position. What if no one else adopts the policy? They’ll stand alone with their pants partially down.
While I haven’t yet talked to anyone at the company about the decision, my sense is that they made the call using a simple principle: do the right thing.
While obvious, it seems that companies are rarely guided by simply doing the right thing. Legal departments get in the way. Or investors get in the way. Someone gets in the way. What’s right isn’t often what’s “smart”. And that’s a problem on multiple fronts.
When I tweeted about the upsides of this decision earlier, many people were quick to point out some of the practical problems. What struck me is how all the problems mentioned were derivatives of fear. Fear of others. Fear of change. Fear of dying.
The number one reason not to implement the IPA seems to be the fear that one day things could turn south and then your patent portfolio becomes your main asset — either as a commodity for sale (see: Aol) or as a weapon (see: Yahoo).
That is such a losing mentality. I’d bet any company not willing to implement something like the IPA due to those thoughts is more likely to fail. Failure is quite literally on their minds!
With the IPA, Twitter is taking the opposite stance. They’re betting that rather than having the fallback option to sell their patents at the highest possible price or suing others with them, they’re going to continue to win. And they’re going to continue to innovate.
And if things go wrong, they’ll go down with grace, not with the cowardice that Yahoo is currently showing. But again, things are less likely to go wrong because they’re not busy dwelling on things going wrong.
I think Twitter will find that doing the right thing will pay dividends. It’s hard to imagine a better tool for recruitment in this day and age. True innovators can do what they do best at Twitter without fear that their work will be misappropriated in the future. And in an age of growing concern about the power and intentions of Google, Facebook, and Apple, the broader startup space will look more favorably upon Twitter.
This, of course, isn’t the end of software patents. But it is a practical solution to a problem that was quickly spiraling out of control.
After the initial high-fiving is done today, the cynics will come out and say this was purely a marketing maneuver. Or that it actually won’t change anything. But that talk is a disservice to what Twitter has actually done here. They’ve gone out on a ledge that others haven’t been willing to go out on — and that some never will.
They’re doing the right thing, which isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds.
How long until Yahoo sues Twitter claiming they patented the IPA idea years ago?
Twitter has drafted up what they’re calling the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA). With it, the company is promising to only use their patents as the actual inventor intended — read: defensively, not offensively.
More specifically:
The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.
Excellent news. Twitter is promising to implement the IPA later this year and says that it will apply to all their patents past and present. Yes, this means things like Loren Brichter’s pull-to-refresh (which he’s excited about).
Hopefully other startups large and small will follow Twitter’s lead here. It would be really excellent if larger companies (*cough* Yahoo *cough*) did as well, but it’s hard to see that happening given the current state of things. This is a movement that will have to start from the ground up.
For future damages, Google proposed paying Oracle 0.5 percent of Android revenue on one patent until it expires this December and 0.015 percent on a second patent until it expires in April 2018.
Oracle rejected the offer for being too low, but it’s interesting that Google (if found to be infringing on Oracle’s patents) was willing to pay a percentage of all the revenue they make from Android. This would have continued the trend of the mobile OS being a nice little business for everyone not named Google.
Yahoo should buy them to bolster their bullshit lawsuit against Facebook. There’s probably some patent in there about the use of the color blue within online systems.
I’ve been thinking about the situation with Yahoo suing Facebook regarding some older patents, and observing the reactions online in blogs and on Twitter. I’ve been struck by how unanimous it’s been, and the emerging narrative that Yahoo has somehow crossed a line, that Internet companies don’t…
A smart take on the Yahoo/Facebook patent situation by John Lilly. I think he’s right, there’s more fueling the outpouring of hatred directed at Yahoo than just their patent maneuvers. BUT, I also think their maneuvers are particularly bullshit in this case. Look at what it is they’re suing Facebook over. It’s things that nearly all social services use. It’s obvious things. Things that existed before Yahoo patented them.
Lilly is right that many other patent lawsuits are bullshit as well — particularly in software. But Yahoo is being unreasonably evil and stupid here. Why didn’t they sue, say, 5 years ago? Why aren’t they suing 200 other companies “infringing” their silly patents?
It’s because, like Kodak, they’re dying. And these are the actions that a dying company resorts to. With Kodak, it’s obvious — they’re bankrupt. And people feel sort of sorry for them as a result. Yahoo is not bankrupt, so it’s not-so-obvious. But they are still very much dying. And they clearly know it, hence, the lawsuit.
Maybe we should feel bad for Yahoo here too. But we don’t yet. But we will someday in the not-too-distant future. The saddest thing now is that they probably really think this lawsuit will help save them. It won’t.
“I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.”
I am not writing this in defense of Facebook. They can and will defend themselves. I am wrting this in outrage at Yahoo! I used to care about that company for some reason. No more. They are dead to me. Dead and gone. I hate them now.
I have yet to read anyone not in agreement that Yahoo’s move here is total bullshit. They’ve really, truly (and probably irreversibly) fucked their reputation in the tech community here. That will be fatal.
Just remember this when they’re chopped up and sold for parts in a few years. Or — more poetically — when Facebook buys them just to turn out the lights.
