Linux and Open Source

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols & Paula Rooney

Apple seeks monopoly through court action against Motorola

By | October 31, 2010, 7:50am PDT

Summary: Patents are by their nature monopolies, granted on limited terms for limited times. Today those terms are overly broad, and those times are longer than the expected life of any market.

Late Friday Apple filed a pair of lawsuits against Motorola, claiming its Android phones violate six important patents, demanding the products be pulled from the shelves, their profits be given to Apple, and that treble damages and attorney fees be awarded.

If the courts agree such a result would destroy Motorola.

This followed by two weeks Motorola’s filing of countersuits against Apple, demanding its patents be invalidated.

All of which means that the very concept of competition within the smart phone marketplace is now before the courts.

Not all the patents being asserted are software patents. One of Apple’s cases relates directly to its multi-touch hardware, and how it tracks movements.

But taken together these and the other cases filed against Android in the last few months do beg the question. Is computing competition even legal?

Since the non-decision in Bilski, computer companies have had an open season to file broad patent claims against one another. According to the Roberts court the very concept of mobile e-mail is patented, syncing e-mail is patented, multi-touch is patented, every single computing advance of the last decade is patented.

From a policy perspective this means there can be only one solution to every problem. Software does not work that way. Software asserts many solutions to any problem. Take a look at any application on your PC right now. There are always many different ways of going about a task. And inside the code the situation is the same.

Patents, as I wrote the other day, should cover how things are done, not the act of doing them. They should be about how NTP does mobile e-mail, how Microsoft syncs it, and how Apple implements a multi-touch interface.

If we don’t have a way to innovate around patents then patents destroy innovation. Patents are by their nature monopolies, granted on limited terms for limited times. Today those terms are overly broad, and those times are longer than the expected life of any market.

The whole situation has grown so absurd it may be a good thing our political parties have gridlocked judicial nominations for so long that justice can’t be done. Because in this case any justice would be a grave injustice.

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Topics

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.

At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.

DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.

My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.

Biography

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.

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RE: Apple seeks monopoly through court action against Motorola
Kerimcan Updated - 10th Sep
@day2die Im not going to do this with just any old ATV from youth to kill somebody that you career from any company website is the best buy if you tip araba oyunlari friv
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How is this Apple's fault?
illegaloperation Updated - 31st Oct 2010
I am no Apple fanboy, but how is this Apple's fault? Motorola sued Apple first then Apple counter sued Motorola.
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Fault?
DanaBlankenhorn 31st Oct 2010
@day2die It's not Apple's fault. As I noted in the piece, all this was driven by the failure of the Roberts court to provide the clarity it's supposed to provide on the law, in this case on patent law.
@DanaBlankenhorn

Then why wasn't your headline:

Motorola seeks monopoly through court action against Apple?
@msalzburg: Motorola's suit did not attempt to put a competitor out of business. Apple's suit does, and quite explicitly.
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Then why not jump on Motorola?
Bruizer 31st Oct 2010
@DanaBlankenhorn

Or Nokia or Kodak or...

Oh wait, that would not make sense to you. It has little to do with Roberts court as software patents have been around for much longer than Roberts has been Chief Justice. But again, that would defeat your rant as well.

As for multi-touch? That covers EXACTLY "how you do something" and the act of doing them. How do you zoom on a screen? From your own definition, you should be backing this specific claim.
@DanaBlankenhorn
Apple can afford to pay any fine that Motorola may eventually extract. However, Apple's suit could clearly put Motorola out of business. Then Nokia. Then HTC. Etc.

The rules are different when you are the world's biggest tech company. It might not be fair but tough. At least Apple has billions in profits to ease the suffering. Those who have responded to you, Dana, with their feelings all hurt, get nothing in return from Apple. It makes me laugh. happy
@DanaBlankenhorn

How would this put Motorola out of business? Selling Android mobile phones is not Motorola's entire business. I'd suggest a little research: http://www.motorola.com/Business/US-EN/Business+Product+and+Services/

How would this compare with Nokia's stated intention to drive Apple out of the mobile phone business?

Just asking.
@DanaBlankenhorn This goes back to the point you made in this article and a previous one: "Patents should cover how things are done, not the act of doing them." This statement describes how patents originally worked. I do not understand why the current technology industry thinks it should be allowed (nor why the courts are allowing it) to patent an idea that something a certain process can be performed, without consideration to how it is performed. If this had been allowed within the automotive industry, there would have been only one internal combustion engine - a very unreliable and inefficient one. This way of interpreting patent rights is ludicrous, anti-competitive, and, if allowed to continue, will kill the improvement of a multitude of products.
@day2die
Apple zealots truly need to get used to the "unfair" attention that is being placed on Apple. The funny thing is that at least Apple has billions in profits to ease the suffering. Apple zealots get nothing. I feel very fortunate that I can take advantage of the 2 products that Apple got right (iPhone 4 and MBP) without feeling any of the emotional scarring that you guys do when a headline like this one singles out Apple. It just makes me laugh. happy
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Nothing more than another sky is falling...
Snooki_smoosh_smoosh 1st Nov 2010
@NonZealot... Chicken Little article.
Online Schools
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@day2die Apple sued Motorola first, earlier this year.
@day2die Im not going to do this with just any old ATV from youth to kill somebody that you career from any company website is the best buy if you tip araba oyunlari friv
Dana, I'm seeing a complaint about the process, but not a offering of how it could be corrected. Should Apple, Microsoft, HTC, etc, spend millions of shareholder dollars driving researching a process/method/function to solve a problem and not have the ability to take their solution to market without some protection from competitors who will simply copy their work with no R&D expenditure of their own?

Just look at the smart phone market, before Apple, where where the touch screen only non sliding keyboard phones, now how many are there?
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Just because someone added the phone function to such a pre-existing device should not mean that they should hold a patent on "phones with touch screen keyboards".

Should the first company that adds a keyboard directlly to their televisions have the ability to patent the idea, even though many people have a keyboard attached to their television allready, though by way of a computer?
plain
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@Mister Spock - apple is not claiming they own or invented multi-touch.. only that they have a uniquely implemented it.. and are determined to protect their unique implementation...

just for reference.. this is what android looked like pre-iPhone

http://static.phonesreview.co.uk/wp-content/phoneimages/2007/11/android-screenshots-pic-2.jpg
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There was the LG Prada.
Bruizer 31st Oct 2010
@mrgoodall

It was announced about 1-2 months before the iPhone. From a physical standpoint it was very similar. A candy bar phone with 3" capacitive non-multi-touch touch screen. A virtual keyboard but having a layout like:

"abc" "def" "ghi"

like a typical feature phone. It had no serious web-browser and was reported to be very slow but usable in operation.

So the iPhone was not the first candy bar fully touch screen based phone, but it was the first well executed unit. It was also the first phone to include multi-touch.

At the end of the day, I would expect a cross licensing agreement between Apple and what ever company Motorola becomes, Apple will cross license with Nokia (plus Apple will add in a bit of $$$), HTC will pay Apple for Android's use like it does MS.
@Bruizer

I read about the LG Prada. Virtually a tie -- LG posted a note that they intended to release a new phone that December. Apple demo-ed the actual iPhone within two weeks.

I feel confident it was just a coincidence. Product development takes too long for either to be a copy.
@Bruizer HTC shouldn't have to pay apple for anything. Apple has not done anything worth paying for. They have taken other peoples technologies, licensed them and released it in devices. The only developing that Apple does is on aesthetics. The only thing apple coders know how to do is google for code and then modify it to be locked down.
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The iPhone was a crippled clone of the HTC Touch
NonZealot Updated - 31st Oct 2010
@mrgoodall
Just look at the smart phone market, before Apple, where where the touch screen only non sliding keyboard phones

The HTC Touch was a full screen touch screen cell phone with a gesture enabled UI and it came out before the iPhone. It even had an app store called Handango InHand. Apple copied so many things from that Windows Mobile smartphone. Over the years, Apple eventually added all the things that were there in that first HTC Touch until they finally reached the iPhone 4, Apple's first good smartphone.
@NonZealot: please do not lie any more; you can do better.
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@NonZealot The HTC Touch was a touch screen but NOT a multi touch screen like the iPhone. And it came out what a few days prior?
@NonZealot

"The first iPhone was introduced on January 9, 2007.[1]"

"The global launch of the Touch was in Leicester Square, London, on June 5, 2007 "

A-hem. January comes before June, NZ.

I guess your memory for dates isn't so good ?
Again, you use a lie and mis-direction on the argument. HTC Touch (June 2007, same date as iPhone) also did not use any pinch/spread features for zooming.
@mrgoodall There were plenty of them, for all of time. All PDA's had no keyboards, they were all touch. Phones weren't really even running major OS's so it wasn't a big deal. There were both full touch and hybrid phones on Windows Mobile while most palms had keyboards. Apple didn't invent ****. They just improved on an idea of touch phones with apps. Windows mobile had apps, it had touch support. The Multitouch (which Apple didn't invent, and thus should have NO IP on) was invented at a California University. The tech is licensed from them. They might have been the first to implement it in their devices, but thats about it.
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mrgoodall:
DanaBlankenhorn 31st Oct 2010
You ask a fair question. The answer is that protection needs to be limited to the implementation, and not the idea.

You patent a better mousetrap, and you publish the design so I won't copy it. But I can still try to make mousetraps.

You can patent the method by which you do multitouch or ellipses -- you should not be able to patent the multitouch concept.

And that's what is happening here.
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@DanaBlankenhorn: so if Apple came up with finger touch-based mobile devices and the corresponding UI, then of course it is fair and logical that Apple would have that monopoly.

Google's Android was a lame copycat of Blackberry/Symbian (you might want to check reviews of the betas) before Apple showed the way to build a mobile OS in January 2007.

Google stole intellectual property of Apple and it would be fair if Android would just go back to the "fantastic" UI it had before Jobs revealed the iPhone. Of course, this would not happen, but this is the idea.

And why multi-touch can not be patented? If this is so common place, then why no one ever actually made any use of it in the field of *mobile* devices?

Apple came up with way to use it, invested thought, time, money in for years and years, and when they made iPhone public everyone just makes this look as if the whole thing is a common place?
@denisrs I question whether Google (actually Motorola) should be said to have "stolen" anything. I believe there is more than one way to make multitouch work, just as there is more than one way to build a mousetrap.

If indeed Google did "steal" Apple intellectual property, if they copied what Apple did and the way Apple did it, that's another thing. That's for a court to decide.

But the evidence I've seen indicates Google (and therefore its OEMs) had the innovation before the iPhone was released, so it's likely they did it in a different way.
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@Dana
Bruizer 31st Oct 2010
Dana,

But the evidence I've seen indicates Google (and therefore its OEMs) had the innovation before the iPhone was released, so it's likely they did it in a different way.

Do you really believe in your heart that the iPhone was designed in 7 days? I have seen not a shred of evidence that Google (and therefor the OEMs) had any innovation in process for multi-touch before Apple had it going in their labs. It is amazing naive to compare the release date of one product to the development and R&D dates of a second.

Having used a Droid, a Droid Incredible and a Droid X, I assure you you zoom on the web browser the same exact way as you do on the iPhone.

Likewise, I can assure you, the same exact code could be used to implement each lock screen. Only the image would change. You could even take the same branch paths the two methods are so amazingly copied.

Google could have used a vertical swipe or a mechanical switch or a dozen other methods. They choose to do a simple copy.
@DanaBlankenhorn

But the evidence I've seen indicates Google (and therefore its OEMs) had the innovation before the iPhone was released, so it's likely they did it in a different way.

If you recall, the iPhone shipped with the Maps and shortly after release (if i recall correctly), the Youtube app. Both of these apps were developed with the assistance of Google. This would mean that Google must have had access to some sort of iPhone interface (whether it be a prototype phone, or just the emulator) well before the iPhone was released.

Seeing as how rough the Android UI was at release (and imo still very much is), I don't see it as a stretch to suggest that Google quickly did what they could to make their interface "more iPhone like".
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Have we not seen multitouch concepts
Mister Spock 31st Oct 2010
in a number of Hollywood movies and television shows, denisrs?
In fact, the control pannels on the Enterprise D where all multitouch flat panel screens.

So in fact it was not Apple that came up with the concept or idea, instead they just took the idea from someone else.
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I will continue to be amazed how some of us ignore the obvious. We don't need a court to decide that Google's Android was heavily influenced by the iPhone (to put it nicely). Take a look at the direction they were going with Android when they first showed it off in Nov 2007 (months after Jobs introduced the iPhone in Jan). It reminded you more of a BlackBerry type phone than an iPhone then. It had a UI that was vastly different than the then iPhone, no multi-touch, no pinch-to-zoom (it had a contextual menu to handle zooming, amongst other things). No long press for selection. Nothing of the early Android reminded us of the iPhone. Some of us just want to cover their eyes I guest, just like they covered their eyes with Microsoft.

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/11/android02.jpg

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-11-12-n14.html

Meanwhile the iPhone's UI and the core way it functions remain unchanged since 2007 (earlier as it was said to be in development for 2 years).
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@DanaBlankenhorn.. a lame blackberry rip off.. this is not hard to figure out guys...

http://static.phonesreview.co.uk/wp-content/phoneimages/2007/11/android-screenshots-pic-2.jpg
As to patents, Apple did not patent ideas, it patented implementation for mobile devices. The "problem" for others is that Apple's implementation is basically the only way to do it, so the patents secure ideas' too. And it is fair: everyone is free to go back to their own ideas and fantastic UIs like stylus and buttons with Symbian, BlackberryOS, Windows Mobile 6, and so on.
@denisrs

By the same line of thought, only should exist IBM PCs, Sony walkmans, Motorola cell-phones or if we go by implementations, only Nokia could have text-messages and send images with it, only Samsung can have Color visors and real sounds, only Blackberry can have e-mail on cell-phones, and Facetime is property of Nokia (and is for years, at least here in Europe)!

Patents were made for the way that things are done, in the case of multi-touch - the way that it is implemented on the cell-phone, not the multi-touch itself, and the multi-touch in Linux (Android) is far different for the one used by Apple - that's why until the amoled visor no multi-touch were so fluid as the one in iPhone.
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@pisquinho: the UI idea is that a user can, for example, zoom a picture, is not patented by Apple. However, the way it can be done is patented -- Apple invented and patented one-hand gesture "pinch to zoom" for mobile devices.

With such line of thought, Nokia and such are not examples.
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@dana
Bruizer Updated - 31st Oct 2010
Yes, there are many ways of doing multi-touch. Apple has specific patents on WHAT you do with that multi-touch data within a process. Your idea of software patents is more like software copyright.

For example. How do you zoom a web page on an iPhone. Pinch to zoom out. Spread to zoom in. Very simple. Apple has that action patented. Although there were phones with capacitive touch screens before the iPhone, not one used a gesture like that. OK, it might be a stupid patent and it might be obvious but that is a different question. The key point is, it is a "how" just like you want.

How do you zoom on a HTC HD2? You have a zoom bar on the bottom of the divice. Also simple. You might even be able to incorporate multi-touch in that sequence. Both could use multi-touch but the how the action done is very different.
@Bruizer

And text-messages, and video-calls, and many other things that Apple uses that were created by others?
@Bruizer It may be. I question that. I suspect there are many ways to do multitouch, just as there are many ways to do all sorts of things computers do.
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@ pisquinho
Bruizer 31st Oct 2010
They license lots of technology from other companies. They are being sued by some (as well as suing others) for infringement. I would expect them to pay if found guilty.
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The issue to really argue
etschuetz@... 31st Oct 2010
What I think Dana hit on well is the fact that many patents are so vague, and openly written that any device that remotely comes close to function how the patent describes is marked for a lawsuit. Many companies, like Gibson a couple of years ago, sued Activision over there Guitar Hero titles because it violated a patent from Gibson on creating "virtual similuations" of rocking it out on a "virtual guitar". A company that isn't even remotely in the Video Game business. Apple is far from innocent here in violating many patents, and then claiming them as their own. Motorola is far from innocent. No company is. However, as stated in the article, and I agree with is, patents are killing the industry.

You wish to talk about shareholders and their investments? How many investors want to know that their money is being WASTED on years in court, instead of furthering innovation and bringing in profits for their company.

In the long run, these actions do not just kill innovation, and destroy companies, but hurt consumerism. It destroys consumer interest. It creates limited, tasteless devices that are way over priced. If Apple were to win this situation any time soon, then they would have the ability to SHUT DOWN anyone that releases a device with touch interfaces...even though Apple DOES NOT actually build the technology.
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@etschuetz@...

Whole history of touch goes to times earlier than that, but eventually Apple was the first to come up with a mobile device with multi-touch UI.

Mobile multi-touch was pioneered since 1998 and the scientists then joined Jobs few years later.

Apple's patents do not go beyond mobile field, so Microsoft's "Surface" table has nothing to with it, and vise versa.
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We ask for proof, please
Mister Spock 31st Oct 2010
As you are the only one here who seems to have head about that.
@Mister Spock

Look up the company Fingerworks, you will find that Apple purchased them in 2005.
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@Mister Spock
Bruizer 1st Nov 2010
Most have heard of it unless they just want a reason to apply double standards.
in the case of RIM, the patents can be invalid, but not ruled so yet, and you can still get a judge to give you an injunction. Hopefully out of all this madness, we will get some reforms in the form of clarifying rulings by the court, and/or new legislation that makes it much harder to patent general ideas, and easier to get a court to overturn obviously bogus patents.
@DonnieBoy In the absence of clarity from the legislature, it should have been up to the courts to decide what the law meant. The fact they didn't was malpractice on their part, and the result is a tax on all innovation that everyone -- even Apple -- is now paying through legal fees.
where their decisions are take as fact by the real courts and even the WTO. A real court should be able to throw out any rulings of the patent office, and, anybody being sued for patent infringement should be able to challenge the patent, again, in a REAL court.

Companies should also be allowed to challenge patents in front of the WTO.
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Another Apple sues and the sky is falling article...
Snooki_smoosh_smoosh 1st Nov 2010
okay Chicken Little. Seems to me that MSFT is suing Taiwanese manufacturers, such as ASUS, and no one is screaming that the sky is falling...

This is the mess that is modern day patent law. Don't like it, write your congress people and tell them to change it!
Zooming in and out with gestures has been demonstrated, before Apple was founded by Jobs. If Apples improvement was to do it on a Phone screen with your fingers, instead of a bigger screen with your hands and/or fingers, then I don't know how that patent can stand up. Since the patent was awarded, I assume it's not something so obvious. Has anyone read the patents that are in question?

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