But there’s another issue brewing behind the scenes that’s sent Apple’s iPhone engineering team back into the bunker for preemptive damage control. If you’ve been into an Apple Store (or visited Apple’s site) recently, you might have caught a hint while browsing iPhone 4 cases (or lack thereof). Although Apple has just this week reestablished a wide variety of cases for sale, as of only a couple of days ago the only iPhone 4 case Apple even so much as mentioned on its site was its own first-party Bumper — and still conspicuously absent from its lineup are slide-on cases. As it turns out, was by no means a cynical ploy to maximize profits.
We’re not sure how seriously to take claims that some third-party iPhone 4 cases can cause the handset’s rear glass panel to shatter.
To be fair, no one appears to have suggested that this has actually happened. But it is alleged by Gdgt.com that Apple engineers are busy investigating this potential problem, implying that the company is sufficiently worried that broken phones – and, by extension, a broken reputation – are a possibility.
Summary: Apple’s Godly hand strikes another manufacturer where phones of the ‘wrong’ brand were manufactured
Apple has already resorted to lawsuits against Android (with Linux) and now we discover that a design issue — not an alleged patent violation — is being used by Apple to remove a Linux-based phone from the market. “In case you have no idea what we’re talking about,” says Engadget, “earlier this month said Chinese company’s been in heated talks with Apple due to the M8 smartphone bearing an “appearance roughly similar” to the iPhone.” Apple appears to have gotten its way:
So, it looks like the M8′s all set for an early retirement, either way — it doesn’t look like Apple’s going to let this one go easily, and Jack’s also expressed concern over the fact that the IPO has the power to shut his factory down without going to court. That said, things are still looking positive for the elusive M9 — from the sounds of it, Meizu’s upcoming Android phone isn’t affected by this takedown (yet); but the question is whether Jack and co. can keep the shops running until a December launch for their next flagship device. Oh well, hang in there, Meizu!
Meizu M8 was going to have Android too.
Why does Apple fear commoditisation? If it can make phones that can justify their price, let competition do its thing. █
“Those who can, innovate, those who can’t, litigate.” –Harish Pillay, Red Hat (and others)
“When the apple is ripe it will fall.” ~Irish Proverb
Summary: Privacy is harmed by Apple’s highly restrictive phones and according to a yet-to-be-released report, Apple’s manufacturer Foxconn is riddled with problems despite Apple’s whitewash
Techrights opposes Apple as much as it opposes Microsoft, especially since Apple actively attacks people’s freedom and goes as far as suing those who offer free software. This new cartoon about Apple (from Free Software Magazine) helps remind people that Apple is seen as a foe — not a friend — by software freedom supporters (the FSF even emphasised this clearly in its new post about Vista Phone 7 [sic]).
Charles Arthur from The Guardian has published this article which — just like others of its kind — helps to show why proprietary software is a threat to people’s privacy and there is nothing the users can do about it. Specifically, claims are being made about Apple’s platform.
Uploads from iPhones using the Facebook app will push all your contacts onto Facebook’s servers – where they’ll be matched against any and everyone. Worried at all? Update: Or how about a random Facebooker’s number?
Apple — like Microsoft — is using sweatshops in order to keep costs down. We are not new to Foxconn crimes and Apple’s partial responsibility. Apple loves its massive margins and its revenues it just won’t share with underage workers (children) who work excessively under very poor conditions in order to meet Apple’s demands.
As our reader FurnaceBoy put it, “huge new scandal looms for Apple outsource Foxconn based on damning report.” Here is a preview:
Leakage from a yet-to-be-released survey report by Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn has triggered the public’s look of distrust for containing various kinds of illegal activities believed to take place within the firm’s premises.
According to information obtained through insiders, illegal activities include: abuse of interns, overly strict training and harsh punishments as well as the turning of blind eye to safety problems in the workplace and unreal salary hikes, among others.
During the survey, done jointly by more than 60 teachers and students from 20 universities in mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan- including Tsinghua University and Peking University, 14 surveyors were able to enter the company and experience ‘life inside Foxconn’ themselves.
Manufacturers of phones running Linux may also exploit people in the same way, but we are not talking about Linux here; we are talking about software freedom and the accompanying philosophy which reduces emphasis on consumerism. One reader of ours, “Agent Smith”, recommended the following video some days ago. █
“The sweeter the apple, the blacker the core. Scratch a lover and find a foe!” ~Dorothy Parker
Summary: A closer look at how Apple is fooling a lot of people and how it impedes sharing amongst its very own customers
TECHRIGHTS oppose non-Free software, but it particularly antagonises Apple and Microsoft because they actively suppress use of Free software. They even sue those who make Free software available. Apple — like Microsoft — is a marketing company. It’s in a business of taking commodity PCs (produced in the far east), putting on them an operating system that Apple hardly developed (Apple likes to exploit Free software and it hardly produces any of its own), and then selling it for a high price using perception management, currently the illusion that Mac users are somehow better than their fellow men/women. Apple sells arrogance and it spends an enormous amount of money brainwashing the public in the same way that large fashion brands do (and the cost of brainwash passes to the customer, who pays for these false perceptions to persist). Apple can only ever reach a tiny niche on the desktop because prices are kept artificially high. Without a high price, the whole “I’m rich cause I have a Mac” rhetoric would evaporate.
“There is nothing particularly advanced about hypePad and it lacks some basic functionality which goes almost a decade back.”hypePad is a good example of how fake hype gets generated (sometimes with help from unethical marketing firms [1, 2]). There is nothing particularly advanced about hypePad and it lacks some basic functionality which goes almost a decade back. But anyway, that’s not the purpose of hypePad, it’s not about functionality; it’s more of a fashion item, it’s also a status symbol. Its perceived value is what’s supposed to elevate the perceived value of its user (not owner, as it is not possible to truly own such restrictive gadgets).
Gawker has just published some recent examples where Apple is suspected of manipulating media coverage:
For a man who assiduously avoids the news media, Steve Jobs is incredibly skilled at exploiting his leverage with the press. So skilled, it’s alleged, he turned a top newspaper into a key tool of Apple’s public relations.
TechCrunch’s MG Siegler this morning published a fascinating compilation of stories that Apple may have planted in the Wall Street Journal to distract people from bad Apple news or, in one case, to bolster the company’s buzz and profits. Former Apple marketing manager John Martellaro has written about how and why the company conducts “controlled leaks” to news outlets like the Journal, and there’s reason to think the articles cited by Siegler fall into that category; each served a key role in helping Apple move beyond bad news or sharpen the impact of its good news.
[...]
Making the cheap iPad sound expensive, January 2010, WSJ: Citing analysts, who themselves cite anonymous sources, the Journal reports that the iPad might cost $1,000. This number makes the iPad look all the more incredible when it debuts at $500, which seems like a bargain in comparison to the earlier figure. Siegler suspects Apple leaked the $1,000 figure, presumably either to the analysts or by indicating the Journal that it would safe to cite that number.
[...]
Fair enough; the idea that Apple fed these stories to the WSJ is speculative and backed by circumstantial evidence. Siegler, unlike Swisher, was never part of the traditional journalism establishment; the writer rose up out of the ranks of indy bloggers, algorithimically boosted by Techmeme, plucked out of obscurity by VentureBeat, then artfully poached by TechCrunch. He speaks, in many instances, for the paranoid rank-and-file engineer who knows nothing about how the sausage of journalism is made, but is deeply suspicious of it, and sees conspiracies everywhere.
And who is to say said engineers are wrong, or even misguided? You don’t get too far into the God’s honest truth with an operation as tight-lipped as Apple without a little conjecture and dot-connecting.
Just a few days ago we broke the news that the first BitTorrent app had been allowed into Apple’s App Store. The developer managed to get it approved despite Apple’s hatred towards BitTorrent. Unfortunately, the fun was soon over as Apple has already kicked the App from the store. The developer is not giving up that easily and hopes to convince Apple they’re wrong.
Summary: The Nemesis of software freedom (or #1 threat to it) is summoned by Linux rivals like Microsoft and the Microsoft-occupied Acacia; Rebuttals come from the likes of Jason Perlow, Glyn Moody, Matt Asay, and Groklaw
THE world is upset to see Microsoft suing Linux-using companies. It just shows how incapable Microsoft is when it comes to producing real products. Jason Perlow receives praise for his response (he works for IBM) and Ghabuntuwrites: “My friend calls him Steve “I’ll fcuking kill Google” Ballmer. And I think he is right. Microsoft has been rattling the saber at Android in the last week, demanding patent payment for all Android phones. To say this is an absurd claim is being very gentle.”
One difference, of course, is that Watt’s patent at least related to a substantial technological development: in the case of Microsoft, we are dealing with the usual trivial and/or obvious patents – “scheduling meetings”, “changes in signal strength and battery power”. Even the synchronising email element, which presumably relates to Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, is simply a question of dominant protocols, not market-enhancing improvements.
People forget that the central purpose of patents is to encourage real innovation, not simply reward people for being the first to file for even obvious ideas with over-stretched patent offices that set incredibly low bars. The world of patents has become perverted in recent years: patents are seen as valuable things in themselves – the more the merrier – irrespective of whether they do, truly, promote innovation. Worse: in the world of software, they are actually brakes on that innovation, particularly as they begin to interact and form impenetrable patent thickets.
As Moody has been showing for years, Microsoft is lobbying for RAND (along with its lobbyists) and it’s stuff like ActiveSync which shows the impact of RAND. Here is a nice diagram of patent lawsuits in the mobile space and another diagram of this kind. All these lawsuits contribute to the conclusion that patents are counter productive and hardly manageable, even for very large companies.
Motorola has meanwhile sued Apple for patent violations [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and Moody responds to it by writing “welcome to the patent thicket”.
The legal landscape in mobile technology is getting a little bit crazy these days. Everyone is suing everyone, and keeping up with every claim and counterclaim is fast becoming a confusing endeavor.
Today, Motorola decided to keep the legal party going when it filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission (ITC) alleging that a number of Apple products infringe on 18 Motorola patents. Separately, Motorola also filed patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and the Southern District of Florida.
We have also just learned that Apple is now suing Nokia in the UK, not just the US [1, 2].
According to Reuters, Apple has sued Nokia in Britain. Nokia said that it is investigating the claims, which appear to be based on nine implementation patents already in dispute between the two companies in the United States.
Microsoft’s CEO has just been in the UK where he urged to “harmonise” laws regarding so-called ‘IP’. In a new article from The Inquirer (titled “Ballmer gives LSE a masterclass in not answering questions”) it says: “Giving an indication of how hard any sort of global security architecture will be, Ballmer spoke of a need for the US, Europe and China to harmonise their laws to try to stop ‘piracy’.”
“Ballmer already has lobbyists working on these schemes of legalising software patents in Europe and they give the illusion that Microsoft is not involved.”He hopefully is not calling for patent law too to be harmonised. Ballmer already has lobbyists working on these schemes of legalising software patents in Europe and they give the illusion that Microsoft is not involved.
Then there’s the Oracle case, which is really about Java more than anything else. We wrote about it yesterday (the counterclaim) and now come some more sites [1, 2] including Groklaw [1, 2] with the analysis that’s mostly of interest to legalese lovers. We’ve heard even from a lawyer that Google’s papers are hard to follow/analyse.
Matt Asay, a lawyer by training, looks at this case from above and concludes that “Oracle is the least of Android’s patent woes, while Microsoft is the most offensive” (that’s his short summary). Here is his full punditry which says:
But Android particularly annoys Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, albeit for very different reasons.
Apple, design purist that it is, disdains the momentum Android has seen. Apple is, of course, the early winner in the smartphone market, and its lawsuit against device manufacturer HTC seems to be a means to slow Android’s advances. It hasn’t worked. Not content to sit by and watch its market share erode as developers flock to open-source Android, however, Apple has loosened its grip on developers and is making a serious attempt to win in the market, not simply the courts.
Microsoft, a serial underachiever in mobile, despises Android for the same reason it has long wrung its hands over Linux servers: Microsoft doesn’t know how to compete with free. Google gives Android away, but Microsoft has repeatedly stressed that patent-encumbered Android isn’t free. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told The Wall Street Journal, “Android has a patent fee. It’s not like Android’s free. You do have to license patents.”
This is the same strategy Microsoft has employed in the server market, signing up licensees to its patent portfolio based on vague FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that Linux violates its patents. If Microsoft can force Google to license its patents, it can make it harder for Google to keep Android free.
Wheeler talks about another one of Groklaw’s analyses and says that “so many software patents are patents of prior art”:
In short, “The bottom line is that patent applicants receive the benefit of favorable procedures and a resource-constrained review by the PTO and then assert presumptively valid patents that, according to the Federal Circuit, can be defeated only by clear and convincing evidence. That serves only to insulate patents of dubious quality from adequate scrutiny at any stage.”
A different brief shown in Groklaw was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge, Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), and Apache. They point out some other unfair aspects of the patent process. In particular, they note that “patent owners assert that accused infringers must use the prior art’s source code to prove invalidity, but that source code is often unavailable years after the fact”.
Our reader Jose has read the submission from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and he argues that they defend software patents in principle, just not “bad” ones. If true, it’s akin to the position taken by the OIN. It would be wrong to suggest that Linux-using firms are all fundamentally against software patents. One of the biggest Linux-using aggressors is TiVo (notorious in Linux circles for other reasons), which has just gotten a shot in the arm because of a USPTO reversal:
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Wednesday affirmed the validity of TiVo’s so-called Time Warp DVR patent, reversing the agency’s ruling this summer — after a second re-examination requested by EchoStar and Dish Network — that the patent was invalid because some of the claims were covered in two prior patents.
TiVo’s stock price shot up 9.7% for the day, to close at $10.08 per share Wednesday.
The decision by the PTO is final and cannot be appealed by Dish/EchoStar. Dish and EchoStar declined to comment on the latest ruling.
We covered the likes of these cases in [1, 2, 3]. TiVo deserves no sympathy here just because it uses Linux in its boxes.
Bradly Kuhn from the FSF has also just called Red Hat’s settlement with Acacia [1, 2] “Extremely disturbing” because they “bound themselves from saying how the[y] licensed/invented-around patent”. A reader of ours has explained that “Red Hat likely took the NDA approach and perhaps because Acadia/etc paid them.
“I’m not trying to get people off Red Hat’s back, but I would not want people to assume Acadia [sic] won because that could very well be the exact intended effect of an NDA and why Acadia would then have had to give Red Hat something of value.
“Yes, I don’t like NDAs. Maybe this one lasts for a modest term or Red Hat got something very valuable (that hopefully does not hurt the community or overly enrich their execs at our cost).”
We may never know the answer then. Either way, a Firestar lawyer has told me that when a Red Hat settlement extended to the whole community (see background in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]) Red Hat bragged about it rather than signed an NDA. The silence around Acacia gives room for mobbyists to incite against Red Hat. Next time around, Red Hat ought to put transparency first. The person to push regarding the secrecy turns out to be Tiller, not Fontana. He may not be able to unsign an NDA, but the same mistake oughtn’t be repeated at a later date. █
Summary: Europe’s leading Web browser rejects the patent trolls who sell H.264 licences and Vincent Van Quickenborne gets accused of lying “about open source and software patents”
Despite H.264 announcing it would go royalty free, Opera says the standard isn’t open enough for them to support it
In late August this year the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG LA), a body which licenses pools of patents for various standards, announced that it wouldn’t charge royalty fees for Internet video that streams to end users for free.
Previously MPEG LA had said they wouldn’t charge royalties for such video until after 31 December 2015, but now it appears that this will be extended into perpetuity.
This move by the MPEG LA wasn’t welcomed by everyone however, with Mozilla speaking out against the move and questioning the relevance of the H.264 standard beyond 2014.
Mr. Quickenborne, whom we wrote about back in July, is still on the side of the likes of MPEG-LA considering the fact that he wilfully (perhaps knowingly) opens the door to software patents in Europe and, according to this new video, he also “lies about open source and software patents”. From the video’s summary:
Belgian EU Presidency lies about open source and software patents
Belgian Minister of Economy, Vincent Van Quickenborne, was interviewed about software patents in the Radio show “RTBF Matin Premiere”, lying about the current situation in Europe about software patents. In fact, the central EU patent court he is pushing has great chances to validate the practice of the European Patent Office (EPO) to grant software patents.
Summary: Apple gets slapped quite hard for patent violations, helping to show that it would possibly be better for Apple to just end software patents
THE following new verdict will hopefully teach Apple that software patents are against everyone’s interest (except patent lawyers and patent trolls, who always benefit from them, and unlike monopolists who benefit from them just most of the time) and that it’s time for Apple too to call for their abolishment. From A. Marsh:
Apple Inc. is challenging a jury verdict last week in which the computer maker was ordered to pay as much as $625.5 million to Mirror Worlds LLC for infringing patents related to how documents are displayed digitally.
Apple asked U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for an emergency stay of the Oct. 1 verdict, saying there are outstanding issues on two of the three patents. Apple said patent owner Mirror Worlds would also be “triple dipping” if it were able to collect $208.5 million on each of the patents.
Apple has been ordered to pay more than $200 million to Mirror Worlds, LLC after having lost a patent infringement case brought by the company. Apple was found to be in violation of Mirror Worlds’ “document streaming” patents, which Apple allegedly used in its implementation of Cover Flow and Time Machine.
A company going by the name Sharing Sound LLC, which of course does not appear to do anything, got hold of some exceptionally broad and absolutely ridiculous patents on “distributing musical products by a website over the internet” (6,247,130 and 6,233,682). Go ahead and read the claims on both of those, and realize they were filed in 2000, well after online sales of digital goods was available (I should know, I worked for a company focused on selling software online through nearly identical means described in the patents — in 1998).
Earlier this year, however, Sharing Sound sued a whole bunch of companies over these patents. Included was Apple, Microsoft, Napster, Rhapsody, BDE (Kazaa), Sony, Sony/Ericsson, Amazon, Netflix, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble and Gamestop. Late last week, the news came out that Apple had settled and paid up. Along with that, people noted that most of the other companies had already settled.
According to The Wall Street Journal, European regulators are satisfied that the changes Apple made to the developer agreement are adequate to dispel antitrust concerns.
European regulators ought to look at Apple’s abuse of its competition (including Linux) using software patents. Apple — just like Microsoft — finds comfort in software patenting because it’s a monopolist in some areas and patents are a counter-productive, protectionist measure. █
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” — Siddhārtha Gautama
Steve Ballmer’s presentation slide from 2009 shows GNU/Linux as bigger than Apple on the desktop
Summary: On a global scale, Apple remains just a perceptual luxury of very few and those who know better give GNU/Linux a try
APPLE claims to ship only about 3% of the world’s computers, according to a reader/contributor of ours. This figure makes a lot of sense because only US-centric market share figures can show Apple having gained significant foothold. The US population is about one twentieth of the world’s population and Apple is of course US-based, just like Xbox 360 is US-based so any real comparison to Japanese consoles must be global to become meaningful at all. Ghabuntu has just posted this rant which it titled “Dear Apple Fanatics, the World is Bigger than America!”
Last time I checked, Nokia, even with the current crappy SymbianOS, still has over 40% of the TOTAL smartphone market share around the WORLD. And then too Android has managed to displace the iPhone as the third place platform. So what are these writers telling us? That there is nothing better than the iPhone or what? Or is it some form of addiction to anything that falls off the table of Jobs?
To be honest, it is very funny and sometimes irritating at the same time when you get bombarded over and over with such crappy articles that always tend to think the world is America and America is the world. Please Apple fanatics, we all know Lord Jobs is good at producing very shiny and likable UI, but please spare us the mostly baseless and frantic effort you devote to tearing apart anything that looks the least bit like a decent phone compared to your hypeDevices.
Nice to see the hype* meme we got started spreading further. Apple is just targetting people who are willing to pay massive premiums for commodity PCs with an Apple brand (which sometimes comes in the form of an illuminated logo that projects to some crowd in a presentation, for example, an implicit message like “I am richer than you”). Certain people would mumble something about “Mac experience” (whatever that is), but the dumbed-down menus are too restrictive and “I don’t think those UIs are likable,” wrote MinceR because “they couldn’t even get maximize to work correctly.
“[At Apple] they couldn’t even get maximize to work correctly.” – MinceR“[N]ice article though,” he wrote in IRC. Apple is neither more ubiquitous nor better than GNU/Linux. It is more commonly found in the United States (not BRIC, which stands for Brazil, Russia, India and China) where Apple marketing is obscenely pervasive. For a modern desktop experience, give KDE4 a try. It does a lot more than Mac OS X can do and it deserves a lot more exposure. When it comes to small computers, GNU/Linux has become almost a de facto standard. Below is a new video of LimeOS (specialised GNU/Linux distribution). █
Content is available under CC-BY-SA