Irresponsible journalism

Summary: Failure by the press to correctly identify people leads to misguided coverage which brings back mostly old news and helps smear Linux/Android

The borderline illegal tactics, such as blocking of competitors, are not new to Apple. The company has always been very restrictive as it allowed almost nobody else on its platform/s. Apple also dodges tax. Apple has in it everything a sociopath would love, so Apple's popularity in some segments says a lot about today's society.

Based on this report from CBS, "Antitrust regulators send questionnaire to wireless carriers to determine whether Apple is using anticompetitive sales tactics to squeeze out rival handset makers."

Apple is no stranger to such tactics. More recently, boosted by European lobbyists like Florian Müller, Apple also deceived regulators. It tried to pretend that Android devices are worthy of bans in Europe. EU-based Microsoft-run Nokia did the same thing in recent months [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], aided again by this bribed lobbyist, who is quoted by Heise's London-based branch (report by Walker-Morgan, who can't deny knowing about Müller's connections). A new article says: "It has now been revealed that Nokia's recent submission to the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) alleges that HTC smartphones are infringing six US patents. According to a report by patent commentator Florian Müller, one of these (US 6,711,211) describes methods that are apparently infringed by Google's VP8 video codec. VP8 is currently being proposed for standardisation with a number of organisations."

"Microsoft pays this guy, and it no longer keeps it secret, either."First of all, he is not a commentator, he is a lobbyist and he is funded by anti-Android companies. Secondly, he has been boosting MPEG-LA for years (Apple, Nokia-, and Microsoft-funded). Last but not least, he has a history of lying at Microsoft's behalf, so why quote him? He is a mouthpiece that mass-mails journalists, he is no "commentator".

The article continues: "The patent, granted in 2004, is entitled "Method for encoding and decoding video information, a motion compensated video encoder and a corresponding decoder". In a document submitted to the ITC, Nokia explains in some detail, illustrating with source from VP8 open source code, how it believes VP8 is infringing on claims made in its patent. All devices which run Google's Android 2.3 or later are able to play VP8 videos. According to Nokia, this means that the HTC One also infringes this patent."

We covered this before, it is not news. The BBC has been doing the very same thing recently, as it repeatedly cited this lobbyist in anti-Android (or pro-Microsoft extortion) articles without correctly identifying him. Microsoft pays this guy, and it no longer keeps it secret, either. ⬆