Tag Archives: intellectual property

Six strikes program begins

Posted on by at 8:50 am
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Starting now, a so-called “six strikes” program has begun with at least the following Internet providers: AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. It appears that these five ISPs are the only companies implementing the program negotiated with the MPAA and the RIAA Under the program, users will be monitored ad if they are detected downloading copyrighted material, they will be notified by their ISP and become subject to increasing levels of punishment. So much for privacy. Can you imagine the phone company scanning your calls looking for prohibited content or behaviour? Can you trust your ISP with the sort of deep scanning that is required?

If a customer believes he or she is innocent, they can file an appeal (which costs $35, refundable if the customer wins). I would expect a large number of “false positive” claims to be made by the carriers. And I would switch away from these five carriers if you possibly can.

More details here and here.

GOP proposes copyright reforms

Posted on by at 7:05 am

On Friday, the Republican Study Committee released a paper analyzing the current copyright regime, and suggesting major reforms directed to reducing the public cost of current law.

rsc_policy_brief_–_three_myths_about_copyright_law_and_where_to_start_to_fix_it_–_november_16_2012

More details from Techdirt here.

The report was so well-written and powerful in its defense of public benefit (as opposed to content creator benefit) so it may come as no surprise that it was disavowed by the RSC in a matter of hours. Presumably the content industry wasted no time it bringing its power and influence to bear.

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Apple’s apology (updated)

Posted on by at 9:55 am

Apple lost a patent dispute with Samsung in the UK this week and the judge ordered Apple to post an apology. The result, posted on Apple’s website, is classic Apple. While Apple acknowledges the loss, it takes the opportunity to get in some real digs at Samsung.

Excerpt:

In the ruling, the judge made several important points comparing the designs of the Apple and Samsung products:

“The extreme simplicity of the Apple design is striking. Overall it has undecorated flat surfaces with a plate of glass on the front all the way out to a very thin rim and a blank back. There is a crisp edge around the rim and a combination of curves, both at the corners and the sides. The design looks like an object the informed user would want to pick up and hold. It is an understated, smooth and simple product. It is a cool design.”

“The informed user’s overall impression of each of the Samsung Galaxy Tablets is the following. From the front they belong to the family which includes the Apple design; but the Samsung products are very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back. They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool.”

Update: It turns out that the UK judge was none too happy about Apple’s approach.

Apple and Samsung react to verdict

Posted on by at 7:52 am

Here are the statements issued by Apple and Samsung following yesterday’s win for Apple.

Apple:

We are grateful to the jury for their service and for investing the time to listen to our story and we were thrilled to be able to finally tell it. The mountain of evidence presented during the trail showed that Samsung’s copying went far deeper than even we knew. The lawsuits between Apple and Samsung were about much more than patents or money. They were about values. At Apple, we value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. We make these products to delight our customers, not for our competitors to flagrantly copy. We applaud the court for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.

Samsung:

Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies. Consumers have the right to choices, and they know what they are buying when they purchase Samsung products. This is not the final word in this case or in battles being waged in courts and tribunals around the world, some of which have already rejected many of Apple’s claims. Samsung will continue to innovate and offer choices for the consumer.

By the way, the verdict comes one year to the day after Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple.

Apple-Samsung verdict in favor of Apple (updated x7)

Posted on by at 6:53 pm

It is very preliminary at this time, but it appears that the jury in the Apple-Samsung trial has ruled in favor of Apple. The jury appears to have decided that several Apple patents have been violated, including “bounce back”, scroll, zoom and navigate.

The Verge has a live blog as the verdict is read. And the judge will have to determine whether the verdict is consistent.

More details later as the verdict is still being read. Somewhat strange that the verdict was reached so quickly by the jury.

Update: The jury has calculated damages in favor of Apple in the amount of $1,051,855,000.

Update 2: Apple is currently (6 pm eastern) up more than $6.00 in after-hours trading.

Update 3: Jury finds no violation of any Samsung patents by Apple. This is a huge win for Apple. They did not get every thing they wanted, but is a clear victory.

Update 4: As of 7:16 eastern, Apple is up more than $9.00 in after-hours.

Update 5: Cnet also has a live blog of the verdict.

Update 6: This verdict, whatever happens on appeal, clearly lays down a marker by Apple and will likely lead to something of a chilling effect in terms of multiple manufacturers seeking to parrot other products. The effect on the overall technology sector could be interesting, and it may not be in the interest of users.

What else is new in the arena of intellectual property?

Update 7: As of 7:30 pm Eastern, Apple is up more than $11. What can Samsung’s counsel be thinking now?

Update 8: A succinct summary from the Wall Street Journal:

A federal court jury delivered a big win to Apple Inc., AAPL finding that Samsung Electronics Co. infringed six of the Silicon Valley company’s patents and awarding $1.05 billion in damages in a closely watched case over mobile devices.

The jury also found that Apple’s iPhone and iPad tablet didn’t infringe any of the patents that Samsung had presented in the trial.

The award from the nine-member jury is shy of Apple’s request for more than $2.5 billion, but much larger than Samsung’s estimates and still ranking among the largest intellectual-property awards on record.

Jurors found that Samsung infringed all but one of the seven patents at issue in the case–a patent covering the physical design of the iPad. The found willful infringement by Samsung in five cases, a finding that can affect the size of damage verdicts. They found all seven of Apple’s patents valid, despite, Samsung’s attempts to have them thrown out.

Tech quote of the day

Posted on by at 6:06 pm

No one can look at Samsung’s mobile products over the last decade and not consider them anything other than a ruthless, relentless copy of everything popular that’s came before. It’s not that Samsung doesn’t continuously push the limits of hardware specifications and capabilities as much if not more than anyone else. They do. But they do so by systematically, institutionally copying what other vendors have already done first.

– Rene Ritchie, calling a spade a spade. There is much more to his essay that you can read by clicking his name. (via The Loop)

Apple v. Samsung

Posted on by at 6:56 am

Apple has presented a stream of Samsung’s own internal documents clearly showing that Samsung was terrified of the iPhone and went to great lengths to copy its most attractive features, as John Paczkowski writes in All Things D:

As part of its case against Samsung, Apple has shown snippets of an internal Samsung document comparing the original Galaxy S phone with the iPhone. On Tuesday, Apple managed to get the whole 132-page document admitted into evidence. And it’s a doozy. The 2010 report, translated from Korean, goes feature by feature, evaluating how Samsung’s phone stacks up against the iPhone.

Authored by Samsung’s product engineering team, the document evaluates everything from the home screen to the browser to the built in apps on both devices. In each case, it comes up with a recommendation on what Samsung should do going forward and in most cases its answer is simple: Make it work more like the iPhone.

Follow the link to see the entire 132-page document he describes. It is stunning.

And while I am on the subject of Samsung, check this out:

A new report by a Chinese labor watchdog makes Apple’s Foxconn woes look like a game of spin the bottle, Laptop Mag reports. Untreated injuries? Check. Dangerous workplace? Check. Hitting children and forcing them to stand? Check. This is bad.

The report chronicles the inner workings of HEG Electronics, which manufactures gadgets on behalf of Samsung. Inside their factories? Kids under the age of 16, being worked like dogs until they bleed. See above. China Labor Watch says it was “stunned” by its contact with child workers and the findings of its investigators….

Samsung’s “beat Apple” files

Posted on by at 11:11 am

In the jury trial currently underway in California, pitting Apple against Samsung, Apple argues that Samsung deliberately copied the look and feel (aka “trade dress”) of Apple’s iconic iPhone. On Friday, Samsung documents discovered by Apple seem to provide some very compelling evidence that such was the case.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt provides chapter and verse in an article that is worth a full read:

… it was Apple’s grilling of its final witness Friday — Samsung’s chief strategy officer Justin Denison — that most interested me.

His testimony gave the jury its first peek at the “Beat Apple” files.

Asked under oath whether Samsung tried to emulate any Apple products, Denison, according to CNET’s reporting, said that was not the case.

That gave Apple’s lawyers the opening they needed to start introducing a series of internal Samsung documents with titles like

“Beat Apple response”
“Lessons from Apple”
“Why you should care about Apple”
“Recent Apple analysis project”
“iPhone 5 counter strategy”

Much more from The Verge here.

Disclosure: I am long AAPL.

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IP quote of the day

Posted on by at 4:41 pm

It’s actually worse than that. Copyright and patents are the exception and limitation. Not fair use.

Property rights are considered inalienable rights in the Constitution. They’re also considered natural rights. They can be thought of as inherent rights. They’re not given by government. They are given by nature itself. The purpose of government is not to give such rights, but to protect such rights. And the government can only intrude upon such rights through due process.
Unlike property rights, copyrights and patents needed to be explicitly included in the Constitution because they were not natural. The concept of giving out monopoly rights to ideas was contrary to nature. Thus, such monopolies were by their nature an exception and highly limited.

As pointed out here before. Copyrights originally lasted only 15 years. And even more interesting, copyrights did not cover music or literature.

But as money was made on these limited monopolies, those who collected the rents needed more gates from which to collected upon. So music was added. Literature was added. The length of time was increased. The monopoly on publishing was not enough. Soon performances were added. And now we’re stuck with a convoluted draconian system where we need to pay a license to combine music with video, separate from the publishing right, and separate from the performance right.

The reason we think of fair use as a limitation and an exception, is because for over two centuries, copyright law has turned on its head.

– “Ima Fish” (via TechDirt)

Tech quote of the day

Posted on by at 6:30 am
Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand (Photo credit: jpeepz)

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine – too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property’, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

– Stewart Brand, expanding on comments he made at the first Hackers’ Conference, from the 1987 book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. (via The Quotation of the Day Mailing List)

Piracy cannot be stopped

Posted on by at 7:55 am
The Pirate Bay logo

Image via Wikipedia

Paul Tassi, writing in Forbes, has a good overview of an underlying and unavoidable reality of the digital age in which we live: piracy cannot be stopped. Technological blocks are temporary at best, because blocking any particular digital tools for sharing content merely results in the rapid invention and deployment of new technologies. Consider Napster. When it was such down, numerous clones of its technology appeared. As the IP industry filed lawsuit after lawsuit to shut down the Napster clones, bit torrent technology was created and widely deployed, leading to Pirate Bay. Sharing sites themselves come and go as well. If Pirate Bay is shut down, it will matter little as there are dozens of alternatives already in operation.

But Tassi also notes that piracy will not kill the IP industry. The industry’s claimed number of lost sales caused by piracy are simply silly. Most pirated material is acquired by people who would never buy the content in any case, either because they don’t have the money to do so, or the content is not available in any legal fashion at the time, or because it is simply not worth the trouble or expense to buy, say, a $30 Blu-ray disc.

The real problem, in his view and mine as well, is that the IP industry has failed to adjust their its business model to something that customers actually want and are willing to pay for.   (Perhaps the exception to this is the music industry that was successfully prodded by Steve Jobs into relatively easy legal access at a modest price).

Here is how Tassi put it:

The seven step, ten minute [Pirate Bay] download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle. Right now, the industry is still stuck in the past, and is crawling oh-so-slowly into the future. They still believe people are going to want to buy DVDs or Blu-rays in five years, and that a movie ticket is well worth $15. Netflix is the closest thing they have to an advocate, but the studios are trying to drive them out of business as they see them as a threat, not a solution. It’s mind boggling.

The primary problem movie studios have to realize is that everything they charge for is massively overpriced. The fact that movie ticket prices keep going up is astonishing. How can they possibly think charging $10-15 per ticket for a new feature is going to increase the amount of people coming to theaters rather than renting the movie later or downloading it online for free? Rather than lower prices, they double down, saying that gimmicks like 3D and IMAX are worth adding another $5 to your ticket.

They have failed to realize that people want things to be easy. Physically going to the movies is hard enough without paying way too much for the privilege. Going to a store and buying a DVD instead of renting or downloading is generally an impractical thing to do unless you A) really love a particular movie or B) are an avid film buff or collector.

The essay is worth a full read.

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