Comments for Jury in Apple Case Rules for Big Government at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 25 out of 20 comments http://www.cepr.net Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:12:46 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18451 I'm sure you saw the recent article by the Financial Times on the insanity of patent protection in the US: "American law is patent nonsense" http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ea9503c2-f0f9-11e1-89b2-00144feabdc0.html - Stefano Wed, 29 Aug 2012 09:20:46 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18434 Here's a good article on this case if you haven't seen it. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/ea9503c2-f0f9-11e1-89b2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz24wP4Yr9U Though the author gives way too much praise of patent law regarding Big Pharma, he does have some good points about how it's out of control in the technology sphere. - Brett Wed, 29 Aug 2012 03:21:40 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18426 Last Mover: Izzatso? :-) - Calgacus Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:24:26 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18418 Oops. Device. Sorry. - PeonInChief Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:38:54 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18417 I don't know enough about the technical patents to make an informed judgment, but a rectangular devise with rounded edges? Formica kitchen table, 1950s! - PeonInChief Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:28:02 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18412 "According to Fire in the Valley, he also reportedly told Gates that when IBM CEO John Opel heard Microsoft would get the contract, he said "Oh is that Mary Gates' boy's company?" since Opel and Bill Gates' mother served together on the national board of the [b]United Way[/b]." IBM simply went to Microsoft twice about an OS, there was no inside information. The first time Microsoft refered them to Digital Research, the second, Microsoft and IBM agreed that Microsoft would buy and improve what became DOS. Crucially, IBM did not pay a per unit fee to Microsoft, thus making a PC-Clone DOS sale more profitable to Microsoft than an IBM. [url]http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/software/286148-the-rise-of-dos-how-microsoft-got-the-ibm-pc-os-contract [/url] - AndrewDover Tue, 28 Aug 2012 01:44:31 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18407 Per Wikipedia (for whose accuracy I can vouch based on personal memories of the era): "MS-DOS was a renamed form of 86-DOS ... by Seattle Computer Products, written by Tim Paterson. Microsoft needed an operating system for the then-new Intel 8086 ..., so it bought 86-DOS for $75,000 [and used it as the basis for MS-DOS 1.0] released with the IBM PC in 1982. (86-DOS, in turn, was a clone of Digital Research's CP/M ... ported to run on 8086 processors and with two notable differences ... possible because of the increased availability of RAM ..." Because Bill Gates had inside information (from his mother, an IBM board member) that IBM needed an 8086 OS, but Seattle Computer Products had no way to know of that, he was able to buy it from them for chump change. He wrote none of it (and it certainly wasn't written in MS-BASIC -- you don't write operating system kernels in interpreted BASIC). Regarding patents, my recollection is that innovation in computer software was much greater back in the days before software patents were allowed (copyright was the only protection). If the early pioneers of software had patented their ideas, the industry would never have developed as it did. - jm Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:27:48 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18406 [quote]Assumes facts not in evidence written by Dark Helmet, August 27, 2012 5:30 "The ruling gives strong protection to Apple's patents, which means that it will be able to charge more money for its iPad, iPhone and other related products in the years ahead." Yes, but will it? You haven't the faintest idea, do you? [/quote] Actually, not only do we have the faintest idea, we have incredibly spelled out, in-you-face examples that only the willfully ignorant could possibly ignore. There are so many examples of anti-competitive behaviors in big pharma alone. But Apple itself has been sued for price setting behavior, which it used to force competitor Amazon pay more for ebook publishing rights: [url]http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/apple-anti-trust/[/url]. So, Dark Helmet, the schwartz is not with you. Defenders of patent law either have no idea of the corruption, or just choose to ignore it or are getting a pretty penny out of the situation. - David Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:52:08 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18405 [quote]... written by urban legend, August 27, 2012 4:52 Patents have been around for a long time, and Adam Smith recognized them as legitimate ... [/quote] And if Adam Smith recognized photographing a grizzly bear from 50 yards away as being (or maybe jumping off a bridge) legitimate, should we follow him? Are you really saying that in over 200 years (with all due respect for Adam Smith in his limited intellectual framework), nobody has come up with a better, less economically destructive idea? Patents are part of what makes this system of capitalism unstable. As Thomas Jefferson said, they are an embarrassment, because [i]they are not ultimately necessary[/i]. I've got an idea for something better than the patent system. Should I patent it? :-P - David Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:42:58 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18402 [b]Dark Helmut[/b] blithered [quote]Reasoning by ideology is intellectually bankrupt. [/quote] Uh, no. The reasoning is by economic theory, backed up by centuries if not millenia of economic data: monopolists abuse their monopoly. - liberal Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:01:25 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18401 skeptonomist: [quote]Two operating systems were originally offered for the IBM-PC, and Microsoft's DOS - a derivative of UNIX - turned out to be the better one, thus giving Microsoft a perpetual monopoly on OS's for this type of computer. [/quote] This is not correct. DOS was not a dervative of UNIX - it was a very simple shell written in BASIC that allowed the user complete access to every function of a computer system - after all, this was a "personal computer", not a networked one. The advantage of DOS was that, since Bill Gates wrote it himself and owned the rights, it involved no complex negotiations over UNIX, which belonged to AT&T. It was essentially a dummy operating system (or rather, "Direct Operating System") - it didn't actually do anything. Afterwards they bolted on a "windows" system as an application that ran in the DOS shell. Later on, the lack of the useful pieces of an operating system (a real security model with users and permissions, and controlled access to the system kernel) proved a serious liability to MS-DOS when these systems began to expose themselves to the Internet, and suddenly the wide-open personal computer did not seem to be such a good idea. - saurabh Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:09:01 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18400 "The ruling gives strong protection to Apple's patents, which means that it will be able to charge more money for its iPad, iPhone and other related products in the years ahead." Yes, but will it? You haven't the faintest idea, do you? Reasoning by ideology is intellectually bankrupt. - Dark Helmet Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:30:42 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18399 Patents have been around for a long time, and Adam Smith recognized them as legitimate -- depending, of course, on defining an appropriate right of exclusivity the patent provides. But it is absurd to say that this is "Big Government." This is classic distributed enforcement of the law: once the patent is granted, the market determines how valuable that exclusivity is. Government has no involvement except for providing the court and its few employees involved in a particular case. Having some government-created organization handing out rewards for hundreds of thousands of inventions -- one of Dean's unrealistic suggestions for an alternative -- is a lot clearer case of Big Government with centralized decision-making. - urban legend Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:52:28 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18398 nope they aren't. apple has copied as much or more than samsung ever could. all major corporations steal any possible information they can from other outfits, then use their super attorneys to patent info. the net result as baker & others point out is americans pay a heckuva lot of money for over priced junk. only people that don't know much about patent law & patent history think otherwise. - mel in oregon Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:29:07 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18396 That Big Government comes to Apple's side in this case despite fact that Apple uses every trick in the book to avoid paying taxes (including doing most of their manufacturing/production overseas). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/business/apples-tax-strategy-aims-at-low-tax-states-and-nations.html?pagewanted=all Rather than punish them for this, the government rewards them by stomping out competitors and raising costs for anyone wishing to compete with Apple. Seems corporations get to have their cake and eat it too. They get to whine about being overtaxed, they get to do all they can to avoid paying taxes and contributing to society, and they get the benefits of the strong Federal government to keep sending profits their way. No one asks them to pay for any of this, and it's not even commented upon in mainstream press that these corporations are raping and pillaging and getting away with it. In fact, the government is helping them get richer. - Brett Mon, 27 Aug 2012 10:54:09 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18395 @aaron: although the constitution gives the government the right to issue patents, that same constitution allows for amendments should something the writers didn't think of arise and threaten the general welfare of the nation. Ben Franklin issued no patents for his work, out of a sense of ethics and community; and Thomas Jefferson, even after his presidency and having served as a patent officer, still thought of patents as "an embarrassment" [url]http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html[/url] [quote]Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.[/quote] Just because [i]you[/i] can't think of something better for driving innovation, doesn't mean that there isn't something better. As Mr. Fleming suggests, we don't have to have a "one tool" mentality about migrating to a more sustainable system of the fostering of innovation. Clearly inventors need time and money to bring their inventions to market; but are patents really the best choice for this? A 200+ year old legal tool of the British monarchy? This ruling in favor of Apple does provide fuel for further innovation as someone comes up with the next best thing to take over that market. But I do side with Mr. Fleming that it's an ever-widening vicious circle that threatens to suck down the entire system. - Daivd Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:51:23 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18394 From an Amazon review: "If all measures of human advancement in the last hundred centuries were plotted on a graph, they would show an almost perfectly flat line — until the eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution would cause the line to shoot straight up, beginning an almost uninterrupted march of progress. "In The Most Powerful Idea in the World, William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it — the steam engine. In the process he tackles the question that has obsessed historians ever since: What made eighteenth - century Britain such fertile soil for inventors? Rosen’s answer focuses on a simple notion that had become enshrined in British law the century before: that people had the right to own and profit from their ideas. "The result was a period of frantic innovation revolving particularly around the promise of steam power..." It is disappointing that Dr. Baker, one of our finest economists, should be so prejudiced against patents. It would be a relief if he would object only to patents which the holder does not deserve. He has been doing this with drug patents. Much of the research for these patents is funded by the government, yet only the drug companies profit. It seems that many E-tech and software patents are no better. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs mainly took advantage of government-funded or private research by others to make their billions. If they did nothing illegal, it would indicate severe deficiencies in patent law. For those interested in the monumental foolishness of software patent law, I recommend Greg Aharonian. Dr. Baker has apparently declined to copyright some of his later work. This shows that he is attempting to practice what he preaches. If patents are bad, copyright is outrageous for the length of its term, which is continually being extended and is now far in excess of the term for patents. There is no legal justification for this discrepancy. Perhaps patents are worse than Dr. Baker believes, but for a different reason. The Industrial Revolution is responsible for the ever-increasing destruction of the natural world, and for one of the major causes of that destruction, the population explosion. This is a difficult truth for me, a mechanical engineer and inventor. - George Fleming Mon, 27 Aug 2012 09:03:39 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18393 Apple and Microsoft are not the technological innovators that many seem to think, their success has largely been driven by imitation, chance, legal operations and marketing. Apple especially takes ideas that others come up with and determines how to optimize them for simplicity in operation and how best to market them. They are innovative and expert in user interfaces, but the standard graphical computer user interface that first became popular in the Macintosh was actually invented by Xerox; what if Xerox had patented those ideas and defended them in court as Apple has defended its copyrights and patents? The memory-based music player was around for some time before Apple jumped on it at a critical time when memory became cheap. Microsoft's original success was largely by chance. Two operating systems were originally offered for the IBM-PC, and Microsoft's DOS - a derivative of UNIX - turned out to be the better one, thus giving Microsoft a perpetual monopoly on OS's for this type of computer. The decisions on patents are apparently often made by juries which have little understanding of the technological matters, and often when the original innovation is long past. - skeptonomist Mon, 27 Aug 2012 08:48:51 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18390 I am always amazed that the same people who fight the perceived oppression of taxes jump so eagerly in to the soft-lined shackles of corporate replacements. The argument is mostly emotional: Anglo-Saxons are known for moving to the suburbs in order to escape the city taxes imposed for the services, even though by paying privately and directly for these services the overall cost is higher. Yet is this unconditional support for laissez-faire corporatism only the switching of one master for another? Divorcing the politician from the warm embrace of the capitalist mistress can work for a while, but when the latter romance fails divorce is no longer an option. As the writer suggests, the excess rents emerging in the large corporate world, due to corporate concentration and support from the policy makers, is tantamount to a tax. It is a testament to the success of the political and cultural strategy of this group that we submit to them so eagerly. - Andy Mon, 27 Aug 2012 06:42:25 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/jury-in-apple-case-rules-for-big-government#comment-18389 In this case, the patent distinctions that are being defended in these comments are pretty meaningless. But they make the case that rewards for research, etc. can almost certainly be arrived at more intelligently and without excessive cost to customers. - fuller schmidt Mon, 27 Aug 2012 06:36:26 +0100