Apple Mines App Store Submissions For Patent Ideas 307
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Apple has started filing a bunch of patents on mobile applications. That might not be so interesting in and of itself, but if you look closely at the figures in one of the patents, you can see that it's a copy of the third-party Where To? application, which has been on the App Store since at least 2008. There's also a side-by-side comparison which should make it clear that the diagram was copied directly from their app. Even though it's true that the figures are just illustrations of a possible UI and not a part of the claimed invention, it's hard to see how they didn't get some of their ideas from Where To? It might also be the case that Apple isn't looking through the App Store submissions in order to patent other people's ideas, but it's difficult to explain some of these patents if they're not. And with the other patents listed, it's hard to see how old ideas where 'on the internet' has been replaced with the phrase 'on a mobile device' can promote the progress of science and useful arts. This seems like a good time to use Peer to Patent."
Yup. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Mhm. Yup. You're app has been approved! I'll just... ::yoink:: there we go. Thanks for your submission!" -Jobs
False (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a few lawyers and have had them look over the agreement, nothing like that was in there. Can you point to proof?
Words (Score:5, Insightful)
but if you look closely at the figures in one of the patents, you can see that it's a copy of the third-party Where To? application
Yes, and if you read those pesky words that are floating around all the pretty pictures, you'll realise that the patent is for a data aggregation service that applications like "Where To?" will be able to use.
Apple seems to be looking at common applications in the app store, and figuring out what infrastructure services might make them better. This isn't evil, it isn't even particularly sneaky - anyone with an itunes account can browse apps and patent the same sort of ideas.
Don't get me wrong - I still think Apple is evil - this just isn't an example of their evil behaviour.
Re:False (Score:2, Insightful)
This is Slashdot. (Score:1, Insightful)
I know a few lawyers and have had them look over the agreement, nothing like that was in there. Can you point to proof?
This is Slashdot.
You can make baseless claims and get modded up, as long as your words align with groupthink.
Re:If you read the agreement... (Score:3, Insightful)
...you'll see that you gave Apple all the rights to your IP
Being a lying dick gets you Informative?
Re: It's only words, and words are all I have (Score:3, Insightful)
The 'Where To?' app wouldn't infringe this patent if it was granted, apple is not patenting the operation of apps in the app store in the way the article reports.
This is a patent for a type of service that apps like the 'Where To?' app could use if they wanted to, and the image in question is just held up as an example of this.
This patent couldn't be used as a defensive patent for the 'Where To?' app like you sarcastically suggest, because it is patenting a different thing entirely.
I'll agree with you that the US software patent system is evil, but the fact is, it exists, and large corporations can't afford to ignore it.
Re:Yup. (Score:3, Insightful)
So, kind of like Netscape/IE or practically every other app or feature that's ever been added to an OS.
Another stupid /. story on patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the god damned patent application itself. What they are trying to patent has nothing to do with that application.
Slashdot should just stop accepting any patent-related stories until it gets an editor who can grasp the concept that you have to read the claims and specification to know what is covered, not just glance at the pretty pictures.
Re:It'll be fun seeing (Score:2, Insightful)
They're worse at that than Microsoft...
I think you meant to say there are more effective at that.
Re:It'll be fun seeing (Score:4, Insightful)
"Gaffe"? So they stole it accidental-like?
"Geez, boss, I don't know how that dern image from that app store travel app got into the NEW! IMPROVED! travel app that I just wrote and we patented. Maybe the guy who wrote the original travel app also has a time-travel app and went into the future and stole it off my hard drive and put it on his own app after also stealing my future travel app (patent applied for). We oughta sue his ass pronto, boss, because that time-traveling app writer from the past is trying to take our property which is rightly ours because we thought of it first in the future!!! And we better find out who at the App Store approved of a time-travel app in the first place. That guy needs to be fired because the memo clearly stated that the time-travel app is supposed to be in-house only!"
How many big corporations have pissed on so much good will in so short a time? It used to be you could never find anybody who could find anything bad to say about Apple. Even people who didn't use Apple products wished them well because what they were doing was good for personal computing, and they seemed pretty decent. Then the business with licensing Apple OS and then Jobs takes over again and now Apple is a big boy but a lot of people who care about personal computing (and are not fanboys) are starting to admit that Apple's starting to do more and more shitty things. The shit-factor of their behavior has gone up in a remarkably steep curve, and now even some fanboys are starting to say "I love their products, but their choice of strategic partners sucks" and then "Sometimes Apple does some shitty things but not as bad as "X" Corporation who does much shittier things" and then finally "What the fuck is going on at Apple"?
Even a very good looking girl can behave in such a shitty manner that you'd no longer consider banging her. It might be getting to that point here. Apple may be getting too skanky to fuck.
Re:Yup. (Score:5, Insightful)
gives a different impression depending on if they approve the app or not. I could see bigger issues if they say, denied an app and then patented the idea of the app. But once it's approved, it's publicly available and visible to millions of people, apple just has a few hours head start on it, so I don't see a problem at that point.
Someone that speaks Lawyer needs to read their big SDK eula and appstore license and see if it in any way waives rights or something when you submit an app.
Re:New Art (Score:3, Insightful)
nope.
A legal battle around a patent costs a lot of money, time and energy. A huge majority of developers cannot afford any of those 3 , let alone all of them. So even an invalid patent can be quite efficient in neutering a market.
Re:App store monkeys deserve all they get (Score:3, Insightful)
God forbid developers actually target a platform, whose users are likely not to only actually give a shit about apps, but are actually prepared to pay money for them.
Re:It's not a good thing but not the problem state (Score:3, Insightful)
If only you left this part out it'd be incredibly difficult to call your post a "troll". Apparently you have a sore spot and are eager to let everyone know this fact about yourself. In fact when I first read through your post I was wondering how the hell it wasn't moderated "Informative" until I got to that part...
Here's the part I think you are underappreciating. When Apple does something you judge as morally "good", it is good for their customers only. When Apple does something others would judge as morally "bad", it is a patent or other issue capable of affecting many people who have never done business with Apple. Can you see how this reality would naturally tend to constrain the good that they do while spreading the bad that they do?
Re:There is only one word for this (Score:4, Insightful)
Fraud
Libel?
That is, if they are looking at people's application submissions, figuring out their functionality, and submitting patent applications claiming they invented this (thing the app published on their store does).
Then the claim is false, deceptive, harms the person who actually did the work and developed the application, and benefits them.
Go look at the claim in the patent application - the figure (and the app the figure is based upon) are only related to the claim in that they're both iPhone apps and are both useful to travelers. That's it.
Angered? (Score:3, Insightful)
FutureTap can't sue either, because their business model involves selling apps for a product whose maker has Monopolistic control over the distributed apps. If they sue, Apple could just refuse to sell all of their apps for the duration of the lawsuit.
Re:You're welcome! (Score:2, Insightful)
To be fair, you make a good point. (2 actually). To still be fair, you are probably the most rational Apple fanboy I've seen in years.
See, if you had down-modded me you'd simply be making the point I laid out at the end. So I respect you for acknowledging there were reasonable points in there. As for "letting everyone else notice", I don't mind letting other people judge the ratio of useful content to verbal jabs.
I'm glad you saw reasonableness in the points themselves. I think if you look carefully as post positive takes on Apple, they are more rational than you think. How can you like anything if you don't understand it well? In fact in anything fans of something can be the harshest critics when a company actually screws up.
Re:It's not a good thing but not the problem state (Score:5, Insightful)
When Apple does something you judge as morally "good", it is good for their customers only.
Why do you say that? Is Apple contributing back to Webkit good for Apple customers only? What about the pressure Jobs has put on the music industry to allow DRM-free online music sales? What about the competitive pressure on the other big industry players, particularly Microsoft - do you think Windows 7 would be what it is now if Apple had quietly died around 1998/1999?
I appreciate that, like any company, Apple does things that are good and bad, both for its own customers and for the IT world in general, but I think it's extremely biased and inaccurate to claim that they only do good things for their customers.
You need lawyers to run a business (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of running a business involves working with lawyers from time to time, or at least it does if you have a lick of sense. Who in their right mind signs any business contract without having a lawyer look it over? You need lawyers to look over contracts you hand out, in addition to contracts you have to sign to do business. The simple truth is that the U.S. is a very legally oriented place so you are taking a pretty big risk if you just go into anything without legal review.
Not to mention you can simply read the agreement for yourself - it is not unintelligible. I myself did not see anything like that in there. There were no warnings from a legal review.
You can easily prove I am lying by pointing to the part of the contract that disproves what I say. Never mind that companies like EA are also producing applications for Apple and would never cede control of IP...
Happy hunting!
Re:It'll be fun seeing (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Apple is behaving the same way it always, and there have always been people who have criticized Apple. That criticism is just getting more traction on slashdot because Apple is more popular now.
Most slashdot readers (including me) want to appear more knowledgeable than normal computer users. In order to do that they need to have different preferences than normal computer users, and they need to have reasons for those differences that make them look smart. When Apple was an alternative to the mainstream it was cool to like Apple, because that meant you could say "I don't use windows because of xyz", now that Apple is popular those same people are looking for reasons not to use Apple.
Re:It'll be fun seeing (Score:2, Insightful)
Even a very good looking girl can behave in such a shitty manner that you'd no longer consider banging her. It might be getting to that point here. Apple may be getting too skanky to fuck.
While I agree with this post right before this comment, I think it's important to point that this is the kind of throw-away statement that tends to drive women away from technical areas (esp. computer-related fields). It's one thing to have a random troll toss out some silly sexist crap... most people can just ignore that. But it's quite another for it to come from someone who says something that otherwise is very reasonable.
Re:You're welcome! (Score:1, Insightful)
Are you this annoying even in real life? God! I hate apple fanbois more than ever.
When hate is your foundation for interactions all before you crumbles.
I don't hate Apple Haters at all. I think they are misguided. That is the difference between us I guess, that I can't sit there and hate someone because of the computer they use.
SUBMISSION IS RIGHT in a way (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know whether the patent is on prior art from that particular app; arguably it actually may be. It certainly isn't "unrelated". And it is likely that the Apple engineers got their ideas by looking at that particular app and asking themselves "what can we patent that's kind of like an extension of this app?"
More importantly, if you actually read the patent, it's clear that the patent is (1) merely a computer embodiment of a manual process, (2) something lots of other apps have been doing already, and (3) devoid of new technical ideas.
Re:SUBMISSION IS WRONG: Link here (Score:4, Insightful)
How many ignorant people aren't going to read the update or the patent and subsequently go on thinking Apple is "mining app store submissions for patent ideas"
But they are. They're just doing it the way the patent-system encourages - looking at what someone else built and patenting a bunch of possible innovations to it, properly referencing the prior art. So it's not like they're patenting an app out from under the author, but they definitely are looking at what the apps do and patenting as much as they think they can of everything the apps don't already do.
They might have key features of a version-2 app already being patented though.
It's amazing how easy it is to emotionally rile up Slashdot regardless of any facts. Just mention one of the following: 1.) Patents
Well, patents are universally bad. "IP" laws are just another form of corporate welfare. The tremendous cost, in enforcement and as a burden to society, aren't paid at all by the patent-holder. Patents aren't granted, at all, on the assumption of accruing a benefit to society as was the idea, they're just a government-printed license to sue, with the benefit of the doubt no less.
So yeah, the headline was wrong but everyone was right to expect Apple(/someone) crushing independent developers with patent law. That's just what monopolies are. The only "news" is that it's just business as usual, not some new and interesting screw like it appeared to some.
Re:SUBMISSION IS RIGHT in a way (Score:3, Insightful)
And it is likely that the Apple engineers got their ideas by looking at that particular app and asking themselves "what can we patent that's kind of like an extension of this app?"
Or, perhaps an Apple engineer saw the App and saw the name and thought "Hey, does it do this? Ah, no, the app is completely different. But, hey, this is a pretty cool idea. Let's see... implement it like this and do that like so and... Hey, does anyone have an App that does that? No? Hmmmm... let's see." "What are you doing, #Engineer?" "Hey, boss, check this out. Does this seem like a workable idea?" "Yeah, it does. Perhaps we should take steps to protect it before someone else comes up with it."
I.e. it's seems at least equally likely that a developer was just inspired by this app than that Apple has their developers tasked with looking for inspiration or patentable ideas from AppStore submissions.
Just a thought.
Re:SUBMISSION IS WRONG: Link here (Score:5, Insightful)
Some small company does all the actual work.
Builds in as much functionality as they can in reasonable time.
Leave a few obvious but hard to implement ideas for version 2 .
Create a useful app and submit it to the app store.
Then some lazy jerkoff with a legal department behind him spends 5 minutes playing "what would it be cool to have this also do" and before the small guys can release version 2 the bigger company patents most of the version 2 functions.
Now despite them doing nothing useful whatsoever you have to pay them for the privalige of releasing a better app.
Re:Yup. (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. The crap apple pulls and gets away with these days is something on a scale that I've never seen before... of course, that goes for many corporations nowadays.
It really just seems to me that they're getting more and more bold in regards to flaunting both the law and their purchased law makers...(not just apple, a whole bunch of different companies). Maybe people will start waking up to it soon. Then again... maybe not.
Let me be the first to say... I do NOT welcome our new corporate overlords.
Re:Yup. (Score:2, Insightful)
[citation needed]
(and no, the headline is not a cite - for one, it doesn't actually describe the article accurately at all, or the patent in question).