Sorry but the author attribues the deficiencies of the patent system to Apple. If not Apple someone else would have done it. I would also contest the competition argumen by saying that lesser clones in the market make for better competition. The way I see it, I am happy that there will be lesser clones and more original stuff for me to choose from purely from a consumer POV.
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You really see this as a "plus" from a consumer POV? Things like pinch to zoom and auto-hyperlinks have no place in patents. It may make Samsung differentiate further but at the same time they have to create unintuitive gestures to avoid Apple patents. Can you imagine being a "little guy" trying to get into mobile development? The patent process has effectively made it impossible to create a mobile phone without breaking patents. That's not a win.
> It may make Samsung differentiate further but at the same time they have to create unintuitive gestures to avoid Apple patents
No they do not. They can still use the same gestures and implement it differently.
> The patent process has effectively made it impossible to create a mobile phone without breaking patents.
You have put the blame of the patent process on Apple which is very unfair was all my point.
How so? I didn't even mention the word "Apple" in my post. I just purchased a Macbook Air, I like Apple. This has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with a broken patent process.
Watty, It's not whether I like Apple or Samsung. I myself feel that the patent process is broken. My only point was not to single out Apple and leave the others. In this case, there was enough evidence that Samsung "willfully" copied from Apple. For example, a 132 page document was a very hard evidence including emails from the company. You do not require patents to prove it. Patents were used to calculate the financial losses. If otherwise, there would have been a long list of patents which the judges may have seen Samsung to infringed. However, that's not the case.
Will you pleas stop with the mis-information. Read the linked article by Nilay Patel. It explains exactly why you are wrong about pinch to zoom.
"It may make Samsung differentiate further but at the same time they have to create unintuitive gestures to avoid Apple patents." Or in simpler terms, it forces companies to innovate.
"Can you imagine being a "little guy" trying to get into mobile development?" Sounds an awful lot like "Won't you please think of the children!" to me. Let's not forget that IBM, HP, Apple and Microsoft all started out at some point as the little guys, as did Google.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...
You're right. They tweaked the obvious, and patented it. It's almost as bad. Software patents like this should not be validated.
To allow two fingers to zoom and one "tap" to set ... next, you'll be telling me that two fingers to zoom and one finger to slide left is patented too. When will this madness end?
This "if not Apple someone else would have done it" argument is the biggest pile of horseshit Apple apologists have been spewing since these lawsuits started. Do we see similar search lawsuits started by Google against Bing? Or against Duckduckgo?
> Do we see similar search lawsuits started by Google
> against Bing?
I think his argument is that Google has a big pile of patents in search and distributed systems, but isn't using any of them offensively. So, the whole argument that it's okay to act unethically (but legally) because someone else is bound to rings especially hollow here. As for the rest of your comment, it's a disingenuous argument that's been thoroughly debunked, so I won't bother wasting the time or keystrokes on it.
Google is just anouther company that thinks its shit dont stink. No different from any other in my opinion. So why dont you have a look through this and consider what you are really saying.
Lot's of Google employees on hn, doesn't surprise me at all when certain stories/comments get upvoted and downvoted.
You know Google isn't the first search engine, right ?