{"id":16545,"date":"2012-08-19T15:56:30","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T19:56:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16545"},"modified":"2018-09-18T10:37:19","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:37:19","slug":"esr-on-the-limits-of-lawfare-for-apple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/19\/esr-on-the-limits-of-lawfare-for-apple\/","title":{"rendered":"ESR on the limits of “lawfare” for Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"

To put it mildly, ESR<\/a> isn’t a fan of Apple’s lawfare approach to competition:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s beginning to look like Apple\u2019s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.<\/p>\n

Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple\u2019s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple\u2019s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.<\/p>\n

The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple\u2019s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs\u2019s forehead. But it didn\u2019t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.<\/p>\n

The trouble with this is that there\u2019s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone\/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone\u2019s leveraging of what we\u2019d now call \u201ccloud services\u201d in 2002-2003; and of course there\u2019s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple\u2019s own designers as an important influence.<\/p>\n

If only Apple were honest about what it owed others\u2026but that cannot be, because the company\u2019s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To put it mildly, ESR isn’t a fan of Apple’s lawfare approach to competition: It\u2019s beginning to look like Apple\u2019s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,9,15],"tags":[160,140,1235,174,529,428,380],"class_list":["post-16545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-law","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-design","tag-esr","tag-innovation","tag-lawyers","tag-marketing","tag-patents"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4iR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16546,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16545\/revisions\/16546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}