Samsung files redacted copy of ‘very lopsided’ Apple-HTC deal in U.S. court; Distinctive Apple User Experience not for sale

“Lawyers for Samsung Electronics Co Ltd filed a redacted copy of a 10-year patent licensing agreement between Apple Inc and Taiwan’s HTC Corp in a U.S. court late on Wednesday following a judge’s order,” Sakthi Prasad and Poornima Gupta report for Reuters.

“The court last month ordered Apple to disclose to Samsung details of the legal settlement that the iPhone maker reached with HTC, including terms of the 10-year patents licensing agreement,” Prasad and Gupta report. “The redacted copy excludes key specifics such as the royalty payments HTC would have to make to Apple for using some of the U.S. company’s patents. Also excluded are details of some of HTC’s covered products that were part of the licensing deal. The court order had stated that “only the pricing and royalty terms of license agreements may be sealed.”

Prasad and Gupta report, “As per the Apple-HTC agreement, the licenses do not include Apple’s design patents, according to a filing made with the District Court of Northern California. Apple and HTC also agreed to fully paid-up, royalty-free, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licenses to certain of the other’s patents.”

Read more in the full article here.

“Samsung cannot and presumably will not try to argue that Apple is willing to license its design patents. Those are explicitly excluded from the agreement in a way that leaves no doubt whatsoever,” Florian Mueller writes for FOSS Patents. “Apple and HTC never had a design patent dispute. Apple’s design patent assertions have so far targeted mostly Samsung (in multiple jurisdictions), in one German case Motorola’s XOOM tablet (Apple lost that one but may still be pursuing an appeal), and a few smaller players in Germany, Spain and possibly other jurisdictions. Should HTC suddenly build iPhone and iPad lookalikes, Apple could still sue, but I doubt that this will be necessary.”

“I’ve been saying for a long time that at a minimum Apple needs to defend the distinguishability of its products, or its business would be subjected to totally unfettered, margin-destroying commoditization. The Apple-HTC agreement defines a very important term: Distinctive Apple User Experience,” Muller writes. “That’s what Apple seeks to protect and that’s something that is not for sale. The first time that an anti-cloning provision in an Apple license agreement was mentioned in public was this summer when an Apple executive testified in open court that Microsoft has a license to all Apple patents but that the parties agreed to an anti-cloning provision.”

Muller explains, “HTC can use what Google provides without fear of being sued by Apple. Otherwise HTC would be at a fundamental disadvantage vis- -vis other Android device makers. And while Google now knows these terms and could implement certain features just to help HTC and possibly others who will sign similar license deals in the future, Google also realizes that Apple might at some point enforce its rights against Google directly. Apple is obviously not afraid of Google. Otherwise it would never have sued HTC and other Google partners, and wouldn’t continue to be suing a wholly-owned Google subsidiary, Motorola Mobility.”

“Whatever the court will decide, it’s a very interesting question whether Samsung will agree to a license deal with Apple along the lines of the one accepted by HTC, especially now that Samsung sees how most of the terms of these deals may ultimately have to be shown in public. The Apple-HTC deal is very lopsided,” Mueller writes “There are no two-way payments: it’s all about HTC paying to Apple. The deal is under California law, and any arbitration proceedings would be under the auspices of the international division of the American Arbitration Association. HTC is not allowed to “clone” Apple’s products and features, but the agreement doesn’t limit Apple’s use of HTC’s patents. And various other details also reflect the fact that this was absolutely positively not a deal between equals.”

Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: Have a nice day, Samsung.

Apple-HTC terms are consistent with what Steve Jobs told Eric Schmidt and stated in public

“The public filing of the Apple-HTC license agreement, with the exception of its financial terms and a few details, is the most important smartphone patent news in the build-up to the Apple-Samsung injunction hearing,” Florian Mueller writes for FOSS Patents. “The first license deal ever to have become known between Apple and an Android device maker certainly raises the question of whether Apple’s current leadership has softened its stance compared to what the company’s iconic co-founder and two-term CEO, Steve Jobs, had in mind when he sued HTC in March 2010 (and two other Android device makers, Motorola and Samsung, within 13 months). Time and time again Apple’s adversaries have pointed courts to a passage in the biography authored by Walter Isaacson. Purportedly, Steve Jobs vowed to destroy Android because he considered it a stolen product, and said he was willing, if necessary, to spend all of Apple’s cash reserves on the pursuit of this cause. According to the book, he even declared himself prepared to wage ‘thermonuclear war.’”

“This reporting has led people to believe that Apple’s patent enforcement against Android was an emotional crusade more so than a smart business choice, and has made Apple appear to be a ruthless, anticompetitive aggressor,” Mueller writes. “I never believed any of that. In many interviews over the last 12 months I’ve urged reporters not to attribute to emotion what can be explained with strategic/competitive needs (differentiation vs. commoditization) and, especially, not to attach too much weight to what was, if authentic (which I obviously don’t know but which I’ll presume in the following for the sake of simplicity), merely a private comment and thus can’t be compared to public statements. In particular, comparing a private remark by Steve Jobs to public statements by his successor, Tim Cook, would be completely flawed and unlikely to lead to accurate conclusions.”

Mueller writes, “The different things Steve Jobs said must be weighted according to context. The logical starting point is not his biography but the press release with which Apple announced the HTC lawsuit in March 2010. It contains this Steve Jobs quote: ‘We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,’ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. ‘”We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.’ There’s no contradiction between that statement and the published terms of the deal.”

Much more in the full article – very highly recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: The walls are slowly closing in on the serial patent- and trade dress-infringers; the Apple wannabes who’ll never be.

And none of your derivative Droids are going to be able shut down all the garbage compactors on the detention level, either. This is how the worm turns.

Ever so slowly the screws of justice grind, yet grind, they do. Tick-tock, slavish copiers. Tick-tock.

Related article:
Samsung files redacted copy of 'very lopsided' Apple-HTC deal in U.S. court; Distinctive Apple User Experience not for sale – December 6, 2012
Boom! Apple sues HTC for infringing on 20 iPhone patents – March 2, 2010

Apple working on automatically sizing text based on proximity to user’s face

“Apple Inc., the maker of the iPad and iPhone, is seeking a patent on a technology aimed at making it easier for a user to read a display on a mobile device,” Victoria Slind-Flor reports for Bloomberg.

“Application 20120287163, published in the database of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Nov. 15, covers the scaling of a device's visual content depending on its proximity to the user's face,” Slind-Flor reports. “The technology covered by the application would determine the distance between the user's face and the display screen, and then, using a calibration procedure involving one or more processors, would adjust the display's scale.”

Slind-Flor reports, “Sensors that would capture the image of the user's face for calibration purposes could include ‘an infrared distance sensing device; a laser distance sensing device; a SONAR distance sensing device; and an image capture device.’”

Read more in the full article here.

Why Apple’s Steve Jobs turned Apple into a patent warrior

“Almost every major technology company is involved in ongoing patent battles, but the most significant player is Apple, industry executives say, because of its influence and the size of its claims: in August in California, the company won a $1 billion patent infringement judgment against Samsung,” Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr report for The New York Times. “Former Apple employees say senior executives made a deliberate decision over the last decade, after Apple was a victim of patent attacks, to use patents as leverage against competitors to the iPhone, the company's biggest source of profits.”

“Apple has filed multiple suits against three companies - HTC, Samsung and Motorola Mobility, now part of Google - that today are responsible for more than half of all smartphone sales in the United States,” Duhigg and Lohr report. “If Apple's claims - which include ownership of minor elements like rounded square icons and of more fundamental smartphone technologies - prevail, it will most likely force competitors to overhaul how they design phones, industry experts say.”

MacDailyNews Take: Read “force competitors to overhaul how they design phones” as “force competitors to stop stealing Apple’s trade dress and patented intellectual property.”

Duhigg and Lohr report, “‘Apple has always stood for innovation,’ the company wrote in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times. ‘To protect our inventions, we have patented many of the new technologies in these groundbreaking and category-defining products. In the rare cases when we take legal action over a patent dispute, it's only as a last resort. We think companies should dream up their own products rather than willfully copying ours, and in August a jury in California reached the same conclusion.’”

“The evolution of Apple into one of the industry's patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs,” Duhigg and Lohr report. “It was 2006, and Apple was preparing to unveil the first iPhone... Mr. Jobs gathered his senior managers. While Apple had long been adept at filing patents, when it came to the new iPhone, ‘we're going to patent it all,’ he declared, according to a former executive who, like other former employees, requested anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.”

Tons more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: The article goes deeply into how the patent system is “broken.” Yadda, yadda, yadda. Yes, some changes are needed, but protection is also required. Obviously (see below). Steve sounds like he was past tired of getting ripped off – and rightfully so.

If you can’t see why Apple needs legal protection from theft, you really need to see an eye doctor.

Apple’s products came first, then Samsung’s:

Here’s what Google's Android looked like before and after Apple’s iPhone: