Technology & Gadgets

A lot of people are questioning whether Apple has a case when it says Samsung, Motorola and others copied their design for their own tablets from the iPad. Take a look:

Source: MacRumors/SockRolid

Taken individually, Apple’s claims may not look like they have much merit. For instance, one of Apple’s trademarks includes, “The mark consists of the configuration of a rectangular handheld mobile digital electronic device with rounded corners.” Another states, “The color gray appears as a rectangle at the front, center of the device” (the screen). It probably isn’t hard to find prior art of rectangular handheld mobile electronic devices with rounded corners and a screen. But put them together in the same configuration as the iPhone – the rounded corners at the same radius, a grid of colorful square icons with rounded corners, with the bottom 4 set apart on a silver background, and the whole device surrounded by silver edges – and the merit of the claim begins to focus.

There are plenty of ways to design a phone, and nothing before the iPhone could have possibly been mistaken for an iPhone. You can put an LG Prada next to an iPhone and make a case for Apple copying some of their design aspects, but you would never mistake the iPhone for the Prada; and that’s what this lawsuit is about – in their hardware design, interface, icons and through to their packaging, Samsung’s products all-around mimic Apple’s quite closely, and that’s what intellectual property Apple is trying to protect.

In this set of visual charts, Apple’s trademarks and self-proclaimed trade dress are broken down line-by-line, and checked against Samsung’s products prior to (SGH-F700 smartphone & Q1 UMPC) and after (Galaxy S smartphone & Galaxy Tab tablet) the release of the iPhone & iPad. While no silver bullet, it does illustrate the transformation Samsung’s products have made since Apple’s devices have been on the market, and how similar they have become to those devices.

Start: Apple vs. Samsung Page 1: Hardware Design

Apple ‘got’ the right combination of simplicity (interface) & complexity (apps) long before the rest of the smartphone market – including Google. Now, while Apple is still dipping its feet into the TV market with the new $99 streaming Apple TV set top box, it’s Google who is pushing ahead when it comes to delivering internet video to our TV’s. But don’t count Apple out just yet.

This recent ABC’s Nightline shows off the soon-to-be-released Google TV, a device Google hopes will find as much success under and inside your TV, as Android is finding on phones. Take a look:

While Apple is trying to press you to use iTunes for most of your content (Netflix is the only other video source available on the new Apple TV), Google is going for the whole internet’s library of video. There are built in apps for Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Unbox, and new apps will surely come out quickly after the product is officially released. The killer feature is Google’s specialty – you can search for a show, and whatever video source is available online will come up in the search results. Select one, and you’re off to watching.

While this doesn’t immediately fix the problem of content providers clinging to their archaic “content bundle” cash cow, it will be a huge step in educating consumers about what TV could be. DVR was a small step – allowing people to time-shift their shows, to watch at their convenience. But the future of TV is this ‘library’ concept, where you don’t have to preemptively choose a show to ‘record;’ instead, you’ll just hop on your TV and pull up whatever show you missed, instantly from somewhere online. When consumers get a taste, they’ll start thinking, “why am I paying for all these channels, when all I really want to watch is X & Y?” And when enough consumers start asking that question, it’ll be the end of ‘cable tv’ as we know it.

But what about the content owners, you’re wondering? Why would they put their content up on the internet, if it means more people will cut the cord to their cable bundle? It will be very similar to how the music industry eventually caved in after Napster, and started to offer their music for sale digitally – if you don’t give the people what they want, at a reasonable price, they’re going to go somewhere else to get it; often times that means ‘pirating.’ While the content providers might want to think they can kill piracy through lawsuits, the only real way to reduce it is to give in, and offer a compelling product that makes piracy less appealing than just coughing up for it. Hulu was a good start in this case.

When Hulu came out, many ‘pirates’ found Hulu to be easier, and the short commercials, not too much of a put-off. So while not collecting the same kind of revenue as they had been used to on their cable networks, the content providers did find a way to curb pirating and collect revenue. By raising the cost from a few commercials, up to a few commercials plus $10/mo for Hulu Plus, suddenly the dynamic had changed once again. If that $10 got *all* of the current episodes for all networks, they’d probably be onto something (also, a ~$30 which also included all the “standard” cable channels might be a good option, too); but since it’s still just a small selection of the overall breadth of shows, it’s going to send the pirates back off to pirating again anyway; and why pay $10 for *some* of your favorite shows, when you’re already off pirating the other ones anyway?

So this is where Google TV has it right: give consumers access to *all* available content, no matter where it’s from. When the content providers see they’re losing viewers and subscribers, they’re going to have to choice but to add their videos to the pool of online content, so they can collect some of the revenue from unplugged viewers. Hopefully, at that point, Apple will come around to offering some kind of subscription TV service, and Apple and Google can both work to do for the TV industry, what they’ve done for the cell phone industry; and we can kiss the cable ‘subscription service’ good riddance.

Just when it looked like H.264 was the clear winner in the video format wars (with Apple’s snub of Flash & HTML5 specs coming along), somebody else comes along and throws a big wrench in MPEG LA’s plans.

A little back-story: MPEG LA is a group of patent holders (including Microsoft & Apple) who jointly hold the patents on H.264. For certain applications, licensing fees are charged for implementing the codec, and while it’s been free for most applications, that may change after 2015 when the current licensing runs out. That’s the only reason not all browsers – namely Firefox – have come around to supporting it in their implementation of HTML5. Until now, they (Mozilla) were pushing the Ogg Theora format (currently free, but possibly open to future patent claims).

But now, a few big names, including Mozilla (Firefox) & Google (Chrome & YouTube), as well as numerous others, have come together to stand behind a new royalty-free open source format (read: completely free) called WebM. It uses the VP8 codec (which, ironically enough, is the successor to VP6 – the standard Flash FLV codec until a couple years ago when they switched to H.264). Google gained ownership of the VP8 codec when it acquired On2 Technologies last year, and has only recently announced that they’re releasing it as open source.

Will it catch on? Don’t expect an answer any time soon. This won’t be as ‘short-lived’ as the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD war (which was long and painful enough). Unlike that format war, both ‘web’ formats can easily co-exist for years or even decades to come. But with the state of digital video at a sort of apex right now (users aren’t interested in anything larger than 1080p, and that’s mostly H.264 right now), if one of them does come out ahead in the long-run, it may prove to be the same standard format we use for the next 10 or even 20+ years. And ‘internet video’ isn’t just browsers anymore. H.264 is currently used on Blu-Ray discs, and as the format of most of the digital video you see on your tv. If H.264 does end up coming out ahead, there’s a good chance you’ll pay a licensing fee every time you rent a movie on your TV, or buy a new mobile device that can decode the format. It won’t be much, but the manufacturers will pass those costs on to consumers.

What about Microsoft & Apple? (oh, and Adobe)

Microsoft recently announced they will support VP8 with the release of IE9, but not out of the box. Users will have to download a codec/plugin. So that kind of sucks, but Flash was never included with Windows, and look how far that’s come.

Adobe announced they will support VP8 in Flash.

And as for “we want to support open non-proprietary standard formats” Apple? No comment yet. But I’m willing to bet that the lack of any kind of DRM, at least for now, will mean Apple’s going to continue tooting the H.264 horn for a while. They use H.264 for all of their iTunes video content, and have H.264 hardware decoders in all their devices. It’s going to be a hard sell, especially considering the threat of licensing fees isn’t much of a threat, considering they would be one of the companies collecting.

As much as I like H.264 now, it looks like VP8 and the WebM format will be better for everyone in the long run. …damn it. Well, as long as I don’t have to code for IE6 anymore. What’s that, now? Oh Science damn it.

In a recent ruling by the Australian supreme court against ISPs being responsible for its users’ copyright infringement:

“To use the rather colourful imagery that internet piracy conjures up in a highly imperfect analogy, the file being shared in the swarm is the treasure, the BitTorrent client is the ship, the .torrent file is the treasure map, The Pirate Bay provides treasure maps free of charge and the tracker is the wise old man that needs to be consulted to understand the treasure map.”

I think the analogy is quite accurate, with the exception of the treasure being something congruous to gold doubloons. To be more accurate, the treasure would magically self-replicate itself – at first from the goldsmith’s treasure chest, and then from each pirate to have pirated a piece; but by doing so, because of the treasure’s self-replicating ability, no one is ever deprived of any of the treasure. Rather, the treasure can be spread to a much greater magnitude of pirates, many of whom may otherwise never have known about the treasure or its (magical) goldsmith. With a much greater pool of fans for his/her gold, the goldsmith would have a better chance of making money off their treasure – by making more treasures, offering them in ways that pirates would be willing to pay for, and even charging pirates to see the goldsmith work his/her magic in person.

It sure beats the model of a few goldsmiths, chosen by a handful of businessmen who advertising the goldsmith’s (often inferior) treasure on a massive scale, sell it for a greatly inflated rate, block anyone from using its magical self-replicating feature, and then pay the goldsmith a pittance for their creation.

In terms of legal precedent, it’s great that the judge actually took the time to completely understand the technical implications of the case before making a ruling. If more judges would take that much time and care in their cases, the world would be a much better place for the great majority of its inhabitants, if a little less cozy for its richest.

More case analysis at ArsTechnica.
Complete ruling at Austlii.edu.au.