- There was the infamous incident where an Apple employee lost an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar. It was recovered (for $$) by the blogging tech website Gizmodo. They contacted Apple and simply wanted confirmation that they had in their possession the new iPhone, but Apple would not do that. Eventually the phone was returned to Apple and everyone already knew who the person was who found the phone (turned in by a spiteful roommate), but in something I would only expect in a world like that in the book “1984”, the police broke down the door of the Gizmodo tech writer to confiscate his computers. There was lots of speculation in various tech forums that the Gizmodo tech writer would face charges, in a sense, justifying the action by the police, but in the end, no, the tech writer was never charged with anything.
- Well, you may have heard in the news recently, once again, an Apple employee lost the newest iPhone prototype in a bar. At least it was a different Apple employee this time. Anyway, Apple used the phone’s GPS to track down the location of the phone. This time, police went to the door and without a warrant started to search the occupant’s house. This was originally reported by the tech website CNET, but when other news media tried to confirm with the SFPD of this incident, SFPD denied any knowledge of such a raid. This led people to assume CNET had done shoddy reporting and only wrote such a baseless article because of ill feelings toward Apple. However, later SFPD changed their tune and said that they did accompany Apple employees on such a visit. During the visit however, they all flashed badges and noone identified themselves as Apple employees. In fact, besides looking for the phone, they also questioned (aka, threatened) the immigration status of him and his family. (Just FYI, they are all legal.) And no, they have not yet found the phone.
- We all know that Apple dictates what software is allowed to be put on the iPhone. They reject apps which they consider “smutty”, so now they are being the judge of what is considered decent and what people are allowed to view on their phones. Interesting enough that they rejected all such apps except for that of Playboy. I’m sure this exception was made because we all know we only read Playboy for its articles. They also decide which companies software can run on the phone as they have made all efforts to prevent Adobe from having their Flash player available on the iPhone and iPad.
- Apple has been known to silence (ie, delete) critics on their forums.
- During these hard economic times, they gave the new CEO Tim Cook almost $400 million in stock as a bonus for becoming CEO as if his CEO salary and position of being CEO of the company with the highest market value in the world is not enough.
- Instead of competing based on their products, they are suing competitors. Most notably, Samsung has arguably the best Android tablet on the market, and Apple has been trying to sue them to prevent them from being able to sell their new tablet. Where they first filed for blocking the sale of Samsung tablet in Europe was a conservative German district, who initially agreed to impose an injunction to block the sale of the Samsung tablet in all of Europe until later it had to backtrack when it came to realization they had no authority to speak for Europe. In the meantime, the case was then brought forward to a court in the Netherlands where out of the 10 patent claims, the judge ruled 9 out of the 10 claims invalid and only supported that there was a potential patent infringement based on Apple’s patent on touch scrolling for photos which did not apply to Samsung’s tablets, only a handful of phones not yet running on the latest Android level. In addition, it was discovered that the documents which Apple submitted in Germany had doctored photos to make the Samsung tablet look more like the iPad. In recent news, the judge in Germany has agreed to Apple’s claims and decided that the Samsung tablet “looks” too much like the Apple iPad, saying there are alternatives to designing a tablet other than a “minimalist” look. Does Apple have a patent on minimalist look? No. So the judge’s decision is then not even based on any patents.
- At any rate, with the below diagram, we can see that “suing” is the way companies are trying to block other companies. We see that Apple is highly involved in this approach. If there’s a bright side, it’s the tens of millions of dollars being spent to pay lawyers for these lawsuits, which in the end means their fees are being paid by consumers.
Diagram courtesy Gizmodo under the article US Patent System Is Killing Innovation. - The most recent lawsuit filed by Apple is that they are suing a Chinese food company for their logo.
Somehow Apple says their logo is improperly similar to Apple’s logo. These lawsuits are not only a financial burden on Apple and that of the targeted company, but also on our legal system. This is similar to the time Apple sued Woolworth over their logo:
Some of the points were already outlined in an earlier post.
References:- http://news.yahoo.com/police-helped-apple-search-iphone-5-prototype-175651593.html
- http://www.techdigest.tv/2011/08/did_apple_fake.html
- http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20102071-71/apple-objects-to-chinese-food-makers-logo-report-says/
- http://www.theage.com.au/business/apple-bites-over-woolworths-logo-20091005-ghzr.html
- http://gizmodo.com/5831354/the-us-patent-system-is-killing-innovation
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