Friday, February 15, 2013

Post 6: Update on Samsung vs Apple

This post will be about the emailed out article: http://news.msn.com/science-technology/stalemate-between-apple-samsung-in-smartphone-wars

If you guys have been following this, it's been pretty intense for a while. Right now though, it seems like things have fallen into a stalemate between these two companies. To quote:

"Indeed, a series of recent court rulings suggests that the smartphone patent wars are now grinding toward a stalemate, with Apple unable to show that its sales have been seriously damaged when rivals, notably Samsung, imitated its products."

So what happens now?

It seems like both of these companies have greatly benefited from this war in some aspects. Cook apparently never really wanted to sue Samsung because of manufacturing diplomacy stuff, and Samsung got some pretty good market research data from selling phones that greatly resembled the iPhone.

The article is leaning towards the idea that these two super companies might actually band together in terms of furthering technology. They even go so far as to say that there might be a possibility these huge firms might go after some of the smaller ones like Blackberry.

In some aspects this legal war seems to be almost like a battle of who'd better. So perhaps they're squaring up and this war might result in some awesome technology as the battle to be the best. That would be a cool outcome though it might go in the opposite direction in terms of stifling innovation and iteration.

Did anyone else who read this article agree or disagree with it?

Post 5: Google accuses BT of patent trolls

Hey ya'll,

Here's an interesting yet short article that was uploaded yesterday: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/google-accuses-bt-of-arming-patent-trolls-in-new-lawsuit-1131280.

This stems from a acusation in 2011 where BT said that Google infrindged on 6 mobile patents in all different departments like Andriod, Maps, and Gmail. Now Google's basically claiming that BT used Google's patents for phone calls and networking.

They're trying to turn the tables on them for this, and they say that they have an army of patent trolls.

It's in the courts now, but it's really impressive that BT is heading up against Google, a huge giant in the industry. It will be an interesting story to follow along in the coming months.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Post 4: Legal Issues

Hey ya'll,

So I remember reading back a while ago on HackerNews an article about a very particular legal case involving property. The story goes like this:

There's a guy, let's call him Mike (because I cannot remember or find the article anymore). Mike's spent a few years developing a mobile app, which he's pushed out to the app stores online. He's given it a name, lets call it FriendFinder, because it's relevant to what his app does.

Fast forward a bit and a start-up has pushed out a very similar product that does the same thing, and calls it FindFriends. This startup is backed up by a pretty impressive venture capitalist firm and within no time, Mike gets a email from their lawyers demanding he either he takes his app off the market or he sells over all his rights, data, and code to these guys, or else he's getting sued for it anyways.

Uhm...what?

When I read this I was super surprised but also a bit sad for this Mike fellow, because what can he really do to protect himself from this large company over this intellectual property? Considering the name and the product is so similar, is there definitive proof that someone has more ownership of it?

In the end, I never followed this story to see where it went, but let me know how ya'll feel about this situation.

Post 3: Monday Class Post

Hey ya'll,

So today we covered patents, copyrights, trade secrets, and other things related to these. To be honest I'm still a little confused on the difference between all three, because it seems like there's a gray area when it comes to distinguishing them.

Let's take Google as an example. The Google logo is a trademark, and to make things really simple, let's look at their search engine. This search engine is pretty much a ton of code and algorithms that involves many processes and hardware even to complete, servers, warehouses, etc.

We can define Google's search engine as a trade secret in a sense, no? I've studied before how they approach the search function and at it's very basic point, it's a implementation of PageRank, an algorithm. It's definitely not open sourced, and people can have little search bars on their pages to allow users to search within that site itself for things. PageRank is what started Google off so I definitely don't think they'd want to release it. However, PageRank is actually considered a patent, because, well, it's patented by Google.

So which is it? A patent or a trade secret? I guess the easiest way to explain it is that PageRank itself is a patented product, but the trade secret lies in all the secret criteria they use it in to figure out how to best rank pages in a Google Search.

Agree or not? Let me know in the comments belooowwww!