Worth to note that is not just some obscure small company coming out of nowhere to capitalize from Apple. Masimo is a decades-old medical equipment company, with several developments and patents for non-invasive PPG.
Apple is obviously well-aware of their developments, and was in touch with them already in 2013, more than a year before the launch of the Apple Watch.
From the actual lawsuit filed by Masimo in 2020 [1]:
"In 2013, Apple contacted Masimo and asked to meet regarding a potential collaboration. Apple told Masimo that Apple would like to understand more about Masimo’s technology to potentially integrate that technology into Apple’s products. Apple and Masimo later entered into a confidentiality agreement, and Masimo’s management met with Apple. The meetings included confidential discussions of Masimo’s technology. After what seemed to Masimo to have been productive meetings, Apple quickly began trying to hire Masimo employees, including engineers and key management."
Apple is quietly know for such moves. A friend of mine worked in a lab that supplied Apple with [insert thing here]. Apple poached several of their senior employees, and though the lab strenuously objected, Apple was also their biggest customer.
My friend got poached, and that lab has none of their brains left to drain. They no longer supply Apple.
Why is it scummy? Hiring people to produce goods or services and compensating them based on the value of their knowledge and abilities is sort of the entire value pitch of capitalism, and it's unlikely anyone would have moved over to Apple if the compensation wasn't more worthwhile to them.
They attempted to acquire a specific tech of Masimo, but changed their approach to hiring key resources of it instead of partnering with the company (or acquiring (parts of) it).
The aftermath is this lawsuit, which illustrates that Apple needed their hires to build something that was already existing in Masimo and would have been subject of that partnership.
I'm sure this "brainrape" strategy often works flawlessly, especially on smaller companies. But in this case the tech was already patented.
Or like a lot of technology it quickly ages. What's more important are the minds that created said technology and will have the future ideas. This is why tech companies pay a lot and grant a lot of stock. They are trying to align their incentives not just what employees create today, but what they create tomorrow using what they learned.
I don't know much about Masimo but they appear to be operating like an old school hospital technology company. They list 'algorithm developer II' salaries of $130k - 190k and requiring a MS or PhD - good luck keeping people when big tech turns its focus on an industry.
I don’t think “brainrape” is a good description as employees leave of their own choice.
The corporation isn’t paramount, the individual is. Saying Apple “brainraped” Marino because Masimo didn’t want the employees to leave with their skills leaves out the very important part that employees wanted to leave.
Companies should be able to hire away key talent because it helps the talent who get hired away. As well as the talent who stay.
The point is that Apple had Masimo describe their tech, the issues and methods they developed to solve them, and Apple walked away to rebuild Masimo's solution.
They succeeded, but unfortunately for them the methods were already patented IP of Masimo, that company which explained this whole field to Apple in first place.
The fact that Apple hired Masimo staff to do so is just the smoking gun.
It should be noted that we're taking Masimo at their word here -- scummy as described, yes, but for all we know things may have actually gone another way: they may have tried to hold Apple over a barrel, may not have actually revealed all that much, etc.
- It's agreed by both sides that meetings took place in 2013 and subsequently a confidentiality agreement was made.
- Within the same year Apple hired Masimo's Chief Medical Officer and EVP for Medical Affairs, along with additional staff.
- They developed and integrated the IP of Masimo into a commercial product.
- A judge ruled that Apple infringed patents of Masimo [1].
There's not so much room for things to have gone another way. They were aware of the company and its tech, they met with them, they hired the people away from this company, they built the tech, ultimately violating their IP.
Besides the patent infringement, I see no issue with them hiring key employees and trying to recreate the technology.
If Apple, or some other company, approached you to rebuild what you built at your current company, for a lot more money - are you really telling me you're going to say no and that's the moral thing to do?
Why are you trying to protect a company, a fictional entity, over the employees that make it up?
Noone is framing this as an issue of individual employees. It's an issue between two companies, and one of them has a very thin argument to claim that it didn't systematically extract the other one's IP without paying for it.
As mentioned elsewhere: This strategy surely works most of the time, especially on smaller companies unable to survive 10 (!!) years after their IP has been extracted to await justice. But this time it didn't work because the other company is successful in another industry and has patented the technology.
Because those actions demonstrate that the company Apple didn't rebuild the IP of the company Masimo by accident, they had close contact with each other beforehand.
Maybe the value has never been held on intelectual property but on the people who develop the technology. This is good for the workers while being bad for the capitalists.
I'm not sure why this is "scummy" though: if these employees really love their employer so much, why would they leave? And if they're leaving, they obviously didn't love their previous job that much. Why should employees be stuck in a particular company and not be allowed to leave? Or is it only wrong when employees leave for a larger company?
Right, but the anthropomorphizing of that collection of people is in this case counter to the individual people themselves - the employees were not victims of human trafficking, they left for presumably better job offers or to work on something they thought would be more interesting.
It also ignores that the Apple employees hired may not have even contributed to the Watch feature in question, because surely all of Apple works on everything Apple does.
> It's like meeting a friend's girlfriend and then asking her out later behind your back.
Trying to understand this sentence. 1. Who is asking who out behind whose back now? 2. I gather you think it's not her choice to go out or not if she wants to, since she is your property now?
> Why is it scummy? Hiring people to produce goods or services and compensating them based on the value of their knowledge and abilities is sort of the entire value pitch of capitalism, and it's unlikely anyone would have moved over to Apple if the compensation wasn't more worthwhile to them.
Its highly amoral. That may be fine (but clearly law may say otherwise), many companies do it. But then some folks not only here on HN preach Apple like second coming of Jesus also for its supposed 'high morality' and 'taking care of privacy'.
Nah, just another huge amoral corporation, this time with great marketing. As long as we can cca agree on that all is fine. Till then, I'll keep pointing to tens of cases like this to naive folks or paid PR posts worshiping them (the idea that there are none on such influential place like HN is... unwarranted)
If the original company doesn’t want their staff to be hired away, they can pay them better or provide gardening leaves.
If they have such amazing technology, why don’t they monetise it and pay their employees well? They can provide vesting options to their key employees that require them to stay.
Every employee can stay or leave as he pleases, that's not the point.
In this case, Apple hired those key-members because they wanted the tech which was developed in the environment created by Masimo. They got what they wanted, but turns out that tech was also patented, so here we are.
I don't mean the people shouldn't chose to be compensated well but if you are up against practically infinite funds there is no realistic option for a counter offer.
Apple didn't "acquire" the tech. They showed intention for a partnership to get the field of non-invasive monitoring explained to them by Masimo, and then went home to rebuild their tech without them.
They hired-away Masimo staff to achieve that, the thing they left behind and didn't acquire was the actual tech.
This strategy surely worked hundreds of times, in this case they picked the wrong company because the tech was already patented.
In the bigger picture this kind of behaviour would destroy the market for innovative tech. Why would anyone still invest in making something innovative if your work gets taken away from you the moment you become successful?
This sort of behavior has destroyed my incentive to innovate. I have had multiple patentable ideas stolen and patented by others. I’m just one guy and can’t afford the process, but a patent just gives me the right to sue someone that infringes. Which also would be leagues out of my budget. The result is that I no longer want to create anything of value, because it will just be stolen. This exceptional case only underscores that rule.
a plurality of emitters configured to emit light, each of the emitters comprising at least two light emitting diodes (LEDs);
four photodiodes arranged within the user-worn device and configured to receive light after at least a portion of the light has been attenuated by tissue of the user;
a protrusion comprising a convex surface including separate openings extending through the protrusion and lined with opaque material, each opening positioned over a different one associated with each of the four photodiodes, the opaque material configured to reduce an amount of light reaching the photodiodes without being attenuated by the tissue;
optically transparent material within each of the openings; and
one or more processors configured to receive one or more signals from at least one of the four photodiodes and output measurements responsive to the one or more signals, the measurements indicative of the oxygen saturation of the user.
How was this granted a patent? With some fudging, we can stretch this to describe every single pulseoximeter made in the past 50 years.
I would like to assume good faith on behalf of the plaintiffs, but this seems like patent trolling by an otherwise legitimate company.
Seems similar to me. Lots of rounded rect products existed before iPhone. Like say, cassette tapes, vhs tapes, 8track tapes, bars of soap, cans of spam, license plates, sardine cans, etc...
Did you read the patent or the article you linked? The patent is very specifically regarding the highlighted region of the patent application, which is (strictly speaking) just a general rounded corner device. Although an IP case would probably hinge on it being a full screen touch device, as well; so "rounded corner phones, tablets, touch interfaces, etc", if you want to be really charitable to the patent + Apple.
Form follows function, do we really expect large corporations to be able to enforce a patent like this given that it _doesn't really matter_?
Apple didn't come up with anything new or incredible, it lends nothing to their brand or to the function of the device. There's no negative impact on Apple if their competition uses the same rounded corner radius.
Saying so otherwise is just playing into the Apple vs Samsung vs Everyone else team based Robert measuring contest where everyone waves the flag of their favourite corporation that they love so much.
That's just being pedantic though; they were pointing out the logic behind a patent of any kind for such a simple thing/feature is ridiculous. And it is. But money talks.
That was a design patent[1], which are different from normal patents. A design patent is a form of legal protection granted to the ornamental design of an article of manufacture. Design patents are a type of industrial design right.
Whether you think it is a valid design patent or not is a different question. There is no doubt that the outline of the iPhone was iconic, and Apple was trying to protect that, and Samsung was trying to ape it.
Though that was a design patent, they also got a normal patent for the pythagorean formula (they didn’t invent pinch zoom, so they patented computing the distance between two fingers from two x,y coordinates).
FYI: Apple’s pinch to zoom lets you rotate and drag not just zoom.
This kind of subtle differences matter quite a bit from a UI perspective. You could have a punch to zoom system where a pinching motion always resulted in fixed changes to zoom levels. You could describe both implementations as “pint to zoom” but one is a lot more user friendly than the other.
Safari lets you drag and zoom so it’s still more than just a zoom function.
Also, Boxed already replied by complaining about rotation in the Map app imagine the hate if Safari did let you rotate. Removing features is just as critical for UI design as adding them.
I agree that Safari would be much worse if it allowed rotation, I think most of the places where Apple currently allow rotation (such as in the photos or files apps) would be better if rotation wasn't allowed, but we're not discussing my taste or yours in UIs here.
The original Surface was unveiled a few months (May 30, 2007) after the iPhone (January 9, 2007). Not sure who implemented the idea first in the lab, but probably neither of them.
Yea, Apple got most of this by buying a company that started working on this stuff in 1999. You can argue about the patents, but in this case it was beneficial for a small innovative company.
Also, the original idea for pinch zooming dates back to 1985, but I have no idea what that UI was actually like.
Are you saying there’s no grounds in a patent if it uses math, because no one can patent math? The patent isn’t even about math. It’s about user interface innovations.
I'm saying that other people had already invented, demoed, and published the user interface inventions (concretely, pinch zoom + rotate) before Apple even considered building a computer with a touch screen, and that, as a workaround, Apple's lawyers patented using high-school trigonometry to implement the prior work.
I wish the rubber band effect could be disabled. When scrolling, I always have to wait a second for the bouncing effect to stop before I can tap on things. It happens in every app.
Android's equivalent can be disabled with the "reduced motion" toggle in the accessibility settings. You also lose a bunch of other totally extraneous animations in the process, boo hoo. Perhaps the same is possible on iPhone?
Oh yea, for sure. And I guess some people do use the maps rotation feature. I'd just like an option to turn it off. I'd even accept it as an accessibility feature :P
Being granted the patent means almost nothing. The only thing that matters is if you can defend it. Which ridiculously I agree, they seem to have been able to do.
Masimo is not a small company coming out of nowhere to capitalize from Apple, they're a decades-old medical equipment company. The case outlines how Apple met with them in 2013 to discuss collaboration. After that meeting, Apple apparently hired away several key-members of Masimo with knowledge about their non-invasive biometric monitoring tech, including their "Chief Medical Officer and EVP for Medical Affairs", who already joined Apple in that same year...
The case claims violation of various patents for non-invasive blood data-collection via LEDs of specific wavelengths and photo-diodes in a specific geometry, patents to reduce power consumption of pulse oximeters as well as patents to detect when a pulse oximeter probe is misaligned on a patient.
But most of all, they can demonstrate in the evolution of the Apple Watch how Apple launched their initial generation without such optimizations but found them to be necessary later-on, so it seems Masimo's patents are not that obvious.
This seems like a problematic patent based on two of the doctrines, both of which the courts have largely abandoned. Firstly, it’s patently obvious. The pulse ox technology in a transmissive mode is very old, and so is HRM in a reflective mode, and the only difference is in the subtleties of the engineering, none of which is reflected in the patent nor the claims. The second reason, relatedly, is the requirement for “replicability by a person of ordinary skill”. The patent reveals nothing that would enable someone to do that, and certainly doesn’t add anything to the ability of a skilled person to do so. The whole thing is just an idea, not an original one, and ideas are not supposed to be patentable.
I think the key here (similar to what happened to Blackberry-RIM which was sued by NTP) is that the ITC has stepped in before other courts or the Patent Office have had their final say. The argument being that Masimo would be harmed by the importation, while the ban will cost Apple $Billions. Rocket-dockets and the ITC are useful tools if you're the plaintiff in getting a big settlement.
NTP had it's patents invalidated shortly after RIM settled for most of a $B, but it didn't matter since BB couldn't afford to have their email servers turned off. Apple probably can afford this. I'm not sure if the patents are in reexam or not, but I'd expect them to be.
They look identical to me btw? both files on 2020-02 and have title of "User-worn device for noninvasively measuring a physiological parameter of a user". From summary:
> light source comprises LEDs and super-luminescent LEDs. The light source emits light at at least wavelengths of about 1610 nm, about 1640 nm, and about 1665 nm. In an embodiment, the detector comprises a plurality of photodetectors arranged in a special geometry comprising...
there are 30 claims and some parts of them seem to definitely be a prior art ("a storage device configured to at least temporarily store at least the measurement").. I wonder what's the real innovation is there?
> some parts of them seem to definitely be a prior art
The standard is to consider ALL of the elements together in the specific configuration. If this were not the case, then any invention that incorporated any conventional element (e.g., a lever) would be invalid.
It cannot be that simple, can it? Otherwise changing a single element (say "concave surface" to "sine-shaped surface", or "strap" to "clamp") would invalidate the patent.
I think the point is that the patent mentions all the characteristics that are essential to the underlying tech working, and that changing those would likely make the mechanism not work.
But also, judges and courts and all of this stuff exists because at the end of the day human beings look at the facts on the ground. There isn't some sort of magical turing machine that decides on exactitude here.
There are two separate matters considered in these cases. First there is the question of whether the patent claims are valid: this is determined by evaluating prior art, either by itself or in “combination” where you take some elements from different pieces of prior art and argue that a skilled artisan would have known to combine them. Apple appears to have challenged the patents in an IPR proceeding at the Patent Office, using combinations of prior art from earlier patents, which they largely prevailed in. However an appeals court reversed parts of that ruling on technical grounds related to the way the IPR board combined different references (and some claims seem to have survived it.) You can read an appeals court decision here [1]. Separate is the question of infringement: Masimo needed to show that Apple’s products infringe the claims of the patent. Apple could “design around” these claims by changing essential elements of their product, but that would only protect them going forward.
Yes. In a well-written claim, then each limitation is only there because it was necessary to get the examiner to allow the patent (i.e., to be valid in light of the known prior art).
Patents are written by lawyers to cover this, generally speaking. Also a court case will have a judge to apply some "common sense" (to lawyers) rulings, like whether in this context a strap could also be a clamp. Then the lawyers will argue their sides to the judge, try to find precedents, and call in experts, and eventually it gets sorted out.
The statement of a storage device is part of a larger claim that decribes a different embodiment of the invention that they also want to protect. If it was an independent claim it would almost certainly be invalid, but as part of a specific claim or as a dependent claim it could be valid when considering the entire embodiment described by the claim(s).
Live by the sword, die by the sword I guess. Apple has been busy patenting obvious VR/AR features and I have no doubt we will see them attempting to aggressively exercise these in future years to shut down alternatives to Vision Pro in the future.
Apple's suit alleged 20 separate patent infringements relating to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. Steve Jobs exclaimed "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it" The ITC rejected all but one of Apple's claims
> July 2008 Apple Inc. vs Psystar Corporation
Apple Inc. filed suit against Psystar Corporation alleging Psystar sold Intel-based systems with Mac OS X pre-installed and that, in so doing, violated Apple's copyright and trademark rights and the software licensing terms of Apple's shrink wrap license.
>2019, Apple v. Corellium
Apple sued security start-up Corellium for creating the first virtual iPhone-simulating software. The product was created with the intent of helping users research security issues in iOS. Apple's lawsuit argued that Corellium's product would be dangerous in the wrong hands as it would let hackers learn exploits easier, as well as claiming that Corellium was selling their product indiscriminately, even to potential competitors of Apple.
> Apple v. Samsung: Android phones and tablets
By August 2011, Apple and Samsung were engaged in 19 ongoing lawsuits in 12 courts in nine countries on four continents; by October, the fight expanded to 10 countries.
The laws are supposed to reward Masimo for their innovation by Apple paying them an appropriate licensing fee. Apple decided to circumvent that by milking them for IP in a feigned acquisition attempt and then headhunting their engineers and are going to be punished financially for not rewarding innovation. The law is working as intended.
right, but it sure looks like masimo's "innovation" is filing the patent paperwork for the general concept of how pulse oximeters have always worked, not anything new they invented.
filing patents for something you didn't invent is not the law working as intended.
If that was the only innovation, why would Apple go and have several meetings with them and then try to hire their engineers? Sounds like they had something that Apple wanted, and Apple decided not to pay for it. This case is the result, which certainly will be settled at some point.
I see you have weird imagination. What even makes you say something as silly as this without any provocation?
I don’t care particularly about Apple or their watches. Yet even Apple can’t win against a patent troll that means any smaller company would never be able to develop and sell their products without paying Masimo.
If that was the case Apple would have overturned this patent on the basis of prior art.
I'm inclined to trust ITC on this one more than a random dude from the internet, even though he is not a toad.
In some narrow cases I see the value in patents motivating financial investment in original research. But most of the time this does not apply.
Optical pulse oximeters are an obvious incremental thing, and with zero knowledge of the space I don’t think it’s crazy to believe these would have come into existence on the same time frame with or without the existence of patents.
Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability. We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance. Originality is quaint pre-industrial human myth.
That said, Apple would have absolutely done the same thing if they had the patent. So I have zero sympathy for either party.
Don’t hate the player, hate the “artificially granted ownership over progress” game.
While I don't think we should give courts and government-like agencies no scrutiny, I think I'm probably going to put greater weight on the ITC's decision than a random person on the internet who admits they have zero knowledge of the technology in question.
>Virtually everything humans create or “discover” is an inevitability.
Even though it's inevitable that someone will invest a lot of time to get us better TFT displays in form of IPS, it's very much favorable that he can reap some reward for it.
It's a bit of a gamble and is therefore supplanted by the trade secret and research grant systems, still it's a useful incentive to do cool stuff.
Especially in the distant past, there have been many patents that were really valuable and their inventors deserved to be rewarded.
The main problem is that today patents are granted far too easily. Most patents contain in their claims only things that any competent professional could discover independently after a few hours of thinking about how to solve a problem.
Other claims are for methods that have been known for a long time, but they were not applied for various reasons, e.g. of cost or efficiency, to the applications described in the patent. Then some unrelated technological progress happened, which may not be mentioned at all in the patent, which suddenly enabled the extension of the application domain of the old method, and then someone quickly filed a patent for the new combination of old methods.
Other claims are far too general and cover all the ways that everyone could list about how to solve a problem, even if most of them are not practical at present and the inventor would not be able to demonstrate any functional implementation, but they are inserted in the patent claims for the case that someone will discover in the future a suitable technology, when it will become possible to claim that it infringes the patent.
Many patents are just reformulations of much older patents, from decades ago, perhaps filed in other countries, but they use such an obfuscated language that it is difficult to determine that in fact the different patents claim the same things.
I have read many patents, but the most recent they are, the less likely it is to find in them anything that I consider innovative or that would justify in any way to consider the patent as valid.
Nevertheless, few individuals or companies would be able to bear the expenses and risks of trying to invalidate patents, so there are many examples when inferior technologies have been used for decades in order to circumvent bogus patents.
Moreover, the days when most patent owners used the patents as a direct source of revenue are long in the past. Today few patent owners are willing to license them at fair and non-discriminatory prices. Most use the patents only as a means to prevent competition.
There is no "he" who will reap the reward. The reward all goes to the share holders and executives of the company which ends up owning the patent, not the individual or individuals who comes up with the thing which can be patented.
The researcher individuals will be paid their salary and their jobs' existence depends solely on ability of the shareholders to protect their investment.
Exactly, and that's my point! The individual who does the invention gets a normal salary which they would've gotten anywhere doing anything (or, at best, a slightly higher salary than others doing similar work), and the people who reap the reward are the shareholders and executives.
That's worse an understanding of economics than I'd expect here. The fact that fruit of research and development is protected investment creates research jobs. Without patent protection, shareholders and executives would hire fewer people and overall progress would be slower.
But they are, even if it's not as direct as you like. The company/inventor is the patent holder, which benefits the inventor either directly or indirectly.
You're making it out like the individuals do not benefit from company's success. I'm saying that's not true, the continued existence of the company is a benefit to the individual.
The individual benefits a teeny tiny little bit from the company's success, but the individual is not getting rich from it. The idea that the inventor is significantly enriched by the patent system is a fantasy; the reality is that the inventor maybe has a slightly higher salary than they otherwise would, while the investors and executives are enriched. I don't know how many times I need to say this before it sinks in.
“We’re all just memetic LLMs, remixing stuff with mildly differing levels of variance.”
Einstein upended every other human beings notion of space and time. Copernicus also proposed something preposterous for his time. Would you say they just remixed stuff with mild variance?
Copernicus has only revived a theory first proposed millennia before him (in Ancient Greece), but initially rejected for insufficient evidence. Even for Copernicus, his theory was based more on faith than on evidence, because it became possible to measure the stellar parallaxes only much later.
When Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity, it did not contain any fact or formula that had not already existed previously in the works of Lorentz, Poincaré and many others. It was just a new and original point of view about which is the meaning of those known relationships (i.e. that it is the speed of light which is constant in all reference systems, while other quantities are variable, instead of making other choices about which quantities are constant and which are variable).
His contribution is actually very similar with that of Copernicus, who also did not provide any new fact or relationship, but just a new choice about which position should be considered constant, Sun's or Earth's. Both changes were very small compared with the existing knowledge, but they were very important for enabling further progress.
Every progress is really incremental and it adds very little over the existing body of knowledge, even if the addition is essential for any further progress and for improving the practical applications.
This might be confirmation bias to a degree, because of something called “the adjacent possible”. That is, that ideas that are too far ahead of their time, simply don’t catch on, and so no one has ever heard of them. However, the individuals inventing these things would be extraordinary individuals, I would argue. Clive Sinclair might be one example of this.
The Ricci calculus has influenced Einstein only more than a decade later, in the development of the General Relativity (1917), for which tensor calculus was indispensable.
It had no influence on the theory of Special Relativity (1905).
Einstein is the one who changed the meaning of the word "tensor" to the meaning used today in most cases, when tensor means a general multi-dimensional quantity. I could not find any information about the reason why Einstein has chosen to make this change in terminology.
Before Einstein, "tensor" (a term introduced by Hamilton) was applied only to symmetric matrices (because general matrices can be decomposed into "versors", i.e. rotation matrices that rotate vectors and a "tensor", i.e. a symmetric matrix that stretches vectors).
While Ricci has invented the concept of tensor, he has not used the word "tensor". Nevertheless, because Einstein's theory had become extremely fashionable at the end of WWI, when Ricci's work has been translated and published in USA, the American editor has introduced the word "tensor" everywhere in the book and they added on the covers that this is the book needed to understand Einstein's tensor theory, in order to promote the sales of the book.
Thus, Ricci's calculus became known as tensor calculus, first in USA, then everywhere.
I wasn't saying Ricci calculus was related to special relativity discovery. OP didn't say whether talking about special or general relativity.
17 years old I think is quite recent given the gap between special and general (would you say no immediate connection between them because of the length of that gap?), and there were presumably other pieces involved.
This seems to be an uninformed opinion. Masimo has been on the cutting edge of pulse-oximetry for decades, and figuring out how to make a low power wrist pulse-oximeter is non-trivial.
Patents expire in 25 years. Either they innovate as hell or you can just verbatim reproduce their model from 25 years ago and compete, you can't have it both ways.
Philips and Siemens, of all companies, decided to partner and license the technology, and Apple decided they can toss them around.
25 years is the length of an entire career, what the actual hell, patents should last for 3-7 years at the most, if they exist at all (they're mostly an outdated, garbage relic system that doesn't encourage innovation anymore and is simply used to keep smaller players out of markets)
But no, that’s actually the hard part. Something Apple did manage to accomplish quite well though (just like many other smaller companies would be able to do if there were no trivial patents preventing them from doing that).
Which patents do Facebook and Google use? Those companies are based on network effects and custom algorithms (not patented). I'll give you that Intel and AMD are coasting on their x86 patents. I'd add Qualcomm as well. Not sure about Apple and Microsoft. They are more based on copyright (ie. source code) although I may be wrong.
In any case this is a far cry from a "U.S. global monopoly on high tech products."
You can't pretend that Apple doesn't set themselves up for the criticism. They're the largest company globally, completely control all major facets of their devices and struggle to admit to adamant and obvious design failure (eg. Butterfly Keyboard, anti-repair DRM, single-vendor App Store, browser lockdown, etc.).
When Apple is wrong, fixing the problem yourself isn't always an option. Reactions like this shouldn't surprise you if you've seen what HN has to say about Meta, Microsoft and Google.
Current patents attempt to claim: this thing I figured out is novel and nobody else should copy me.
Many times, they claim this so someone else can't claim it and thus avoid arbitration.
It would be nice if we could also file: this thing I figured out is not novel and is a natural progression to the current state-of-the-art.
I guess the only means of doing this currently is to attempt to invalidate a patent? Or maybe, a whole swath of patents?
There is nothing truly-novel here (IMHO.) This is like a toothbrush patent with a slightly different number of bristles than every other toothbrush patent in order to sell a toothbrush legally.
>It would be nice if we could also file: this thing I figured out is not novel and is a natural progression to the current state-of-the-art.
isn't this just publishing? no formal procedure required, no government, no patent office, no filing fees, put your a record of your work somewhere that people can find it and then it can be used as prior art in a dispute.
I think they were asking for something like Creative Commons for patents. Prior to CC anyone could write a note that says “free to use” but then you would need a lawyer to do due diligence and scan each with a fine toothed comb. The value of CC is it normalized all of that so the economy around using the free thing got easier.
Yes publishing work will allow you to bring it up as a defendant. But by the time you’re called to a law office in west Texas you’re already out millions in legal fees and still run the risk of getting a judgement against you.
What I think they were asking for is something more formal.
If you are actually sued for patent infringement, then it means you've got deep pockets to pay a judgment or settlement. In other words, you're probably making a ton of money. It's a good position to be in.
That’s…not true. Anyone can sue anyone for anything.
Patent trolls often go after individuals and small firms specifically because they can get them to settle as they cannot afford a legal fight. Most make the bulk of their money by without ever getting any judgements.
Patents normally granted after several years, this patent only took about year, kind of looked fishy to me. Then after closer look, this patent is just continuation of a series of patents by Masimo. How Apple eluded some of the original patents by Masimo is very intriguing. Other comments mentioned that Masimo had been meeting with Apple since 2012 and the fact that the first version of Apple Smartwatch was introduced back in 2015, Apple kind of expecting the lawsuit by not paying the royalty.
Intellectual property purports to foster innovation and reward idea-havers. It does the opposite, stifling innovation and rewarding rent seekers over tinkerers.
"Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities — which measures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body — that were patented by Masimo"
"Joe Kiani, the chief executive of Masimo, said in an interview that Apple had not engaged in licensing negotiations. Instead, he said that Apple had appealed to President Biden to veto the I.T.C. ruling, which Mr. Kiani knows because the administration contacted Masimo about Apple’s request."
“If they don’t want to use our chip, I’ll work with them to make their product good,” Mr. Kiani said. “Once it’s good enough, I’m happy to give them a license.”
Super interesting case, thought Apple would be less sloppy than this.
I realize from the perspective of patent law, the patent is not dumb and Apple needs to respect patent law. But man, the patent is just dumb. It's simply just existing technology A, but on obvious technology B. There is absolutely zero innovation.
So all wear-able devices that use light to measure attributes from your blood stream require a license from the holders of this patent? It's really no surprise that businesses don't try to compete with each other in the "free market" and quasi-monopolies reign supreme. Chances are you're going to be seen as eating somebody's lunch somehow if you try to sell anything.
I suppose you could argue that it's Apple violating the patent here, hardly a party to feel empathy for. But they just had the gumption to put skin in this game. We could have tons of competing devices that do this in their own wear-able products with distinct user experiences for each, but somebody beat them all to the patent house so why bother.
I think there are many problems with the patent system but the way you are describing it is overly broad. There are lots of technical details in this patent that describe a way of doing that. Once the period of exclusivity is up anyone can use that technique freely - but for now other people would have to pay or use an inferior technique that doesn't violate the patent. Arguably there's not a lot of value in every device working as perfectly as possible, but there's a lot of value in giving inventors temporary monopolies on truly new things.
yet as technological innovation gets faster over time, you would've thought the optimal patent term length to balance the innovation-incentivizing and innovation-chilling effects would decrease
Apple has an aggressive legal strategy because they can afford to bend/break the law first and let things play out in court (this case was first filed in early 2020 before the pandemic) while their competitors generally cannot.
Or leasing a new Mercedes every few months so that you never have to have a license plate and register your car like the rest of us plebians...and can illegally park in handicapped parking spaces because cops can't issue a ticket to a vehicle with no plate.
Why on earth can you drive without a registration of the vehicle. This simply indicates the law is broken. Still scummy behaviour but fixing the law so you have to get a plate before driving would solve this (like it's in many places of the world).
This wasn't a registration issue. In CA, new car dealers immediately register cars upon sale. The issue is that license plates formerly weren't issued until sometime later, so it was legal to drive a new car for up to 6 months with no plates. That law was fixed as of 2019. Now dealers have to install temporary license plates.
Mandatory licensing would be wild. If LG invent something that makes TVs better should they have to licence it to Samsung? Or should they just be able to make better TVs and use their invention for market differentiation?
Being required to conduct good-faith negotiation sounds like a great idea, a reasonable tradeoff between protection that encourages innovation so that inventors can profit off their inventions, while also allowing for society to progress based on those inventions.
LG could ignore trolls and morons - but if Samsung makes a good-faith, fair offer to license the technology, they should have to have a good reason for saying no beyond "we don't feel like it."
One company, Cobasys (owned by an oil company!) purposefully refused to license NiMH technology in transportation. The patent system was never intended to be used like a weapon to protect a market.
> The patent system was never intended to be used like a weapon to protect a market.
This doesn't seem true to me. Nothing about the design of the patent system makes sense if the intent if not to use it like a weapon to let a giant company protect a whole area of the market from competition.
As a point of interest, there is a class of patterns called Standard Essential Patents (SEP), which the patent holder is required to sell licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) conditions when an implementation of that patented idea is required to comply with certain standards.
Why shouldn't they have to license it to Samsung? Why do we want to stifle innovation by preventing Samsung from using any of LG's tech and vice versa? Imagine the TVs we could've had if the two companies could combine the best parts of each others' technologies.
> To avoid a complete ban on sales, Apple had two months to cut a deal with Masimo to license its technology, or it could appeal to the Biden administration to reverse the ruling. But Joe Kiani, the chief executive of Masimo, said in an interview that Apple had not engaged in licensing negotiations
> “If they don’t want to use our chip, I’ll work with them to make their product good,” Mr. Kiani said. “Once it’s good enough, I’m happy to give them a license.”
Doesn’t this quite plainly mean that they aren’t willing to just license the patent?
Because the options are either use their hardware or "work with them". That seems pretty unreasonable to me. You're holding them hostage to collaborate.
I'm not an Apple fan, but this feels like abuse of the patent system. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if it's legal, but being forced to work with a company to access their parent feels like absolute bullshit.
Ask for your $X per device sold and be done with it.
What is your actual argument? That they’re willing to license the tech (despite their statement to the contrary), or that it doesn’t matter because it should be legal to refuse to sell licenses?
I obviously know it is legal to refuse to license, that's the problem.
If your whole argument is "it should be legal to refuse to license a patent", I don't know why you went down the whole "They aren't refusing to license the patent" route.
Sorry, I didn't pay enough attention to usernames. caminante argued that the company is willing to license the patent ("How does this statement reject a willingness to license" etc) and I didn't notice that you're not caminante. My bad.
That statement very much reads like they aren't willing to license unless they get final say on products using the tech. Which sounds quite unreasonable as a condition for patent licensing.
Sorta? Compulsive licensing is something that only exists in a very narrow market for copyright material. Pretty sure it does not exist at all for patents.
You can argue that it is somewhat moot here, as Apple was not showing any willingness to negotiate. But the post above is somewhat accurate, in that there is no guarantee that negotiations will end in a license.
I wasn’t aware either, but it looks like it’s a thing for some potentially critical patents. The example in Wikipedia is the US govt threatening Bayer with compulsory licensing of their anthrax treatment if they refused to lower their price.
I beleive the Wright Brothers also had to give up / forced to licence their patent which was key to modern flight. Maybe WW1 related? I might be wrong here butI remember reading it somewhere.
The patent isn't personal property that the company "owns" like how a person owns a house, it's a segment of the market where the government grants a company a legal monopoly. I don't understand why it should be a total legal monopoly. If the idea was that the company which employed the people who invented something cool should "deserve" to get filthy rich (why do we want that again?), you'd think that could be achieved by forcing other companies who want to be in the same space to pay money to the company which employed the inventors.
But instead we apparently want to say, "no other company should be allowed to make a watch with a pulse oximeter for 20 years unless the company which employed the inventor agrees to it". Why?
> I don't understand why it should be a total legal monopoly...
You're asking philosophical questions about the patent system. I'm not defending the patent system and IANAL.
I recommend the wiki article to get an overview [0]. Your phrasing doesn't align with my understanding of patent law or the article's characterization of the situation.
> The patent isn't personal property that the company "owns" like how a person owns a house...
> But instead we apparently want to say, "no other company should be allowed to make a watch with a pulse oximeter for 20 years unless the company which employed the inventor agrees to it".
Apple didn't need to use this design to make a pulse oximeter. There are other ways to make them. It's just most of the commonly known other ways aren't as good or accurate as the one Masimo researched and designed.
I think it is fair to argue against it, to a large extent. However, patents are techniques and methods to do something. This would almost be akin to a sport team getting exclusive use of a play because they registered their playbook first. Which, yes, sounds "wild."
I, sadly, don't know all of the details in this case. But with patents, remember that you don't even have to show that "Bob" even knew of the existence of "Bernie." They could have come to the same general techniques completely independently, but because they were not "first to file," they cannot use them.
(Obviously, if I am wrong on the above, please correct me.)
My point was simpler: negotiations don't have to end in agreement, let alone trying to get a patent license.
This discussion has devolved into abstract swipes at the patent law system with characterizations that don't even apply if you take the article at face value.
But that plays into the "wild" part. It is wild that you can refuse to let someone do something that you know how to do.
In the "compulsive licensing" world, it would be "wild" to not allow someone to perform a song that you played first. Which is why we don't allow that.
In fashion, it would be wild for you to have certain button schemes that nobody else can use. We don't allow that. In math, it would be wild to have equations nobody could use. We... sorta do not allow that.
Practically speaking, damages for the infringement would be a reasonable royalty.[1] So, having to go through the courts to enforce a patent is sorta like a compulsory license, in a way. Going to the ITC skips that, goes simply to stopping future sales.
What's new in this patent? Cheap ($10) pulse ox sensors operating on similar principles have been available since well before this patent has been filed.
There are hundreds of companies making wearable SpO2 monitors. Hell, I worked for one. Ours were transmissive, whereas I'm pretty sure most wearables are reflective. Maybe that's the key, who knows.
What do you meant by transmissive wearable, for fingers normally it is fine that you have in-situ measurement settings, for wearable like smart watch it will be clunky to have transmitter and receiver at the opposite of sides of (relatively massive) hand?
Earlier iterations of the design weren't as chunky as what they're doing now.
PPG readers are tiny, they could easily fit in a watch wrist strap with a little cable connecting back to the main assembly. The hard part would be making sure the sensor is aligned with the LED.
I could imagine transmissive at the belly button to work out with decent design effort, or maybe around the ear.
Nostrils seem unlikely to be comfortable, but would probably work fine.
Masimo, the company who is suing apple, has a market cap around ~$6B. Apple's wearable business (which might include the audio products as well, I guess), at least according to the article, "generated $13.48 billion in revenue". Don't think this is as big of a threat as someone like Samsung suing iPhone.
> Don't think this is as big of a threat as someone like Samsung suing iPhone.
Samsung makes most of the displays Apple uses in iPhones and it's probably the most profitable deal Samsung has. They have a messy relationship but neither of them is going to rock the boat too much because no one else can meet Apple's demand and Samsung can't afford to lose that much revenue.
Sad, because this is the way B2B relationships should work. But you only get "normal" competitive-cooperative behavior because both companies happen to be giants.
Masimo is a well-known and regularly discussed name in med tech (ask me how I know). I can't comment on how Apple perceives them, but Masimo is much, much more than a no-name patent troll.
Samsung phones (Note 8?) had a pulse oximeter that was downgraded via software updates (you could still access if installing an older APK). I wonder if it was in response to something similar. And, could Apple have similarly complied with a simple software change?
> could Apple have similarly complied with a simple software change
From a user perspective, disabling a widely advertised/used feature after a user has bought something is probably worse than having new customers think it’s out of stock.
Since Masimo is a publicly traded company, can’t Apple just buy enough shares to have a controlling interest in the company and just force them to back out?
It's pretty nontrivial to buy a majority interest in any public company. It's not like you can just spend 1/2 the current market cap to acquire it, the price will shoot up drastically as soon as the market is aware of someone (especially Apple) trying to do it.
I guess the consideration wouldn't be the value of whole product category, but related to changes to manufacture/schedule and changes to sales if they dropped that particular feature?
pulse oximeter isn't really an essential feature though. the value to apple is not the total value of the apple watch, it's the marginal difference from what they'd make from selling the watch with that feature disabled in territories where the masimo patent is upheld. which is probably pretty trivial
Price per share is meaningless without also saying how many shares there are, in which case you might as well just use the market cap (about 6b, in Masimo’s case).
Why do you think 51% of the companies shares are available all at once at exactly slightly above market value? How exactly do you think this trade would get completed?
When I first started learning about stock markets I got a lot of insight from one comment a friend (who had gone into finance) made to me: the stock market is not a vending machine.
There is no set price to buy shares. If you just want to buy 100 shares at the current ask, it'll probably go through (but even that is no guarantee), but the next 100 shares might well not be available at that price anymore.
> That trade will be complete before the market "sees" you are trying to buy a ton.
That's not how the market works. There are not enough open sell orders at any price (let alone a little above most recent price) for someone to sweep in and buy 51% (or even just a few percent) at once.
As soon as more than a trivial (in the noise) amount of your buys goes through all the open sell orders will start to move up in price (since it's nearly all automated), so you'll be chasing that ever-increasing price a long way up.
And the sell orders will move in a matter of microseconds, right? It's not just automated trading, it's automated high frequency trading, where trading firms employ armies of excellent low-level programmers to shave off clock cycles from the trading algorithms to be the first company to react to market changes.
Yes, it is fun to watch this in the level 2 quotes (although the true high frequency stuff is surely in and out before it has time to show up, I assume). Put an order at the bid or the ask (depending on direction) and move it up or down a penny and watch all the other nearby open orders instantly reshuffle.
Just because you offer to BUY a share over the current bid price doesn't mean there is a share being offered for SALE at that exact time.
For small-time consumers who are buying a few shares here and there - it will appear like there is always some available, but when you are talking about a majority share of the company there isn't that availability sitting there waiting to be just taken.
Yeah if you called up every OTC trade desk and market maker at every investment firm and told them you'd pay 50% above market for 51% of shares of some company.
They'll charge a handsome fee, but they could probably get it done.
That’s kind of what I had in mind, I don’t really know if it’s feasible or not but if I had billions of dollars deposited in my Robinhood account just made the order for that many shares, would it not go through?
It means that someone currently offers to buy 500 shares at the price of $64.39.
It means that someone currently offers to sell 100 shares at the price of $64.42.
In practice, it means that you can buy 100 shares at the price of $64.42, then, after, it will move to the next price level.
=> You can see the "depth" of offers, it's called Level 2 book:
Ask offers:
$64.42 x 100
$64.43 x 200
$64.46 x 100
$65.00 x 600
$97.00 x 100
$999.99 x 100
=> If you try to buy 400 shares, it will cost you:
100 shares x $64.42 = $6 442
200 shares x $64.43 = $12 886
100 shares x $64.46 = $6,446
Divided by 400 shares.
It means ~$64.435 per share, though you saw $64.42 as price.
If you send very large volumes, you quickly eat these price levels.
In our example, if you try to buy 2000 shares, you will get only 1200 shares.
You will have paid an average price of $145.39 per share.
So, yes it may not go through because, it is possible that there are not enough people interested to sell their share (that there is not enough depth, or not at an acceptable price).
And also, the SEC has certain rules (uptick rules, etc) that makes the stock to be frozen in case the price varies too much.
There are a finite number of shares - you can only buy what is available for sale. When you log into Robinhood and put in an order as a consumer you are doing it on a small enough scale that you don't see it but every "buy" request gets matched up with someone elses' "sell" request.
When we are talking about a massive % of the total share count there simply isn't that many "sell" requests out there for you to take advantage of.
It would not go through: you can only buy as many shares at once as other people are currently offering at that specified price, which would be negligible compared to the total amount of shares.
The algos will immediately yank the price up as soon as an order that big comes in. On many smaller stocks it’s possible to manipulate the price with less than $100k.
It might be cheaper to license the patents, but if they managed to buy a controlling interest in the company, they would also then stand to profit from Masimo's licensing arrangements with other companies. That is, they would be purchasing a revenue-generating asset. And after this lawsuit, I'm sure Masimo will have more revenue, as other smaller companies realize there is no way to win against them, since even Apple lost.
No. Minority shareholders still have rights, and while there may be a tipping point with respect to effort versus reward, but they absolutely can (and do) threaten majority shareholders with legal action when the action of majority shareholders violate duties of acting in the company's best interests.
Hindenburg doesn't short in order to drive down the price.
Hindenburg compiles and releases information they believe to be truthful about a company, which they shorted beforehand in order to profit from the information.
What I am talking about is sending orders only to cause a certain reaction (e.g. by convincing momentum traders that there is momentum in a certain direction).
Others are answering this with more specifics, but there's a first principles answer here too: not without facing a shareholder lawsuit for the difference. The whole idea behind owning stock in the company is that the company acts to maximize the value of that stock on your behalf.
So if the ownership of the company (Apple Computer, in this case) takes a deliberate act that fails to honor the shareholder compact (taking a huge haircut on a patent license), then you sue them because they should have gotten you more.
That doesn't obviate the rights of the other Masimo shareholders. Imagine Apple owes Masimo a $2B judgement. Then they buy the 50.1% of company for $500M and write off the debt to their subsidiary. The other 49.9% say, wait, we were owed $1B dollars in that settlement and all we got was $250M of AAPL stock! And they sue.
> That doesn't obviate the rights of the other Masimo shareholders
It does if they willingly sell their shares to Apple
> Then they buy the 50.1% of company for $500M and write off the debt to their subsidiary
Well that would not be legal.
They’d use their position as the majority shareholder to buy out everyone else and delist the company (of course they could still not sell, they’d just end up having shares in a private company)
> It does if they willingly sell their shares to Apple
Why would they do that? That's literally just giving away money. I still think you're failing to understand the principle at work here. You can "control" a public company with a 50.1% share, that doesn't allow you to steal from the remaining shareholders. That's what shareholder lawsuits are about: the shareholders collectively feel that the company is not acting in the interests of its owners and sue.
Now, sure, often this is abused. Often the suits are baseless and mostly just attempts by law firms to squeeze some dollars out of the process. But the actions described in this subthread are exactly why they are allowed in the first place. You can't do that.
Interesting that the president of the USA has the duty to also review this kind of disputes. If he can pardon people and in USA corporations are people could in theory the president pardon a company for some crime they did ?
It is in fact quite broad and the only explicit exception is impeachment. The exact execution of “pardoning a corporation” is something that would require legal parsing, but it’s within presidential authority.
> The Constitution establishes the President’s authority to grant clemency, encompassing not only pardons of individuals but several other forms of relief from criminal punishment as well.1 The power, which has historical roots in early English law,2 has been recognized by the Supreme Court as quite broad. In the 1886 case Ex parte Garland, the Court referred to the President’s authority to pardon as unlimited except in cases of impeachment, extending to every offence known to the law and able to be exercised either before legal proceedings are taken, or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.3 Much later, the Court wrote that the broad power conferred in the Constitution gives the President plenary authority to 'forgive’ [a] convicted person in part or entirely, to reduce a penalty in terms of a specified number of years, or to alter it with certain conditions.4
Despite the breadth of the President’s authority under the Pardon Clause, the Constitution’s text provides for at least two limits on the power: first, clemency may only be granted for Offenses against the United States,5 meaning that state criminal offenses and federal or state civil claims are not covered.6 Second, the President’s clemency authority cannot be used in Cases of impeachment.7
Beyond textual limits, certain external constitutional and legal considerations may act as constraints on the power. For instance, the Court has indicated that the power may be exercised at any time after [an offense’s] commission,8 reflecting that the President may not preemptively immunize future criminal conduct. In Schick v. Reed, the Court recognized that an exercise of clemency may include any condition which does not otherwise offend the Constitution,9 suggesting that the President may not make clemency subject to a condition that is prohibited by another constitutional provision.10 Other apparent limitations include not affecting vested rights of third parties, such as where forfeited property is sold,11 or proceeds paid into the treasury, which can only be secured to the former owner . . . through an act of [C]ongress.12 The Court in The Laura also alluded to an exception for fines . . . imposed by a co-ordinate department of the government for contempt of its authority,13 though a later case recognized that the President may pardon one who is subject to criminal punishment for contempt of court.14
Assuming the recognized limitations are not transgressed, a full pardon granted by the President and accepted by its subject15 prevents or removes any of the penalties and disabilities consequent upon conviction . . . .16 In several nineteenth-century cases, the Supreme Court suggested that a pardon broadly obviates all legal guilt of the offender, effectively erasing the crime from existence.17 Subsequent cases appear to have backed away from this understanding,18 suggesting instead that, although a full pardon precludes punishment for the offense in question, a prior and pardoned offense may still be considered in subsequent proceedings.19
Apparently third-party resellers can still sell Apple Watches that have already been imported to the US (but Apple cannot import anymore, nor can it sell any first-party).
I wonder if Apple has been importing like crazy, and selling to big retailers like Amazon and Walmart. That way customers can continue to purchase (albeit not from Apple) for the next several months. Then Apple can perhaps release a new version in May, using different technology that either doesn't infringe, or at least would require a new trial to establish infringement.
If this is the case, I think Apple could even continue to have AW showcases in their stores, where people could try them on, see how the features work, and see which size fits best. After all, this wouldn't violate the ban on importation (assuming the store models were already in the US), nor would it violate the ban on first-party sales (since Apple wouldn't be selling the store models).
I wish there was a functional alternative to patents. It seems like if you have a good idea there should be some protections afforded to you to use it. At the very least attribution. But who can afford the cost of registering patents and then defending them? The system is not setup in a way that fosters innovation. It would be really cool if you truly could own an idea for some (sane) period.
It would be cool to build up an intellectual portfolio of stuff that you've thought of uniquely apart from everyone else. To me this would be like (1) a unique challenge of designing novel processes, systems, concepts (2) the reward of having a new IP which would be useful for your portfolio (and may lead to future business opportunities) (3) incentivising people to think more since intellectual work could be 'owned' and the result monetized (either directly or indirectly.)
But IMO - it would have to be cheap so that ideas could easily be registered; efficient - so that authorship could be managed fast (or revoked if 'prior art' is found); and those falsely claiming authorship could be pursed without the patent owners having to act as police for their IP. Ideally, registration fees would cover attorney costs, patent research, and policing the patents (am I being naïve.) Maybe a revenue sharing agreement between patent-owners back into the system could even make patent registrations free which would be massive? Governments could also help back this if it made more jobs (which seems possible to me.)
Initially I presumed this was a patent troll sitting on something obvious and trying to extort a big player. Reading about the actual story reveals a very different situation, and it's one in which Apple needs to pay an extremely heavy toll for scumbag behaviour.
Apple did precisely the sorts of things that big companies are reviled for, and the only good outcome is that this costs them an enormous sum of money, and every scumbag manager involved in this behaviour lose their jobs.
This is not obvious at all. Even Maximo's case has been whittled down from 103 instances of infringement to just 5:
> In its initial filing with the ITC, Masimo accused Apple of 103 instances of patent infringement across five different patents. However, the ITC found that Apple infringed on only two patents, covering five different instances of patent infringements
This is a borderline case and a final decision has not been made. Patent decisions are often in a gray area.
The article you link to is extremely opinionated and it's just as easy to argue the opposite. I.e. Masimo complains that Apple poached some of their employees by paying them more. Well, why wouldn't Masimo pay them what they're worth? Companies try to hire experts away from other companies all the time, and this is good because it pushes up salaries for those experts and fairly rewards them for their expertise.
Masimo isn't some mom-and-pop shop. They have revenue of $1.24 billion. They know what they're doing.
>Even Maximo's case has been whittled down from 103 instances of infringement to just 5
That's like every ITC complaint in the history of ITC complaints. You throw everything at them and your best stuff sticks. They literally need one single complaint to stick, and they have 5. That is incredibly, overwhelmingly strong.
>Companies try to hire experts away from other companies all the time
Apple didn't just hire employees away from them. There would be nothing wrong with that (well, outside of the era of non-competes, which notably Apple was a big fan of and was a legal enforcer of, making that a humorous justification). Apple engaged in a classic "brain rape" to extract value without cost.
I'm a fan of Apple, but it is an extraordinarily greedy company. Maybe the greediest company in history. That is not a good trait, and it isn't beneficial to the industry as a whole.
> Apple engaged in a classic "brain rape" to extract value without cost.
Hyperbolic, sexualized language isn't helpful here.
Why didn't Masimo counter Apple's offers and pay their employees what they are worth? I don't see how this isn't Masimo's fault when they certainly had the money to do it.
I know lots of cases where rival companies tried to hire engineers with highly domain-specific expertise away from rivals and failed, because those rivals would counter offers and provided a great, supportive work environment. If Masimo failed to do that, then that's their own fault.
I side with the employees here. Good on them for knowing their worth.
> Why didn't Masimo counter Apple's offers and pay their employees what they are worth?
Was Apple paying them what they were worth, or did they pay them more than they were worth in order to damage Masimo? I don't think we know enough to say one way or the other. There must be some level at which poaching employees with inflated salaries crosses the line into anticompetitive territory.
Masimo is a profitable company, but that doesn't mean they can survive a bidding war against Apple.
They’re worth what precisely what someone is willing to pay them. Their expertise is probably more valuable for Apple than Masimo. It would make sense for them to be able to work at Apple then.
My understanding is Masimo as a whole couldn’t get the thing working for whatever reason, so key people left for greener pastures. I think this outrage is misplaced.
Alternatively, someone at Apple thought "we should add one of those pulse ox thingies like they've used in the doctor's office for the last 50 years into our next watch", saw that Masimo was a player in the space, met with them, and then decided they'd rather do it themselves.
This is not something Masimo invented themselves. The class of devices existed for decades before Masimo even existed. I'm not saying that Apple's in the right here -- I have no inside information giving me more perspective than anyone else reading this -- but it's far from clear that they did anything wrong.
> met with them, and then decided they'd rather do it themselves
..., headhunted Masimo engineers, and hired them to reimplement a pulse-ox device.
> Masimo and Apple began their relationship in 2013, when Apple discussed potentially integrating Masimo’s sensing technology into future Apple products. Internally, Apple executives debated the idea of buying Masimo and making its chief executive a vice president, according to documents made public at a later trial. But Apple ultimately decided against it because “acquisitions of this size aren’t our style,” an email reads.
> Instead of buying Masimo, Apple ended up hiring Masimo engineers and began working on the technology itself, Masimo later said.
From an employee's point of view, I'm 100% OK with that. If Apple wants to throw money at an engineer to do the same thing they were already doing, but for Apple, then by all means do so. I don't think it's at all unethical to hire away employees. If it were, that'd lead to bad outcomes for those people (i.e. artificially suppressed wages).
… which is in fact something Apple was doing in the past. It's somewhat ironic when a company that gets in trouble for their anti-poaching shenanigans now gets accused of poaching.
To me, it's clear that hiring competitors' employees is not morally wrong, and for the most part it's not legally wrong either, PROVIDED those employees do not take along their prior employers' confidential information.
Agreed, and agreed, with the proviso that “confidential information” doesn’t cover the general knowledge of how something is done. For example, designing motors for Ford shouldn’t mean a lifetime ban on making motors for anyone else.
But I think it is something poetic about a company that sues and wins over Samsung for a "design patent" and uses the fact that Samsungs lawyers cannot see the difference as proof...
when that company gets hit by a ridiculous "intellectual property" lawsuit.
Said as an Apple user who has brought in a number of new Apple users, meaning I am not against Apple only against ridiculous "intellectual property" laws.
It's hard to look at pre-iPhone and post-iPhone smartphones and not see a pretty clear dividing line with significant shift in looks and functionality. I'm leery of design patents, but it's hard to say there wasn't some invention going on there.
We've had easy fingertip pulse oximetry since 1977, and Masimo was founded in 1989. It's unclear to me what in their patent is novel.
Nah, Windows Mobile, Palm devices and even the Newton had virtual keyboards long before the iPhone came around. They were resistive screens with shitty operating systems that required a stylus to do anything but the lack of a physical keyboard is not the difference. Smartphone design language changed dramatically after they all started copying the iPhone.
Nor is Apple copying their tech the “kiss of death” that the article mentions, as Masimo makes primarily medical/hospital equipment. The majority of their equipment is sold to other businesses or through medical suppliers. Seeing as how they claim to own 90% of the hospital O2 monitoring market, I think they’re doing just fine.
Once again, this isn’t Apple stealing tech from Joe Shmoe. This is just standard legalistic BigCorp infighting, corporate backstabbing, brain drain/theft, etc.
Side note - I love the infant sp02 tape monitors they have, as they work incredibly well for use on adults with poor extremity perfusion. Earlobe usually works great.
> Once again, this isn’t Apple stealing tech from Joe Shmoe. This is just standard legalistic BigCorp infighting, corporate backstabbing, brain drain/theft, etc.
Conversely, if Apple feels comfortable stealing from BigCorp, they will absolutely feel comfortable stealing from Joe Shmoe, which is why this issue should be treated seriously.
Apple needs to be incentivized so that if they're sitting down with a startup and considering if they should acquire and make the founder a VP or just go about stealing the technology that they should pick the former path because they've gotten burned in the past by doing the latter.
It isn't clear to me if Apple's internal team working on this was the original plan - think "embrace, extend, extinguish", or "we'll do the basics, everything else is a 'third-party opportunity'" - or if they were formed as a backstop in the event an acquisition or licensing deal didn't happen.
See also the current situation with AliveCor over ECG tech in the Apple Watch.
Bottom line, Masimo wants to be paid - which I get - but I think the case will also try to settle whether or not Apple (or anyone) can integrate these features in something that (legally speaking) isn't a medical device without paying licensing fees of some kind.
They will almost certainly settle, and very quickly in my opinion (also just a layman opinion however) because if Masimo is successful in forcing them to stop sales the next logical step would be to force them to disable the feature until a ruling is made otherwise.
> Apple, of course, is one of the largest and most powerful companies in history — it’s the first to hit a $3-trillion — that’s trillion, with a T — market cap.
Apple is at least 100 times bigger than Masimo, 500x based on the numbers in the article. Sounds David and Goliath to me.
Add in the despicable behavior and you've got a story where real life is more than fiction could do.
It’s still a multi-billion dollar company. At that scale, you’re not facing any real disadvantages in the legal process even against Apple unless your company is actively losing money already and you won’t have enough cash on hand to continue operating. A quick looksie at their financials indicates that is not the case here.
I don’t want to say Market Cap doesn’t matter, but man is it irrelevant to most discussions and mainly of use to PR agents that want to spin a David and Goliath story.
If both companies are able to afford tier A law firms then the relative size difference is meaningless. An extra trillion in market cap doesn't go any further in helping Apple's case.
This is literally standard corporate playbook behavior that has been utilized since the creation of corporations. In what possible way is it “more than fiction”?
They aren't the "little guy", but at the same time Apple is a $trillionX3 dollar company, so David vs Goliath seems pretty fair. It is a tiny operation relative to Apple.
What does the valuation of a company’s stock have to do with this? I keep hearing that Apple is a $3 trillion company but that is strictly a function of how investors value the company. Cash on hand is probably a better way to compare and here Apple is top dog I think.
Investors give Apple 500x more value than their opponent in this battle. I mean market cap (or maybe the more accurate enterprise value) is a pretty ordinary way or comparing the size of companies.
Apple could acquire Masimo in a stock swap and it would be barely a blip on their share dilution.
This stuff is ancient technology. It's a pulse oximeter. We've had those for decades. And then this is a pulse oximeter with computer storage attached. That's a nonsense patent. If Apple is fighting it, perhaps there's a chance it will invalidate. That's a good thing for us.
"Oximeter, but on the wrist" doesn't sound like something which ought to be patentable, even if it was novel. Sounds a lot like those "this old thing, but on a computer" patents.
I’ve been waiting for a killer feature that will make it more than just an expensive fitbit for me. Every generation I say “surely the next gen will be it” but it never was (I guess I’m a laggard in ‘Crossing the Chasm’ parlance).
Personally I expect a Siri overhaul / replacement with an LLM. To me that would be a total game changer and I’d be first in line!
If so, yes, you could probably make money scalping them. Of course, if the scarcity falls through, you might take a huge financial hit (eg “why should I buy from a scalper when I could get one straight from Apple?”), which is an excellent outcome for everyone but the scalper.
I wonder if it's sometimes advantageous to lose a patent case. Maybe an unscrupulous company (not Apple) could intentionally lose a patent case, to help widen the moat between them and any would-be clones, because they can afford to pay the patent troll and clones cannot.
The cynic in me, believes that Apple pulling them now is a marketing ploy ahead of Christmas. Waiting until actually needing to pull them would have not really impacted sales, but this way they get to generate demand right before the big giving day.
There are many works on this topic which are of academic nature?
Oura (as in Oura Ring) is referring to some of those and is also holding patents on the subject. I wonder how Oura is dealing with this as their ring also has an SpO2 sensor.
This kind of case is why I hate patents. As many other commenters pointed out, the fact that light through the skin can be used to measure biometrics is arguably "obvious" given that many people noticed it around the same time. The patent simply measures which group had the $, time, and motivation to submit a patent before any of their peers did. In this situation, the basic measurement method appears all over the place, like in cheap pulseoximeters. Sticking the same device in a wearable or other device isn't a giant leap that deserves being defended via patent law to protect an "inventor".
I'm sure patents have a place in the modern world, but I rarely see a case where they are being used as intended - more often than not, it's as I said above : a measure of who from a bunch of peers who "invented" the same thing at the same time made their submission to a patent office first with the goal of squelching competition or building revenue streams via licensing. Basically, scummy practices abusing the system. Apple certainly is not innocent in this regard - I hate it when they play this game just as much as I hate it when others do too.
"The ITC's ruling upholds a January ruling that found that the Apple Watch infringed on a Masimo patent. The exclusion period recommended on Thursday is supposed to go into effect after 60 days, during which time President Joe Biden can overturn the ruling. Biden previously declined to veto an ITC ruling that found the Apple Watch violated patents of a different company, AliveCor."
"Masimo has accused Apple of entering discussions with it for a potential partnership, including a potential acquisition, in 2013, only to steal Masimo's idea and poach some of Masimo's engineers to implement it."
"As noted by Reuters, Apple and Masimo's legal battles are ongoing. In May, Masimo's lawsuit against Apple in California federal court ended in a mistrial, and Apple has also sued Masimo in Delaware. Flipping the script, Apple has accused [PDF] Masimo's W1 smartwatches of violating Apple Watch patents."
"Meanwhile, Apple is also in an Apple Watch patent battle with California-based AliveCor. AliveCor is currently appealing the revocation of three patents that it claims the Apple Watch infringes upon. Before then, the ITC ruled that the Apple Watch infringes [PDF] on electrocardiogram sensor-related patents. But there's no import ban in effect because the US Patent and Trademark Office revoked the patents in question. Like Masimo, AliveCor has accused Apple of initiating a potential partnership but ultimately poaching AliveCor workers and infringing on its patents instead."
Looks like the patent lawyers are going to do well...
> The company confirmed to CNN it will no longer be selling its Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, starting Thursday on Apple.com and from retail locations after December 24.
Get more people captive shoppers in their brick&morder stores during the shopping frenzy.
> In October, the International Trade Commission ruled that Apple was in violation of Masimo’s pulse oximeter patent, which uses light-based technology to read blood-oxygen levels. President Biden has 60 days to review the ruling before a ban could go into effect.
> “While the review period will not end until December 25, Apple is preemptively taking steps to comply should the ruling stand,” the company said in a statement.
It's nice for review of the ruling to drag its feet until after the Christmas shopping period.
With the news hype, Apple might even come out ahead?
I was curious about Apple appealing to the Biden administration to veto the ruling because it sounded quite arbitrary from the last paragraph "Apple has had success persuading presidents in the past to veto I.T.C. rulings. In 2013, the Obama administration overturned a ban on the sale of some iPhones and iPads, after the court determined that Apple had violated a patent that Samsung owned." However, turns out the veto was just on blocking the sales rather than stopping the patent litigation, so even if Apple do get the Biden administration to veto the block and they can start selling phones again, that doesn't solve the dispute. As far as I understand it, this is the judge getting fed up with one or both of Apple and Masimo (presumably Apple given that they're the one being told to stop selling products) dicking about rather than coming to a settlement.
Why would Apple take their devices off the market or disable the feature instead of parting with a minuscule fraction of the pile of gold they're sitting on for a patent license?
I mean obviously for now it makes more sense for them to wait and hope they win on appeal or get the import ban veto'd, but if it actually comes down to not being able to sell the device, surely the lost revenue would exceed the licensing cost?
surely the lost revenue would exceed the licensing cost?
Assuming a spherical cow, and that Apple's decision-makers aren't completely incapable of basic math, the logical conclusion would be...?
(Spoiler: I assume the patent-holder is asking some outrageous sum. Or there's a piece of the story we're missing. Or maybe some kind of game of chicken.)
This is also an iterated game. Apple doesn’t want a reputation for caving to patent trolls because that invites more lawsuits.
Indeed, Apple has a reputation for going scorched earth on patent trolls and trying to invalidate your entire patent portfolio after you poke the bear (Masimo has already had several of their patents invalidated in the course of their litigation with Apple).
Why do you call them patent trolls when they're not. Patent holders who build and ship products based on those patents are not patent trolls. Do you not know what that phrase actually means?
I don't know if I would call them patent trolls per se, since some patent troll companies' business model is just trying to win patent lawsuits, but if you go to battle and the overwhelming majority of your patents are invalidated when put under any level of scrutiny then you're still being shady. Literally 95% of Masimo's infringment claims (98 of 103) have already been invalidated in this case. They're building products but they're also abusing the patent system.
This is endemic though, I don't think Masimo is especially unique here, companies often encourage filing frivolous patents.
If you can't agree on licensing terms, then you sell the watch without the infringing technology. Nobody (relatively speaking) is making a buy/not buy decision on the Apple Watch due to its blood oxygen monitor functionality. It's a feature that isn't important or necessary for the vast majority of people.
If one has a serious health condition that affects blood oxygen levels, pulse oximetry can be useful. For the average healthy person, the medical value is very little to nil.
Most of the above conditions listed above occur in very sick people already under close medical supervision, with the exception of asthma. But even in asthma, pulse oximetry has limitations: https://asthma.net/living/lets-talk-pulse-oximetry
I think it’s cool the Apple Watch has this, but it’s mostly a gimmick as far as I can tell.
There is also value in monitoring stats over time. ie: knowing what's normal for you and even a normal range throughout the day allows you to identify changes before you get to a state where a hospital is needed.
On the non-medical side, I fly small, unpressurized airplanes and altitude can definitely have an effect on blood oxygen levels. Having this data collected in the background as I fly or do other activities is valuable to me despite not having any of the issues presented from the link above.
I have not had to act on the data yet but if I were to get a low O2 alert while flying I would definitely open a window and descend ASAP. Depending on the circumstances I might also consider landing.
In the short term the impending scarcity will be a great boon for sales, in what's probably their busiest month. In the medium term they can appeal the ruling and hope for help from POTUS. If that doesn't pan out they can still make a deal; probably to more favorable conditions since then they showed that they are willing to walk away from any one-sided license deal.
> “If they don’t want to use our chip, I’ll work with them to make their product good,” Mr. Kiani said. “Once it’s good enough, I’m happy to give them a license.”
It was probably much cheaper to just gut their consumer engineering team instead. The whole company is focused a lot on medical devices Apple wants no part of, they just want the consumer part.
Though it feels like an oversight to me. In this field, like in telecom modems, patents mean a lot, so I also wonder why didn't Apple seek to buy out the consumer part of Masimo along with their patent portfolio. Maybe they did the math and saw that fighting Masimo later in court over their patents is still cheaper.
Yeah it seems like it was cheaper in the short run but will likely be extremely expensive in the long-run.
- loss of sales of watches
- either battling in court for who knows how long or settling out of court for god knows how much money.
The real move would have been to just.. Grow a team internally. I mean come on, ox sensors? They couldn't have figured that out without poaching a well established med-tech company?
Same reason you don't see too many "Connects to Apple Watch" pieces of gym equipment floating around. Apple doesn't want to get into the gym equipment or medical device manufacturing business.
> Why wouldn't they want to enter the gym space at the least?
We're still waiting for Peloton to be profitable. Since Apple's fitness customers already have Apple hardware, they might as well sell you their own version of the service Peloton provides without occurring the expense of producing Peloton-equivalent hardware.
Good to see usa justice system rediscovering their spine against large behemoths (granted that that 60mil would have helped to grease palms of judges & others).
would have been better to see a criminal like jobs behind bars. Sadly they never found the courage
Anyway, there are reports from Bloomberg’s Apple reporter that Apple will ship all new models of watches with a different form factor and new features like BP monitoring in 2024.
PS: Was all set with an app design for the Samsung devices a few years ago, but Tizen turned out to be not worthy of any mindshare and I don’t support Google’s surveillance capitalism business model (so no WearOS for me). Meanwhile, Apple doesn’t have a well known procedure for vetting app developers enough to trust some with full access to their crypto-locked devices. With no other similar platforms, there is no real opportunity to advance mankind in this regard at this time anyway…but dang, love those Activity reminders /not
If Biden sides with Masimo and Apple’s appeals are unsuccessful, it may have to modify the Watch’s software to remove the blood oxygen feature in order to resume sales.
Not that I use the feature all that often, but if I did, I guess it would be time to turn off automatic updates until it gets sorted.
TFA is extremely light on details, given that Apple is effectively ordering a stop-ship on their hardware. Was there an attempt at negotiation? If so, that failed because...? If not, why didn't that happen? Apple has a bit of cash, but their pockets aren't infinitely deep; was Masimo asking too much?
I don't think Apple has to nerf already-sold devices to comply. They just can't import new ones to the US. But yeah, it would be a good idea to turn off automatic updates just in case!
Is there any way to implement a portable oximeter without infringing on any patents ?
Furthermore, is there any way to do anything without infringing on any patent ?
The patent system is really outdated, it's good for lazy people who want to live off royalties, but for end-customers and innovation, this is really bad.
(and it does a bad job at preventing foreign companies to launch clones)
I suspect many people question the value of the patent system at all, so the size of any company doesn't come into it. The patent system was designed to stimulate innovation by allowing inventors to be open with their ideas without risk of "losing out on their idea."
When it was conceived, it may have been a worthy system solving a real problem. But today, it's hard to argue that without the patent system we'd lose out on any innovation. Given the population size and the ease at which it takes to come up with and validate an idea, twenty five years now is an eternity. Do you seriously think that no one would have come up with this particular idea if there were no patent system? I'd argue, that even without copying any idea, this sort of thing would be independently "discovered" many many times within 25 years.
Why should we reward the first person with the money to get the patent? Why should we not instead reward the first to market? Is not being the first to market already a reward?
I'm firmly in the camp that ideas are dime a dozen, and the value is in the implementation/verification of them not in simply writing down a vague notion. The patent system rewards the latter and doesn't even require demonstrating a working prototype, let alone a viable product! It's rewarding the wrong thing.
I think it is more like people on HN dislike the idea of Software / Hardware patents in general that are similar to these but I agree that people can be biased especially the company being attacked.
> If there's a way to do it, you'd think Apple would probably have enough money to pull it off if having an oximeter was going to make them money. Why should they get a pass or shortcut to a successful product just because they're Apple?
So it’s your position that there is a way to do this without violating the patent, and Apple has chosen to be lazy and not pursue it?
I'm sure you're familiar with the meaning of "infinite", as I'm sure you are familiar with the difference between "market capitalization" and "cash on hand".
Assuming those two statements to be true, what's your point?
EDIT: and I see parent pulled a ninja edit. Stay classy.
One point: many here have made comments like "Masimo is a $4B company, screw `em, they can fend for themselves". I think commentary on Masimo's value/available resources should be in context to their competitor.
Patents are universally stifling innovation in pretty much every area of tech. They need to die.
EDIT: And to be clear, this isn’t a case of just having to pay the people who developed the tech for a license. The patent trolls who hold the license aren’t willing to sell Apple a license, unless Apple switches to use their hardware or partner with them to work on Apple’s hardware. There is no excuse. Markets can’t work when governments grant arbitrary legal monopolies on ideas like this.
There are two sides to every story, but given some of the evidence in this case, this seems like exactly what patents are supposed to be for. E.g. little company invents novel technology, then big company comes in and copies them (by largely hiring out a bunch of their employees). E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689442
I'm also usually strongly against patents, especially for software, but I think your characterization is completely off base here.
> The company produces and sells watches with the technology.
Technology that’s been around since the 30’s and has been put in many other devices including other fitness devices. Putting something in watch form is hardly innovation.
They may be selling products but that doesn’t mean they’re not patent trolls. This is clear patent troll behaviour even if other parts of the business is honest.
The way I use the term, a company which engages in patent trolling is a patent troll. That seems natural to me, but I apologise if that’s unorthodox use.
I think using the ITC as the forum of choice for patent disputes qualifies. I can’t see why the courts can’t handle this. The federal agency that makes sure the windshield wiper fluid I put in my car is legit isn’t really set up for evaluating complex intellectual property disputes on medical devices.
A patent troll is a person or company that acquires patents solely for the purpose of licensing and enforcement, rather than using the patented technology to produce their own products or services.
This IS NOT A PATENT TROLL. Please don't water down our language by lumping all patent licensors in with patent trolls. The phrase was created with a purpose in mind and you're harming that with your use.
They do and have been shipping products based on their patents for years, precisely the opposite of a patent troll. Words have meanings. When you use words without understanding their meaning you risk confusing the discussion. Be more careful.
There is some nuance here. I like trademarks which disallow other companies than Apple from selling products called “Apple Watch” or other companies than Samsung from selling “Samsung Galaxy S” series phones. And I like that if I make a piece of music or some art or whatever, some giant company can’t just grab that and use it for profit without making some arrangement with me.
I carefully and intentionally included trademark. And copyright.
> I like trademarks which disallow other companies than Apple from selling products called “Apple Watch” or other companies than Samsung from selling “Samsung Galaxy S” series phones.
Why? It only serves companies to help them become larger companies. If you think it helps customers understand what they're buying, consider: customers are basically oblivious to what they are buying when it comes to technology. If that's actually the problem you want to solve, the solutiom to that is "technology nutrition facts" and spec sheets by law, not trademark.
> And I like that if I make a piece of music or some art or whatever, some giant company can’t just grab that and use it for profit without making some arrangement with me.
What're you going to do about it if they do? Sue Disney? Doesn't seem like you'll get a lot out of that.
Bonus points for additionally eliminating propriety software at the same time.
I don't know dude, I sometimes know what product I wanna buy and I enjoy that I can more or less trust that among reputable stores, a product carrying the name and logo of the product I wanna buy is the product I wanna buy.
> And I like that if I make a piece of music or some art or whatever, some giant company can’t just grab that and use it for profit without making some arrangement with me.
I don’t know why you think monopolies are good if they’re unbreakable. Being government enforced, patent-based monopolies are some of the most unbreakaboe monopolies, are they not?
hmm, maybe the government can be instructed to mediate patent licenses
the company is being particular about how they want to get paid, maybe thats the anticompetitive practice that the government shouldnt be granting an exemption for
there are examples of the government mediating sells such as during bank failures
From NYTimes "In court, Masimo detailed how Apple poached its top executives and more than a dozen other employees before later releasing a watch with pulse oximeter capabilities — which measures the percentage of oxygen that red blood cells carry from the lungs to the body — that were patented by Masimo."
Doesn't sound like they accidentally stepped on a vague patent to me.
Does anyone know what specifically Masimo invented that Apple infringed upon? Pulse oximetry was in standard practice before the company existed, and Masimo's Wikipedia article doesn't mention Apple anywhere.
Given there’s debate even amongst high powered patent lawyers, a layperson-friendly explanation of the specifics rather than “try to parse the patent applications” might still be somewhat valuable.
My snark is mostly directed at people who lament the patent system as precluding innovation wherein it actually does the opposite by forcing public disclosure and precluding the use of trade secrets to protect such information indefinitely.
Is it useful to challenge you to look at one of these patents and actually try to build the thing? They don't even specify the wavelength of LEDs you should use, instead preferring to claim all imaginable wavelengths. They describe (and claim) what are very complicated digital signal processing algorithms in a few highly opaque paragraphs.
Sorry, nothing was forcibly publicly disclosed here. These guys got patent protection, the public got nothing.
>Is it useful to challenge you to look at one of these patents and actually try to build the thing?
I don't particularly think so. Patents are meant for a person of "ordinary skill" in the art. I don't make these devices. I'm not a person equipped to offer an opinion on whether the patent discloses sufficient information.
>Sorry, nothing was forcibly publicly disclosed here. These guys got patent protection, the public got nothing.
The way the invention works is what is disclosed. Patents aren't blueprints. It's even more ridiculous that you are making this comment when Apple seems to have infringed.
What is this? Are they some form of slaves? If company doesn't want its employees "poached" they should pay them enough money so they don't think of "switching sides".
This notion that corporations can own people and their brains should stop.
The notion is not that Masimo owned those executives or employees, the notion is that Apple needed the particular skills and expertise of those employees in order to build what they built.
Executives aren't usually the ones with specific technical skills about the arrangement of sensors and so on. If you were looking to infringe like this, it would be better just to poach engineers.
Still, you don't own people. People should be free to switch employers if they don't like their current ones.
If we going that route, we might be bringing back slavery by the backdoor.
The Masimo case should have been thrown out.
Just imagine you are an engineer with amazing and unique skillset but you were unfortunate enough to pick wrong employer. You get a new offer from someone who sees your potential and could give you tools you need to help you do what you love.
With this kind of precedent, companies won't touch you with a barge pole even if you ticked all the boxes and you really don't want to work where you are.
I phrased my comment poorly. It's not only that they built something similar, it's that they built the patented tech.
Hiring a team and rebuilding something that is not patented, or that skirts the edge of a patent, that's just fine. Hiring the team and building the patented thing is bad, not because of hiring the team, but because of building the patented thing. That it's the same team is just evidence that it infringes on the patent.
Given what is being approved as a patent these days (basically anything goes in), I wouldn't consider this as an exception.
Generally speaking, the patents should describe the invention in such a way that anyone competent in the field could recreate it. So I don't see how the fact the Apple has hired that team has any relevance to this.
Maybe the patents should have been invalidated too.
It undermines any argument that the technology was so obvious it didn't deserve a patent when you are going to the company that owns the patent to poach the staff to implement your own. If it is that obvious, why aren't you just hiring engineers off the open market?
Either the patent system is catastrophically broken or it isn't. I have always contended that it is, and I don't get to ignore that right now because Apple appears to have engaged in shenanigans.
(I don't think patents need to be entirely eliminated, but they need drastic reform. The patent system should be an incentive to small inventors, not a pay-to-play shield for big corporations. Obviously eliminating software/algorithm patents, eliminating "thing but with a computer" patents, shortening the entitlement period, mandating FRAND with full transparency around licensing fees, possibly even capping lifetime license fee revenue at $100m or so.)
None of those are pro small time inventor, those are all benefits to big business and lower the friction of infringing, i.e. making it efficient. It turns patents into an after-the-fact licensing scheme, where businesses can infringe all they want until a small time inventor can muster the capital to actually enforce their own patents. Your response seems to indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of the basic dynamics that influence behavior on both sides of patent litigation.
Your line of argumentation seems specious. If you have evidence to show that making compliance more efficient encourages non-compliance, I'd like to see it. It seems to me that if a corporation is inclined to knowingly abuse a small inventor's patent, they'll do so regardless of how efficient the compliance process is.
Perhaps I don't know the basic dynamics of patent litigation. You're an expert, could you enlighten me?
>Perhaps I don't know the basic dynamics of patent litigation. You're an expert, could you enlighten me?
Yeah, FRAND is pro-big business. It removes the upper limit on damages, i.e. minimizes the risk a business faces by infringing, which therefore minimizes any incentive to license a patent. It also reduces the incentive for a patentee to enforce their patent, as it takes ~$2-3m to litigate against a company like Apple through trial (not even appeals). Because of the upfront costs to enforcement, any small-time inventor is going to need a financier to back their case.
>Your line of argumentation seems specious.
My argument seems specious? You keep saying compliance... compliance with what? you haven't even made an argument, you just associate a few buzzwords and say "thing bad". You haven't explained anyway how FRAND and "compliance" are pro-small time inventor.
If you have evidence to show that making compliance more efficient encourages non-compliance, I'd like to see it.
And yeah, I’m using the word compliance in the straightforward, obvious way. If that’s a problem for you, I don’t think this discussion is ever going to be useful.
Think about it. If legislation can make FRAND mandatory, it can also make the penalties sufficiently unfavourable to large corporations. Perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, back pay for non-compliance could have a defined multiplier. Then there could be an additional multiplier for non-compliance after the date a complaint is made by the patent holder. And a further additional multiplier for non-compliance if the corporation has revenues over $100 million annually.
That’s literally the first idea that came to my dumbass ignorant head and I’m sure there’s a dozen much better ones out there. The key point is that the system can be built in such a way that a patent holder doesn’t need a team of lawyers with clever tricks to be entitled to favourable outcomes. Standardise it all and you reduce the dynamic range of advantage between parties of different size.
>And yeah, I’m using the word compliance in the straightforward, obvious way. If that’s a problem for you, I don’t think this discussion is ever going to be useful.
I'm a patent litigator - nobody uses the word compliance in this field. It's not me that is making this conversation difficult. It's your apparent ignorance and obtuseness.
> Think about it. If legislation can make FRAND mandatory, it can also make the penalties sufficiently unfavourable to large corporations
Do you even know what FRAND stands for? Is this a joke?
>Perhaps, and I’m just spitballing here, back pay for non-compliance could have a defined multiplier. Then there could be an additional multiplier for non-compliance after the date a complaint is made by the patent holder. And a further additional multiplier for non-compliance if the corporation has revenues over $100 million annually.
Compliance WITH WHAT???
>The key point is that the system can be built in such a way that a patent holder doesn’t need a team of lawyers with clever tricks to be entitled to favourable outcomes.
Patentees don't need clever tricks, they just need to prove infringement. That's the only hard part. You skip past that entirely. I think that's what you mean by compliance, but you don't seem to have any idea how any of this actually works. Which is bizarre considering you are offering recommendations on how to improve something that you do not understand.
Ah. I'm reminded of the famous quote — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Community discussions are wher you talk with other people, not to win on a technicality in a courtroom.
> nobody uses the word compliance in this field
I'm sorry that the word compliance isn't sufficiently in-group for you. Perhaps tell people that you want to gate-keep rather than discuss, as it'll save other people a lot of time.
Licensing isn't a compliance matter. There's no enforcement entity. It's all just civil litigation and party's deciding things on their own.
>Ah. I'm reminded of the famous quote — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Community discussions are wher you talk with other people, not to win on a technicality in a courtroom.
I'm not trying to win on a technicality here, all I did was explain to you that your understanding of patent incentives was wrong and based on incorrect facts.
>I'm sorry that the word compliance isn't sufficiently in-group for you. Perhaps tell people that you want to gate-keep rather than discuss, as it'll save other people a lot of time.
It's not that it isn't sufficiently in group, it's that it is without meaning in this context.
> Perhaps tell people that you want to gate-keep rather than discuss, as it'll save other people a lot of time.
I've been engaging in discourse with you. You refuse to come to the table and recognize what's actually going on, just repeating yourself and your misunderstandings.
>Ah. I'm reminded of the famous quote — "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
You have no idea what you are talking about. I'm plaintiff side. Anything pro small-inventor would be for my own benefit. Getting my client a license is preferable to trial. The thing is, the big companies never want to license because they can just force me to have to take them to trial, where we risk losing, or losing on appeal. You'd behove yourself to actually attempt to grok at least one of my posts instead of just typing "but compliance"
Its not because there is no statutory licensing scheme that you would have to comply with... bizarre that you are saying I can't english. No one uses compliance that way. And if your point was that licensing is a compliance matter, you could have said so given the numerous times I asked what you meant by "compliance" in this context. Apparently you just mean "getting whatever is demanded". FRAND doesn't achieve that because it's not what the small-time inventor wants, it's what the big-time infringers want. It makes it trivial for them to infringe and they pay only what they would have had to had they obtained a license. It removes the willful punitive damages standard, which is already hard to achieve. That would mean you could put someone on notice that they are infringing, and they can say fuck off, with no recourse for them down the line. How is that pro small-time inventor???
A lot of medicine requires $100's of millions of R&D, with a high chance of failure. No company would take that risk if their work wasn't protected. So at least in some fields, it spurs innovation.
Perhaps a page with business logic is needed. What you expect from the patent, what a license will cost, what roi they expect per unit sold. If the intend is to either exploit the patent themselves, have others do it or some combination of the two. (rule out patents intended to hinder development) A description of the effort and expertise it took to develop the application.
Perhaps one should submit a product for review and have the patent office list relevant patents along with the bill and/or contract. Like a modular system with a single check out. Add a 10-20% fee in case the patent office makes a mistake so that patent holders can still be paid. That would make sure the patent office would make an effort towards realistic fees.
Just some dumb ideas I came up with just now, I'm sure others have much better ideas for improvements.
Sure, but the technology we’re discussing in this case existed before even the entire company that is suing Apple existed. There was no risk or inventing involved.
Sure, but Apple has made an entire business out of making lowball offers to companies that produce tech they want. Then offering to pay more if they can just get more data on the tech, before ultimately pulling out of negotiations entirely and just copying that tech whether through internal resources, or hiring resources from the company in question.
They've decided it's cheaper to steal and then fight in court than to pay a fair market rate. Honestly given this has happened at least 10 times that I can recall off the top of my head, the Justice Department should be dropping a 50lbs sledgehammer of justice on them. At this point it's intentional and not just illegal but morally reprehensible.
This is wrong way to deal with this kind of thing. Apple should have not been allowed to grow this big in the first place so they could pull these kind of tricks. Otherwise you'll be playing whack-a-mole.
Correct way would be to force Apple to split into separate independent entities. This should apply to all other businesses too big to fail.
Is Apple "too big to fail"? What's the equivalent of a "bank run" for a tech company? Is an Apple failure likely to cause a Great Recession or Great Depression? To be clear, I'm not defending "too big to fail" banking policies; I just don't see how that applies to Apple.
Maybe I used wrong idiom, what I am trying to say is that Apple has too much power and this is bad for economy, because it reduces competition (as in they can buy any business they deem useful or destroy any they see as a threat).
The funny thing is I'm being compelled to invest my own savings (taxes) to fund R&D that is then patentable. It would be a huge improvement to directly pick what I'm subsidizing, and actually get to read the results I've paid for.
Capitalism is a few centuries old. Statistically speaking it's most likely not the economic system we end up with forever. Optimizing for innovation under that constraint only seems premature. To channel Le Guin:
"We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
> I'm being compelled to invest my own savings (taxes) to fund R&D
Taxation is, of course, theft, and any of it's use unethical — but I don't think this has anything to do with my question, which you haven't really answered. I wasn't asking about subsidising or donating either, my question was specifically about investment: act that assumes you expect the returns.
Countries with very lenient enforcement of IP laws have very minimal innovation. Brazil, Argentina, India. Countries who haven't signed TRIPS almost no innovation, North Korea, Somalia. Countries with the strictest patent laws and enforcement are the leaders in innovation. Germany, US, South Korea.
Strict enforcement of patent laws ensures that capital will be invested in innovation.
Conversely, I'm not going to need to ration insulin in Argentina, Brazil, or India. Can't speak to the DPRK or Somalia as I haven't been.
If capital was allocated democratically rather than at the whim of companies (that end up chasing taxpayer subsidies anyways... SpaceX, Tesla, etc.) you wouldn't need to strictly enforce patent law. The risk is already being assumed mostly by the government for truly bleeding edge research. What we have in practice is a system where the cost is socialized and the benefit is privatized.
India doesn't allow software patents and evergreening of pharmaceutical patents. Both are reasonable positions IMHO. Other than that, the IP protection is no less or no more than most of the western countries.
Considering most of my issues with patents is around trivial software patents and the abhorrent practice of slightly modifying a formula (coupled with paying generic manufacturers to not produce) to effectively extend the usable lifetime of a drug patent, if anything, it's the West that needs to change to make patents be actually good for innovation and not just a means to throttle competition.
Its more evidence than what the OP is providing with their argument that patents hold back innovation. I get downvoted for providing evidence and they got upvoted by for making some populist statement with no evidence.
So is there some little guy working out of his/her garage here losing out because Apple wouldn't honour a patent? Or is it all just big corporations now? I just hate patents in general.
Worth to note that is not just some obscure small company coming out of nowhere to capitalize from Apple. Masimo is a decades-old medical equipment company, with several developments and patents for non-invasive PPG. Apple is obviously well-aware of their developments, and was in touch with them already in 2013, more than a year before the launch of the Apple Watch.
From the actual lawsuit filed by Masimo in 2020 [1]:
"In 2013, Apple contacted Masimo and asked to meet regarding a potential collaboration. Apple told Masimo that Apple would like to understand more about Masimo’s technology to potentially integrate that technology into Apple’s products. Apple and Masimo later entered into a confidentiality agreement, and Masimo’s management met with Apple. The meetings included confidential discussions of Masimo’s technology. After what seemed to Masimo to have been productive meetings, Apple quickly began trying to hire Masimo employees, including engineers and key management."
[1] https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrlojrdve/...