

Apple demands $707 million in additional damages from Samsung - nsns
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/apple-demands-707-million-in-additional-damages-from-samsung/

======
xaa
Apple is trying hard to rival Oracle for the "most dickish technology company"
slot. To recap, they've so far:

1\. Partially reversed the commoditization of PC hardware, driving up prices
for consumers

2\. Engaged in large-scale App Store censorship

3\. Gouged 30% from eBook content owners

4\. Exploited Foxconn workers (possibly)

5\. Are sitting on an enormous pile of cash and donate nothing to charity

And now patent trolling. I can't speak for anyone else, but I personally feel
it is unethical to buy Apple products. I think the ethical tone of the company
was set when Jobs screwed Woz out of the bonus for Breakout for Atari.

But hey, they made computing shinier. Yay?

~~~
w1ntermute
The sad part is that very few hackers are willing to put their money (and
their hardware) where their mouths are. It truly is not inconceivable that, if
we all would spend a little bit of our time and money contributing to
Linux/Ubuntu, that we could have a solid OS that we could all use on a daily
basis. But instead, we spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on Apple
hardware, and Ubuntu has to resort to adding advertising to their OS. It
really is quite a sad state of affairs.

~~~
saurik
I would happily pay for Ubuntu. However, Ubuntu would have to charge quite a
bit of money in order to make even remotely as much per user as Apple is
making by being a high-margin hardware company (where the OS is almost nothing
more to them than an incentive to buy more hardware).

Even so, I'd happily pay for that as well; but, I can't, as Ubuntu won't take
my money [1]: they don't sell anything I can actually buy; AFAIK, the only
thing they accept money for is sending people to my business to give talks
about how to better use Ubuntu.

[1] <http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/why-is-it-free>

Now, that said, a lot of the value that Ubuntu brings to the table is actually
thanks to the people working on Debian: Ubuntu just takes their packages. I
would also quite happily pay for things from Debian; I'd probably be even
happier doing so than paying for things from Ubuntu.

However, they also do not charge for things, so I cannot pay them for things.
I can donate money to them[2], but now we are talking about something much
more complex (involving physical mail and checks or money orders) at a much
higher mental cost of deciding "well, now how much?".

[2] <http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/>

I personally don't even think that I'm rare: a lot of people are quite happy
to pay for things that provide them value, and Ubuntu is not just helping me
personally, it helps my business. I run all of my servers using Ubuntu: I'm
paying Amazon to run the machines, I'd happily pay Ubuntu for the software.

I thereby don't think it is quite fair to put the blame for this on the "very
few hackers [that/which/whom/omgdunno] are willing to put their money where
their mouths are": Ubuntu is much like the business that is undercharging for
their services, and thereby cannot satisfy the customer [3].

[3] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4555062>

(Though, I can totally see the argument that the reason that they are able to
even do what they do is that they do not charge: that if they charged there
would be tons of internal community arguments about what the money was for and
who would get it; or, quite simply, the direct monetization could undermine
the charitable aspects.)

~~~
MengYuanLong
W1ntermute is decrying the fact that the Ubuntu team is in a position where
they feel it is necessary to rely on selling access to their userbase.

It seems the most valued contribution skilled peoples can make to Ubuntu is in
code and time. Even non-technical users can contribute valuable assets to the
project. If your company has spare hardware, that is also useful to the SPI.

However, if you lack those resources, donations are openly accepted by both
Ubuntu[1] and Debian[2].

[1]<http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate> [2]<http://www.spi-
inc.org/donations/>

Taking fifteen minutes, considering the value added by Ubuntu and choosing an
appropriate amount to donate is not "a high mental cost". Nor is writing a
check or completing the electronic ClickPledge checkout form.

Further, the argument that if Ubuntu had more money it would undermine their
organization's mission and cause endless infighting is baseless. Would you
make the same argument about the Wikimedia foundation or EFF?

~~~
saurik
First off, the argument I was trying to make with regards to donations being
"hard" is that it turns off a lot of people. I, personally, have made numerous
donations to different organizations for the things they provide me.

I have donated to non-profit organizations like the EFF and contributed money
to everything from conferences to individuals who are simply "making a giant
dent in an important problem but are sadly too busy to dedicate all of their
time to it".

However, I am fairly confident that I am rare. I thereby understand that me
giving $10,000 to Ubuntu, in the grand scheme of things, is meaningless in
comparison to a reality where every serious user of Ubuntu was paying them
$200.

I thereby contend that having a system of open-ended donations that requires
physical mail with checks or money orders is a problem. You can tell me _I'm_
not contributing enough, but that is both insulting to me and _completely
misses the point_.

Note: at this point, you could simply have said "you misread that page, the
Click & Pledge system lower down actually allows you to donate without
physical anything", but you didn't quite; my response would have been: "I
seriously did not notice that, and I'm sorry".

That said, I am not certain how much that changes the overall point: that
entire page seems accidentally designed to make people consider donating to
Debian both difficult and even "scary": as someone who has to do a lot of
writing for random people who may not speak English very well to read, a lot
of people are going to think that paragraph about identity theft applies to
their online transaction, and not to the Debian Foundation posting accounts to
wire.

Secondly, I did not make the argument at the end: I accepted that I could
appreciate other people making that argument. Instead, I made the longer
argument through the previous set of paragraphs that Ubuntu should actively
charge for things.

Your last paragraph and its closing question is thereby highly confusing, and
makes me question both whether you read my comment, and whether I should
bother responding to yours. That said, I will now put on the hat of the people
I overall disagree with and attempt to answer your question.

I, personally, am involved in what I, as well as many, consider more of a
"movement" than a product: a specific form of hacking known as "jailbreaking"
mobile devices, and in particular the iPhone (although I also do Android
work).

In this capacity, I have seen many different people who have myriad opinions
on what happens when you inject the concerns of managing money into a
decentralized system, and I have seen first hand what happens "on the inside".

For one, you immediately get concerns about who is contributing what to the
project, and thereby how the money should be allocated. As the contributions
are decentralized, it is not clear that any one person or even one group of
people should "own allocation".

In the case of Ubuntu, I imagine that even getting donations is tense. It is
my understanding that many of the people working on Debian or with past ties
to Debian feel that the Ubuntu project's primary purpose is to leach off their
effort.

Meanwhile, I contend that things can get even worse if you start charging. Of
course, as I believe that charging is the right course of action, I actually
do charge for things personally, so I can talk about how people react to these
kinds of charges.

The result is that a lot of people now believe you are "rolling in the money",
when in fact you are a community project that is reinvesting the money you
receive in improved output by hiring people and donating the rest.

This is difficult for end users to contemplate, however, as all they see is
that they are having to pay $200 for an operating system distributed via a
medium with a near-$0 marginal production cost (downloadable/copyable files).

However, again, I think that this entire diversion is weird, because I spent
an entire post attempting to argue that Ubuntu should charge for things,
linking to an argument made by other people, and attempting to state that
donations might not be enough.

Thereby, my arguments for why Ubuntu should _not_ accept or even demand money
might not be very good: if you are seriously attempting to ask that question,
you should ask it to someone who is actually on that side of the argument.

------
azakai
Yes, they are just (ab)using the system that currently exists, but it takes a
lot of gall to ask for yet more, when the positive verdict was so precariously
and unfairly won (the jury foreman that completely misunderstood what prior
art means and invented an "interchangeability" definition for infringement).

------
antihero
Well this just makes them absolutely nasty cunts then. Surely even the most
hardcore Apple fanatic thinks this is completely unnecessary and designed to
stifle competition?

~~~
mcantelon
>Surely even the most hardcore Apple fanatic thinks this is completely
unnecessary and designed to stifle competition?

My guess is they'll laud the decision.

~~~
AllenKids
Yes, the battle is nasty and Samsung/Google (both are immensely powerful, and
not human) is in no danger of being driven out. Why should I feel bad about
it?

I'd like to see 3X damage preferably as an AAPL shareholder.

~~~
mcantelon
While that is a somewhat rational viewpoint, I am old-fashioned enough to
consider the philosophy that right and wrong don't matter, only profits, to be
unhealthy.

~~~
CamperBob2
It would be rational if Apple could somehow be certain that they have duly
licensed all applicable patents for the technology in all of their products.

So, no... it's about as rational as stripping naked and running through Times
Square with a vuvuzela, daring the cops to come after you.

~~~
AllenKids
It is rational cause Apple can be sure that it does not willfully infringe on
others patents and risks regarding those patents mines unavoidable can be
managed through ad hoc negotiation and lawyers, lots of lawyers.

Given such a high profile case just resulted in a puny $1B amount, with its
over $100B war chest, Apple can take a few dozens of these lawsuits easily.
Let's see who's willing to go against Apple and comes out ahead.

------
mrinterweb
This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel awkward any time I use my Air in
public. Business practices like this make me feel guilty for purchasing Apple
products.

~~~
uvTwitch
I've always felt that way about apple, which is why I've never owned any of
their products. If this is how you feel, you'd likely feel better if you did
the same.

------
uvTwitch
Is anybody really surprised to learn that apple is a scummy business? Their
polished exterior hides a rotten core - as anyone who's ever worked with xcode
or any of their APIs can cofirm - and their smug, self-satisfied, elitist
marketing has always been the biggest indicator of this.

------
31reasons
It feels like Apple's soul is gone and now its a zombie hungry for cash. All
of their executives and their top engineers are already awash in cash. They
are worlds top company. what are they after now ? Is this how the greed looks
like at a global scale ? They should learn from nature, Lions do hunt for food
but when they are satisfied they leave other animals to scrape meat off their
hunt. They have stopped acting like smart group of people and more like a
tumor.

------
alphang
I believe Nilay Patel at The Verge has previously said that this is an
expected maneuver for this type of litigation after the initial verdict,
including asking for maximum damages and sales ban.

Can a lawyer on HN comment on this?

------
artursapek
Is this really warranted? Hasn't Apple won?

~~~
ww520
Apple won the court case, not yet won the mobile war.

------
lines
If you take asking for the additional damages the law allows (most of which is
based on willfulness, which the jury explicitly upheld), plus an injunction
(which everyone always asks for) as anything other than lawyers taking the
case to its logical conclusion, you're being silly. Whatever you think about
the case, this is nothing new or surprising.

------
1qaz2wsx3edc
And twist the knife.

------
recoiledsnake
They also asked for a permanent injunction on sales of the infringing devices.

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/22/us-apple-
samsung-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/22/us-apple-samsung-
idUSBRE88L04B20120922)

