What no one's mentioned here is: this is an International Trade Commission ruling, not a US court or PTO ruling.
So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.
You make a small mistake, which is really the fault of reporters for not explaining the somewhat complex world of Article I tribunals. The "International Trade Commission" is more properly known as "The United States International Trade Commission", a creation of Congress to adjudicate a number of trade-related disputes. As an Article I Tribunal, all appeals are heard by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. And of course, that gives you a fast track to the Supreme Court if desired. The President may also unilaterally overturn rulings, as has been done by Presidents Reagan and Obama.
Apple can't build a factory to produce Apple Watches before the entire situation would be resolved. And if they could, it would be much more expensive to run compared to making it in Vietnam (where they make it now).
I don't think anyone is seriously considering that, I think the broader point is that by outsourcing and being a tad greedy they have shot themselves in the foot inadvertently.
Of course, they'll have run the numbers and the cost of this fiasco is likely many-many orders of magnitude below the savings from using cheap labour.
They didn't shoot themselves in the foot, by any measure. If the watches were made in the US, Apple could still be sued in federal court for patent infringement. Masimo likely just filed in the ITC because it (correctly) gave them the most leverage (a sales injunction) for the smallest possible legal cost. Apple is going to appeal, so it's still going to get sorted out in federal court in any case.
They are made by Luxshare's China factory, its Vietnam factory probably are trying to ramp up to it. Given how short Luxshare as a company and its capabilities to take shares from Foxconn, ppl may have over estimated the difficulty there.
It's that really even that bad of a thing for Apple? The appeal will go to federal court, which means at the end of the day it's just going to get sorted out by the court system more quickly.
> Can we still manufacture electronics here, even if we wanted to? I thought all the expertise and machinery was outsourced a long time ago?
Yes. There's a bunch of industries that either can't or don't bother manufacturing in China. The majority of the military industrial complex and much of the biotech/medical equipment industry, among many others. The former for natsec reasons and the latter because even after 20 years QC is still a shitshow.
The problem is how spread out the industrial capacity is. In Shenzhen you can walk from the factory to a giant bazaar with every electronic part you could think of available to buy then and there in reel quantities. You can walk to any of hundreds of other factories and talk to the people on the floor to help design parts for their process. When the part is ready, they can courier it over to you within an hour.
The cost of labor doesn't help either but at Apple scale, US companies would figure it out.
Biotech/medtech is only a shitshow because it's typically small run. If the manufacturers actually committed resource they could achieve any outcome they desire. They are just passing the buck. (Source: Lived in Shenzhen for ages, had US friends managing the manufacturing of US medical devices, visited multiple times large factories producing biomed parts)
We can manufacture electronics here, though the exact details of the Apple Watch are probably not easy to accommodate. (The manufacturing engineers knew it would be built in China, so they chose parts and processes that are mature there. For example, if the requirement was for all the parts to be made in the US, then it would probably use an Intel chip, since those are made in the US. It probably wouldn't get 2 days of battery life if they used one of those, however.)
They may find a way around this - I believe it was only required to do two "manipulations" to have a US-created good. Some people were getting around tariffs that way.
Of course, a US court in West Texas could issue the same injunction as the ITC.
I've seen tons of articles/posts about this recently, but does anyone have any links to any good articles that describe the patent(s) in question, and what the arguments are about (a) whether this patent is truly novel (I've heard tons of "pulse oximetry is decades old" arguments, but nothing about the specifics of these patents) and (b) whether Apple is or isn't infringing on the specific details?
I'm sure this kind of analysis must be out there, but I searched through a couple of posts and lots of comment threads and primarily saw a lot of conjecture but no actual references to what was really under debate.
I too would be curious. That said, it's worth noting here that Masimo[0] is an actual company that produces pulse oximetry devices, not a patent troll.
Masimo claims Apple had project to emulate or obtain their tech without paying them, including poaching employees. Apple hired their CTO Marcelo Lamego.
“In the first two weeks that Lamego was at Apple, he filed 12 patents for medical and sensor technologies for the Watch. Though he would only stay at the company for six months, Lamego would be named as an inventor on many more.”
What you think you want is the "patent prosecution history." I say "think" because it's kinda "all hope abandon, ye who enter here." Go to uspto.gov and prepare to be perplexed.
You can be sure the issues of novelty and non-obviousness were argued there. Does that mean they'll be clear to you? Heh.
Pro tip: the history is in reverse chronological order. Any doc that's only one page, you can probably ignore. All the arguments are in multi-page PDF's.
In the meantime, retailers like Best Buy can sell units that have already been imported to the US, and Apple can still sell the SE.
I wonder if Apple preemptively imported a ton of watches for resale, to give them some breathing room. I imagine the post-Christmas period is relatively slow, and they’ll likely refresh the watches in May. Would it be possible for them to stuff the resale channels with 3 months of inventory, and then just move to a new generation of watches at WWDC?
Outside of their own apple stores Apple is not managing or storing inventory for retail sale. A shipment for bestbuy or Amazon will almost always go straight from the origin to the retailer logistics hub in the US.
Agreed; the question is whether Apple encouraged retailers to take on large inventories on a preemptive basis. It's in the retailers' interests to load up so that they're not left dry for an extended period. The only possible bad outcome for them is if they load up but then Apple settles, and they're not able to move it fast enough. But Apple could offer to buy back excess in order to alleviate this concern. It would seem like Apple and the retailers would want to work together 'against' Masimo here, since they both make money by stuffing the channel. I don't know if there are any ITC rules against this type of behavior during the pendency of an injunction.
I was thinking that was the soonest event at which they regularly announce new products. They probably weren’t intending to revamp for a year, but under the circumstances they’ll probably update sooner (or settle).
Is there a chance Apple will pay Masimo for the technology and resume sales?
I am curious why that didn’t happen. If this is an exec’s decision and this leads to bigger losses than paying Masimo, I wonder what would happen the people involved in the decisions.
There's a chance. This is likely Apple exhausting options before it settles into a licensing deal. First you try cease-and-desist, then appeals, then settlement, then import restriction negotiation, etc. Obviously Apple does not want to pay a fee per watch for the technology. They say they're going to try to fix it in software, Masimo says it's a hardware thing.
Apparently this whole thing happened because Masimo started selling a watch and Apple brought a suit against it and the ruling didn't go their way.
That' not the complete story. Apple basically screwed Massimo in getting Massimo to spill their guts on their sensor tech promising them an licesing/partnership and instead of following through, they decided to cease any licensing deal and instead poach the team to build that tech inhouse instead of licensing it.
It's known in SV as "brain fucking". A lot of big companies do this to small companies where they promise a acquisition/licensing/funding deal in order to get presentations with confidential info on the core tech, and then just use their massive war chest to build that core tech themselves without compensating the smaller player for having reveal the keys to the kingdom.
Like, the whole point of a startup is (often) to get bought by a big player.
But what if the big players learn all they can from due diligence presentations, then poach your tech and talent, and when you complain, it turns into a drawn-out court battle they win because they can afford $billions in legal fees but you can only afford $10's or $100's of millions?
Is there a counter? If there is no counter, why does VC exist at all? If the counter is "don't spill the beans to big companies looking to buy you out," how does any startup ever get acquired?
Where are you getting your information? Doesn’t pass the smell test. Apple does tons of licensing deals—how could you run a vertically integrated company like theirs otherwise? A quick Google search suggests the working environment at Masimo is quite poor, so it makes sense employees might leave.
Since most SV startups don't like to patent things (and very few do anything actually patentable), it works. When you run into a case like this, it makes it very hard to say that you didn't infringe their patents.
This is a good thing. It increases salaries for everyone. If Apple can make more money with your ideas than Massimo, why shouldn't they be allowed to pay you more?
Not always and not for everyone. Follow me: Currently there are two players in this space competing for talent, Apple and Massimo. This competition results in higher wages and more innovation. What do you think will happen to wages and innovation if Apple just guts Massimo(or any other company) and now there's only one player on the market, Apple? Now Apple can pay you whatever they want because you have nowhere else to go.
How do I know this? Because years and years ago, two major semiconductor companies had offices in my home town. And workers would get pay raises by jumping ship between the two. A few years ago, one of the bigger corps. bought the other smaller one becoming an even bigger behemoth, so the offices had to merge, leading to layoffs in the name of cutting the redundant jobs and "optimizing efficiency". What do you think happened to the wages at the new giant company? Did they go up or not?
So, I question the thought process of HNers who support that Apple crushing a smaller player out of a market somehow leads to higher salaries for everyone. If you want higher salaries, you need more players in that market, not one giant monopolist. This isn't Apple vs some equal Goliath like Google or Microsoft who can afford to fight fire with fire.
Masimo made investments into R&D. They payed salaries to researchers to create new products and got awarded a patent for that investment. If the employees knew they were onto something big, they should've started a company or negotiated higher salaries before the patent was filed. If you want the reward, you have to take the risk.
Apple sits on heaps of cash and could have done the same.
Hands down the worst take I've read here in a long time and there have been some doozies.
Aside from the detailed rebuttal someone already gave, can you explain in this world of higher salaries what incentive any company not named Apple/Google/Microsoft would have to bother doing R&D if the big boys can just come in and steal your IP and talent?
Is it worth the long term increase in cost if Apple pays Masimo? It's not a one off where you just pay up to continue operations. Pay one and many more will line up. I am sure Apple's analysts already have a number for how much profit they'd slough off if they pay off Masimo and many more follow.
> I am sure Apple's analysts already have a number for how much profit they'd slough off if they pay off Masimo
Apple famously does not budge on their margins. If forced to pay a license fee, prices on these models will absolutely go up. Sale stoppage + this news cycle allows them to reset pricing when they start up again, without making consumers too mad.
They do not. Massimo's relevant patents have to do with their signal processing on user-worn devices. Cheap oximeters are clip-ons that only do rudimentary processing with strong beams of light through the fingers.
Patent laws really are so strange. Two people had an idea in 1989 (over a decade before I was born) and as a result, I am not allowed to build a product using that idea and sell it, even if I independently reached the idea myself. I think in an ideal world, we would have intellectual rights and patents, but for a vastly reduced scope of time.
You come up with an amazing breakthrough that will alter the world? Congratulations, it's yours for 10 years to do what you want. After that, it's fair game. Innovate or die.
> You come up with an amazing breakthrough that will alter the world? Congratulations, it's yours for 10 years to do what you want. After that, it's fair game. Innovate or die.
That’s how patents work in the US. You get 10 years with the ability to extend 10 more. There are games to be played with some patents that extend their life (like a new use patent in pharma) but generally these parents for seemingly old things are new ideas about an old thing.
If you want a short fun read on Solar Panels [0] you’ll find a Melvin Severy referenced. That’s my ancestor. We don’t see a penny from his work because that patent is long gone and is just referenced as prior art. Feel free to use it all you’d like.
I would argue intellectual property laws are bad at the outset, and that the concept of intellectual property is praxeologically unsound. What right does a person have to restrict the progress and free will of another (or society for that matter) simply because they came up with an idea "first"?
The very idea of intellectual property though, you own your mind, you own your thoughts, sure. You can own a document with the details of your idea, and you can physically restrict others from seeing your property. What does it mean for an idea to be property though? Why are government resources invested in protecting something that private companies and individuals have the responsibility of protecting themselves?
> Why are government resources invested in protecting something that private companies and individuals have the responsibility of protecting themselves?
How can an individual protect themselves if a big company steals their ideas?
They cant under the current system, and I see no reason for that to change.
They might have marginally more protection over their ideas than a than a big company can due to leaks, but I dont fundamentally believe that ideas should be protected under the law, assuming a just legal system. I'll break this into 2 parts.
I don't think governments have a great track record of protecting interests, and a theory why. Whatever political system we have, power will centralize in an elite that uses it for their own purposes. Slavery in America was not funded on its merit, it was in fact heavily subsidized at the expense of working americans and the states were turned into fortresses to imprison the slaves. This occured under an arguement that the government should protect private interests. Whatever power you give the government, the elite will steal; an aside, even when the elites are killed in places like russia during the soviet revolution, it was at the behest of a newer and much darker elite; anyways, a corrupt intellectual property system, because government power is prone to capture.
I disagree with the concept that ideas can be owned, as opposed to merely possessed. Allow me to cast abducto absurdum on this, taken to its logical conclusion, does this idea create absurd results? If we were chronically dehydrated in africa, and I figured out how to make a pump to get water, and im willing to make more pumps for trade, would it be reasonable that the rest of the village is going to die of dehydration because you, fully capable of recreating and innovating on the design, were instead bound by intellectual property laws? If that is in fact absurd, then I would like to know what the line is and why.
The international TRIPs agreement, managed by WTO, specifies a 20y term. AFAIK, 20y is standard for patents. Which means an invention (not an idea!) patented in 1989 should be free to use from 2009 onwards.
USA used to have 'submarine patents' that could appear later, but apart from that there doesn't seem to be any jurisdiction in which a 33 year old patent would still be valid.
Some ideas (especially software) move quickly, and you can implement them in an afternoon. Others, like nuclear power, can take ten years just to break ground on construction. It would probably be quite discouraging to innovation in heavy industry if patent protection expired before the first mover could even launch a product.
Your second paragraph is how patents already work, and you can't patent an idea, only specific inventions. Sometimes patents for ideas slip through the cracks and sometimes patents get extended without a good reason, but these are not problems with the idea of a patent itself.
What you're arguing against is corruption, not patents.
But the amount of processing necessary to trigger the patent is "any amount more than zero". Here's what claim 19, which Apple was adjudged to have indirectly violated, says about processing:
> [the user-worn device comprising, among other things: ] 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.
So if your device includes one or more processors, and those processors aren't just decorative, you're in violation. What processing you do is not relevant; what's patented is that you do any processing of any kind.
Note that Apple's violation does not seem to have been related to data processing; they were adjudged to have directly violated claim 22, which is the device described in claim 19 plus a series of modifications and/or clarifications, of which the modification/clarification unique to claim 22 has to do with the configuration of the LEDs in the device.
If the problem had to do with their data processing, they probably would have been found in violation of claim 19 instead...?
It's funny how these things work. They don't even specify the wavelength of the LEDs used, instead preferring to patent any wavelength imaginable. But obviously not all of them will work. Why was this allowed in a patent? How is this a valid description of what they built?
Why wouldn't it be allowed in a patent? As far as I know, there isn't a law that says patents have to specify the wavelengths used.
If you built it with wavelengths that worked, it'd be covered by the patent. If you built it with wavelengths that didn't work, it'd probably be useless.
The independent claims in that patent seem to exactly describe technologies from the 1970’s, except that the detector is flat and uses 4 LEDs. The Massimo page you cite claims they invented their signal processing technique in 1989, and Wikipedia says they shipped it in 1995.
The patent you cite was filed in 2009, and is set to expire in 2028. Patents only are supposed to last 17 years in the US, not 39 years.
Anyway, the clip on one’s probably don’t use the algorithms from 1989 or and whatever is in the patent, since the innovation was using a flat detector instead of a clip. Clips were working fine for 20 years before SET.
Clips work by observing transmission of light through the finger being absorbed by oxygen-carrying blood as opposed to the single chip wearable which depends on measuring reflected light. Different techniques, different patents.
> 22. The user-worn device of claim 21, wherein the plurality of emitters comprise at least four emitters, and wherein each of the plurality of emitters comprises a respective set of at least three LEDs.
> 28. [This is one of the base descriptions; too long to pull as a quote.]
> 12. The user-worn device of claim 8, wherein the physiological parameter comprises oxygen or oxygen saturation.
> 24. The user-worn device of claim 20, wherein the protrusion comprises opaque material configured to substantially prevent light piping.
> 30. The user-worn device of claim 20, wherein the protrusion further comprises one or more chamfered edges.
The easiest way to avoid this set of patents appears to be to use less than three LEDs. I assume that will produce a more unreliable reading, but increasing the number of LEDs does not appear to be considered an "obvious" approach to that problem.
More than four would increase cost and wouldn’t necessarily be more accurate. I believe each LED emits Red, Blue or Infrared.
But these Apple Watches are not approved by the FDA as medical devices and are less accurate than a pulse oxomiter. Even FitBit doesn’t try to fool anyone.
So what’s the real market to add in measuring oxygen levels? Wellness? You have to not move to use it and we already know the measurements are not accurate.
Feels like they added it to sell more watches and seems like they really bought the farm this time
Or trifling matters like clips working on an entirely different principle (transmission vice reflection) than the method which remains patent encumbered.
Certainly it works on a different principle than that which is patented. At the same time, IANAL, and if the stakes are large enough the question might need an adjudicated answer.
Adjudicated answers, also known as patents, have been separately issued for these very different techniques to accomplish the same underlying goal. The transmission patents are expired for quite sometime however, which is why devices using them can be made cheaply.
Not really. $15 pulse oximeters on Amazon are coming straight out of China from fly by night companies in a country that doesn't particularly care about IP law, and even when they do make it amazingly hard for a foreign company with even the most absolute, solid, novel patents to fight against a Chinese company blatantly and openly infringing.
Trying to frame this as a money grab from Masimo is overly defensive of Apple.
None of these pulse oximeters on Amazon from China are violating these worn device patents because those pulse oximeters don't use an array of emitters, and heavily process the reflected light results. Wearable pulse ox is an entirely different tech stack as finger clamp pulse ox.
Yeah finger clamps shine through the finger completely. They don't use reflected light.
They are much more accurate for this reason but also more annoying to wear. I think the only daily-wearable one that works this way is the Oura ring.
I'm surprised how well it still works on a watch though. I never tried Apple's implementation as I don't have an apple phone to pair it with, but my galaxy watch 6's SpO2 works pretty decently compared to a finger clamp one, considering it is much harder to do it on the wrist.
Apple certainly isn’t a an innocent player here (they have shut down competitors with bogus patents), but that doesn’t mean the system isn’t completely broken.
The import ban is due to them using a technology that was invented in 1935, then improved to more or less match what Apple shipped in 1970. Ironically, the inventor from 1970 opted not to patent it. The history section of this article has a good overview: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry
On top of there obviously being prior work, the “court” that blocked imports is part of an expedited process, so even though the real court will definitely consider invalidating the patent (and will probably invalidate it) that hasn’t happened yet.
There are good examples in this discussion of Apple using equally bogus patents to block imports, but I hope something (maybe this case) becomes a poster child for this sort of legal abuse, and leads to real reform.
I generally agree when how bogus this kind of thing usually is is brought up but in this case I'm not sure I can agree what happened here was fair play tarnished by misguided law after reading the backstory these past few weeks. The rub between the two here isn't pulse ox was used at all it's a specific implementation of a certain part of several patents Marino claims Apple stole when they were working together then abandoned the relationship. This isn't something where Apple did something obvious in a vacuum and suddenly a troll came out of the woodwork. "Prior work" doesn't mean someone did light based pulse ox before it means the specific implementation which improves it was already known and in use at the time the patent was filed, which is not the case here.
There was no partnership as far as I know. Masimo met with Apple's M&A team, they didn't do a deal, then Apple hired Masimo employees to do it themselves.
This complaint of Apple meeting with some company and then stealing their technology is the narrative put forward by every company or VC that meets with Apple and doesn't result in an acquisition. As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc.
> As if it's impossible to know who to hire from LinkedIn, patents, knowledge of the field, etc.
That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!"
It's an argument toward the standing of the patent(s?), not a complaint of unfair trade practices.
> That's misunderstanding the argument: it's not "They poached our employees and that isn't fair!", it's "Clearly our technology was legitimate and innovative, they had to poach our employees to duplicate it!"
This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation. So of course you're going to hire them if you can.
> This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos
You're basically agreeing to the GP's "thin" argument by saying you need people who already successfully did it to have a higher chance of succeeding.
> even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation
You can't do a clean-room re-implementation if you're hiring people who already worked of the original implementation. Plus clean-room design only circumvents copyright claims. They don't defend against patents.
> This seems a pretty thin argument. Hiring some people who already successfully did it has a higher chance of success than hiring randos, even if they have to do a clean-room re-implementation.
That's... literally the argument. If the patent was obvious to a practitioner in the field, you wouldn't need to hire experts. And not just any experts, experts from the company that holds the patent in question!
Honestly this part of the argument seems pretty sound to me. Whether patents should have this kind of power on the whole is I think an excellent question. But given the system we have, as I see it Apple is screwed here. They're going to end up cutting a very big check to get out of this.
Isn't the question what the "field" is? Does it have to be obvious to a random college grad in Electrical Engineering? Biomed Engineering? Someone who's worked in Medical devices before? Someone who's worked on any other Pulse/Ox before?
I can very easily see a case where it's obvious to anyone who's worked on this sort of device before, but only 1-2 companies make that sort of device, so if you want to hire someone to make that sort of device without starting from literally 0 experience, it would have to be from one of the few companies that have patents in that field.
Once you're talking about specific methods of accomplishing a specific task in a field, there aren't that many experts or practitioners.
> I can very easily see a case where it's obvious to anyone who's worked on this sort of device before, but only 1-2 companies make that sort of device
You don't win legal cases by resorting to semantic trickery. Clearly the spirit of the law is that "obviousness" should be interpreted generally. If you have some layer of minutiae only understood at an implementation level by a few dozen human beings, it's clearly going to look "novel" to everyone else.
Otherwise everyone in a patent case would throw some obscure genius on the stand to testify "Well, you see, this is totally obvious to me!" and win.
It's not trickery, it's a question of what the law is. If you grab a random person off the street, even simple machines like gears and pulleys may not be obvious. On the other end, you risk running into the "it's an auction but on a computer" patents just because you happen to be the first person to bother paying to patent that you could do that with a computer.
There's a difference between novel and niche in my mind. If you're working for a company that's acquired a monopoly on having enough money to do any work at all on some product, simply because there's not enough demand for it to have active competition, that doesn't seem like it should mean that everything is "novel" just because you're the only group thinking about it. Yes, in this case Apple is the much bigger company deciding to get into the business, but these patents surely would likewise hinder other companies from competing, or even doing their own research into product innovations in this area, for fear of being too close to the existing patents.
Either way, my point was about hiring people, not the patents. Going "they poached all these people so they could steal their patented knowledge" may be true, but if that company is the only company doing any amount of real innovation in that field, you'd also want to hire from them just because you want to hire the best engineers who have experience with those sensors. Even if you were trying to avoid any issue with patent and totally build a unique product, you'd still want to start with people who know the problem space vs. re-training people.
> Even if you were trying to avoid any issue with patent and totally build a unique product, you'd still want to start with people who know the problem space vs. re-training people.
Sorry, that's ridiculous. If you were genuinely trying to avoid IP pollution, hiring employees from existing market leaders is the worst possible strategy.
Again, people are twisting themselves around here. Apple got caught red handed here. Argue, if you must, that the patent is invalid from first principles and that any staff could have done it. But the fact that they went and hired all these folks to do it in the real world absolutely constitutes strong evidence to the contrary.
See, I feel like that's almost the exact opposite unless you assume Apple and its internal legal department is made up of the biggest idiots on the planet. If they were intending on just infringing this valid patent and trying to get away with it, then they've literally handed the world a paper trail that makes them look as bad as possible without a literal email being published in the newspaper from Tim Cook saying "Yea, just violate the patent".
With the history they have with Masimo, surely the more reasonable explanation is that they saw the tech, thought they could make something independently that was as good or better without infringing the patent, and hired off some of the Masimo folks to help with explicit instructions to try to avoid any overlap with their old patents?
Does Apple have some history of flagrantly violating patents I don't know about? If anything, other folks have pointed out that Apple specifically has done this to other people before, so they're keenly aware of the risks here. I just don't buy what seems to be the conventional wisdom of "haha big company is dumb as bricks". Risking getting a flagship product banned from sale seems deeply unlike Apple's business strategy in general, which makes everyone's assertions that this infringement was intentional, flagrant, and obvious to a layman seem like it must have some fault in it.
> See, I feel like that's almost the exact opposite unless you assume Apple and its internal legal department is made up of the biggest idiots on the planet. If they were intending on just infringing this valid patent and trying to get away with it, then they've literally handed the world a paper trail that makes them look as bad as possible without a literal email being published in the newspaper from Tim Cook saying "Yea, just violate the patent".
They don't really need to be idiots. They just need to trust that there is a reasonable chance that Masimo won't do anything about it and if they do, there is reasonable chance that Apple wins in court and if they don't there might be appeals and if not they might have come up with better non-infringing tech and if not then they can come to license agreement with Masimo. With that train of thought I think its pretty reasonable that Apple acted the way they acted.
Those dates are all incorrect (or at a minimum not applicable). As is stated in the cited Wikipedia article, those dates are for detecting pulseox via transmission of light through a thin part of the body, such as a finger or ear, as opposed to reflectance. Reflection pulse oximetry from a thick part of the body, such as a wrist, is a much more recent invention and is the subject of these patents.
Technically yes, but that’s a bit like saying rocket engine patents are about the vector of hot gasses. There are a lot of issues with creating one chip that both emits and receives light which are not present in a transmission model. In particular, if you look at the actual claims in the case, this is what many of the areas which were infringed upon deal with.
A rocket engine (in its entirety) is probably not something you'd patent, probably because of precisely this issue. A sensor that can detect light is also likely not patentable, even if how it does so is novel. That seems ridiculous to me; there needs to be a point at which a patent, no matter how novel, shouldn't be possible.
Why do you think that a District Court will invalidate the parents? The ITC determined they were valid, and they’re a competent specialized court that deals exclusively with this sort of case.
Did they patent pulse oximetry, though? The referenced patent seems to be for their specific detector design and signal processing method. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2
That’s how patents always work; the concept cannot be patented, it’s the method which is. Garmin for instance has their own (patented) method which works differently from the infringing Apple implementation.
It's simply incorrect to say "concept patents get granted all the time." No, they don't. You patent an invention. The claims on it may be inappropriately broad, but there have always been mechanisms to address that.
Unless you have a source showing things have changed for the better, I don't see how the age of my examples is relevant. Especially since they may have been granted in the 90s, but expired only very recently.
Clicking once and having a thing show up at your house is not a concept, it’s a process. There are lots of ways to have a streamlined payment experience which do not violate this patent.
You are correct and OP is burying the actual crime. OP is correct, however, that this is Apple's SOP as well. They don't amass tens of thousands of patents for the joy.
There are other watches with this. Withings is FDA-approved. Garmin and Samsung have several models. There are non-Apple watches which will pair with iPhones. And there are Apple watches without a blood-oxygen sensor. No big deal.
I haven't dug into this in-depth but from what someone who had mentioned, I think it falls into a very specific approach they're using around an array of 4 sensors which is patented. I suspect other manufacturers use different approaches that isn't patented here. Again, this is secondary information so take it with a grain of salt.
The real question is if you’ll miss that feature. It’s one of the most useless things they added to the watch just because they had nothing else they could. This and the wash your hands reminder lol.
I wonder if it is time to re-think the way patents work in an age of highly integrated devices. In this case, it seems like Apple and Masimo could have worked together to deliver a stellar product that promoted both inventor rights and benefited the public. Instead, both companies are suffering, and the public loses access to a technology.
Perhaps the public should buy the Masimo watch if they appreciate the specific advantages of the specific pulse oximetry technology at question here. While that may satisfy a small percentage of customers whose primary motive is that specific feature, the majority of people I know wouldn't consider that a valid option, since they like the integration with the "apple ecosystem", or similar reasons.
Would it be possible to separate end products from component technology in a way that prevents this? Perhaps by tracking an accounting line for patents internally, then pushing for legislation which requires patent-cost -> end product cost transparency?
> In this case, it seems like Apple and Masimo could have worked together to deliver a stellar product that promoted both inventor rights and benefited the public. Instead, both companies are suffering, and the public loses access to a technology.
I don't think the existence of rare costly outcomes is very good evidence that anything is wrong with the system.
Among high-level players, the vast majority of poker hands ends with an "agreement" about who probably has the strongest hand (i.e, all but one player folds and there's a modest transfer of funds to that player). But in order for that system to work, there has to be a credible threat of a showdown which, from an economic perspective considering just that single hand, is inefficient.
Likewise, the patent system might be good or bad overall, but occasional occurance of costly outcomes doesn't tell us much.
That's the narrative I am gathering from the comments here. Is it possible to realign incentives to promote cooperation instead? I understand this kind of restructuring would generate huge turbulence and resistance from entrenched players - but if it's possible to use the patent system for collaboration instead of market exclusion, the resulting net benefit to inventors/researchers, manufacturing and the general public might be worth it.
Paying arbitrary fees to someone who filed paperwork first does not promote any sort of "cooperation", unless your idea of cooperation is one person paying money and one collecting it and giving nothing in return.
Patent law is there, because creating original work is costly and can take years in engineering and scientific fields. The patents are there to give a time-window for the people who made the investments to make their money back and get some return on their investment.
Where are you getting this information? The consumer business is ultimately a threat to Masimo. Did they have any intention of commercializing these patents? Why did so many employees leave?
Yes. By partnering with Apple. The employees left to go work at Apple. Which is fine, you can work wherever you want and companies are free to hire/poach whoever they want.
The issue here is not that Apple hired them or that Apple didn’t go through with the deal. The issue is that Apple didn’t innovate but instead infringed on someone else’s IP. If you want to see an example of what Apple should have done, go check out the Garmin patents around pulseox.
Edit: People like to dunk on Garmin for being slow to market, while ignoring the degree to which Garmin doesn’t just rip off patented ideas and instead actually innovates.
Their existing product line is marketed on their patent background [^1]. The questions you're asking seem to resonate with a certain skepticism I have observed repeatedly in related situations. This is why I am wondering if anyone is seriously considering alternative models. It seems someone in this audience is likely to know of such a proposal if any exists.
Every time I read about
This I am gobsmacked by just how big a cavalier blunder this is for apple.
Who on gods earth at Cupertino thought the pittance you could save from sherlocking would somehow be more than the revenue from a new iPhone in 2023?
Now you've either got to pay the license or buy the damn company. And you STILL had to admit to wrongdoing in front of the ITC and the world. Any acquisition you seek from now on is going to be a pretty cold reception if anyone cares at all to entertain it.
I wager masimo will license this technology out to every competitor apple has until cooks pushing daisies and then open source it out of spite...or at least thats what I'd do ;)
I am worried, but not for apple. I am worried for those poor souls so fixated on apple’s products that they may not even try using a competing product. What will they do now? Where will they shop and consume? There will be no presents with the apple logo, nothing to post about on linkedin, nothing to be proud of, nothing to wear to show the world the product they love and crave. What if Tesla is next? Or openai? What if they will all he crushed by patent holders, or rent seekers. Truly there must be something we can do. Abolish patents maybe? Civil war? UBI? Musk and Tim save us. Or since this is due to “President Joe Biden’s administration refused” maybe Trump will provide relief. Remains to be seen whom the hungry, angry, frightened, masses of consumers will chose as their leader to free them from the burden of small businesses oppressing corporations with their vicious patents.
Maybe? The two violated patent claims are "a protrusion comprising opaque material configured to substantially prevent light piping" and "one or more chamfered edges" of the protrusion, on a patent titled “User-worn device for noninvasively measuring a physiological parameter of a user.” It doesn’t appear anything that HN users would consider technology related was involved, and despite the palpable sense of Schadenfreude here, if it had happened to a company other than Apple, we’d probably be more sympathetic.
The patent’s claims seem likely to be further invalidated once it gets to court, but the timing unfolded to Apple’s disadvantage. (Or maybe not, as they managed to hold everything off until after Christmas sales were completed, and maybe managed to get a bump out of the pending ban.)
I generally feel no sympathy or outrage for Apples patent strife. They are often a target not so much because of their bad acts but because they’re wealthy and a big potential payday, but they’re also wealthy enough to defend their interests and the expenses are just the cost of doing business. (Although they are usually much better at preventing this level of chaos, but they pissed off a billionaire by hiring his top staff, so there’s that.)
HTC practically ceased to exist as a consumer facing company in the West due to this. I don't know of any hardware they've produced recently outside of their partnership with Valve on VR, and they're not the face of that relationship.
I feel like you’re exaggerating the impact of this single case on HTC’s long term viability .
The article says they rectified the issue in software right away. HTC died off in the US for many other reasons, I severely doubt this was one of them given it could be software rectified.
What killed of HTC’s mobile division was the inability to compete in the market against Google, Samsung and Motorola. I’m sure this case hurt some but given how quickly it was fixed, the import ban was likely very short lived. Especially because they had new phones available almost immediately after.
That article says they spun a new firmware almost immediately. I hadn’t heard of that case (Apple patents using computers to process structured data), but I thought some other thing did a much better job of screwing HTC over.
My first (and last) smartphone was a HTC Desire, and I wished HTC died before the day I would shell out over 500€ for that piece of smoking crap. It needed the mainboard to be swapped not one but two times under warranty before it could be used for more than 1 minute without rebooting (apparently a well known overheating problem) then, months after warranty expired, it suddenly died beyond any recover to became my most expensive paperweight.
I know I'm just an unfortunate drop in the sea, still I don't miss their products at all.
Apple loves to bully competitors and suppliers with both patents and app store. I doubt being on the other end of this will make them change their behaviour.
Forget small companies. Apple is famously known for blocking import of 3rd party parts for repair, but refuses to sell such parts to independent repair shops before recently.
OK, but please don't post generic flamewar comments to HN. This kind of thing leads to repetitive threads that have happened many times before, which is not the curious conversation we're trying for here.
That could be. But we have to moderate by the general pattern, even though not every thread works out that way. It's basically about whether the expected value of a thread is flamewar or not.
agreed. the richest company on the planet with its massive army of lawyers are either incompetent and could not see they would be affected by an existing patent, or so egotistical that they felt they could bully their way around it. either way, that's not a good look for Apple in this.
Presumably the patent litigator also knows all of those facts and may have been holding out for too much money (in Apple’s calculus) and the long-run game is better for Apple if they take some short-term pain now in exchange for being known as a difficult target.
Apple will be fine without watch sales for a long time if needed.
Ah. In my mind “holding out” does not require a settlement offer to be proposed by the counterparty.
If you ask the price to buy my 2005 Honda CRV (license my patent) and I tell you $250K ($250M/yr), many would think I was holding out even if you (Apple) correctly roll your eyes and don’t engage.
The point is… even that preliminary exchange of information never took place. Apple has not engaged whatsoever; There’s been no contact since the original meetings (2013 I think) where they discussed working together. Apple (allegedly) went dark very shortly after and started their own thing.
There would have to be some serious mental gymnastics going on to suggest Massimo was “holding out”.
To use your metaphor; If I’m selling my 1999 4Runner but no one ever approaches me to ask about details (ie price) it’d be very weird to suggest I was “holding out”.
I don't know when this was said but wouldn't offering to resolve be acknowledgement that there was infringement on Apple's part?
Maybe now there will be willing to negotiate something
Assuming Apple is in a 2-year cycle with the watch like its other devices, what are the odds the offending part of the series 9 watch is also in the series 10 watch with not enough time to remove it before the 10 release. it would make the 10 necessary to be pushed back while they retool the product or continue negotiating for a licensing agreement
Or they could remove the feature (I don't find the pulse ox particularly useful on my Garmin watch... When I go to high altitude I bring my cheapo pulse ox from Walgreens that is supposedly much more as accurate). Or find some other way to implement it (Garmin, at least, has implemented it differently).
So Apple cannot import those watches. They could probably build them in the US (now there's a thought), and injunctions against domestic products are possible but very unusual. Usually there are damages, not injunctions.