Absent a court-ordered injuction, Apple has no obligation to read, let alone give credence to anyone's claims in this matter, and that's exactly what they should have done: let the courts sort it out. Make PRC get the injuction, don't just give it to them for free.
Exactly this. Apple is, IMHO, in the wrong here because they have acted in advance of a court decision, thereby making themselves the arbiter of a patent claim, not the courts.
Actions like this only serve to highlight the dangers with the walled-garden approach... or maybe, better said, by acting in this way, Apple makes the walled-garden of iOS a less attractive environment for developers and reduces the motivation to innovate using their platform.
Yes Apple is in the wrong but (and possibly I'm giving them too much credit in terms of their corporate unity) maybe their actions are an effort to not weaken the veracity of their own patent claims. Whereby any leniency shown by Apple in the case of other entities patent claims could be used in court against Apple when they are defending their own.
Apple has done it because they are getting 30% of the sale fee from software that is potentially infringing someone's patent. They could be sued for that quite easily if the makers of SfY went bankrupt.
It's a no brainer for a corporate heirarchy to choose to pull it from the store.
Doesn't make it ethically squeaky clean.
They don't have any obligation to do so, but in most case you'll probably want them to: you built an application on your own, over 6 months of your life, and a guy cracked, replicated and uploaded it. Surely you'll want his app thrown out even without having to go through court won't you?
Of course I'd love to have the other guys app taken down if it copied mine. But I'd also want to know that I'm safe against spurious claims of copying from someone else.
If I have to choose one of the two, I'd choose the latter.
I'd not want Apple to be judge, jury and executioner, because they have no legal obligation to ensure a fair, transparent and equitable process, and so the more willing they are to take unilateral action, the greater the risk for me of relying on them for income is.
In fact, given stuff like this, I'm very happy not to be dependent on any income from the app store that can be just yanked away at a moments notice without any real recourse.
The engineers used their knowledge on speech-synthesizers to make a similar app. Just like an Airport engineer leaving Apple to build wi-fi devices, or an iPod engineer using his knowledge of hardware and interfaces to build modern thermostats. Hmmm...
It's not a stretch of anything because it's not in any way, shape or form a qualifier for the case at hand but an example used in making the case for "gatekeepers" acting without court orders if they believe that is for the best of their keep.
