Agreed. Oracle and Google fighting it out doesn't really tug at your heartstrings -- but this is just sad. It puts a human face on the effects of patent hoarding / trolling.
I too have a handicapped child and I know how much work it can be to make even the littlest progress. I'm so glad to hear you've found such a great tool and love that you have also noticed such a big spike in ability ... my son's seem to come during and immediately after trips to Disney World.
And I can also sympathize with the idea that you might lose the sudden gains. Our son didn't walk until he was 3-4 years old, and then at about 9 years old his knees started degrading. Which leaves me with this ... sometimes all I can do for my son is to pray and I'll do that for you too. But I'm also going to send my elected officials your story. It needs to be heard.
This is unfortunate, I do hope there is some recourse for him. I am curious, are there similar cases of this happening for the Android platform? Would there be another opportunity to plead his case before being banned?
Best solution here would appear to be never sync that iPad again, back it up to iTunes, disable its Wi-Fi, and consider it her speech appliance. Don't update the OS, don't sync to iTunes, never do anything with it again aside from using it for this essential purpose. If you have to buy another one, restore it from your iTunes backup. These are the 'legal' avenues, clearly with jailbreaking it's simpler.
Unfortunate that a legal battle puts you in that position, but if this app is as important to her life as she says, she should be perfectly fine freezing that iPad where it is and not treating it like an iPad any more. It is now a dedicated appliance, not a general-purpose iPad. Buy another one for everything else.
Sucks, but, best solution given the circumstances, I think. Obviously, it'd be great if the circumstances changed.
Modern computer equipment is not designed to last forever. Computer equipment that is heavily used by a 4 year old is even less likely to survive. (I just was trying to talk in my pool/sandbox/mud/...!)
Are you going back up the iTunes computer too? Restoring backups relies on various moving parts. It's never a simple matter when operating systems and hardware keep moving forward. I'm not saying there's a better solution here, just saying it's non-trivial and fragile.
Who should pay for that? The company which believes they aren't infringing and are already in negotations over the licensing? Or the family who presumable don't have infinite wallets?
I feel the discussion may be either:
Cheap enough or marketed enough.
Because never the article talk about it. So either it's cost prohibitive, our they couldn't even find it's existence. But again... If it were life changing...
Perhaps you missed this passage on a first read-through:
What would happen if we lost SfY? I have no idea. As I’ve explained
before, we have tried other communication apps and didn’t find any
that were a good match for Maya. Interestingly, we also carefully
considered purchasing a communication device from PRC, and met with
one of their representatives in November, nine weeks before a post
on my Facebook wall introduced me to SfY (and seven weeks before it
even existed in the iTunes store). We examined PRC’s devices and
were disappointed to see that they weren’t a good fit for Maya.
For us, this wasn’t an issue of an expensive device versus a
“cheap” app. This was an issue of an ineffective device (for Maya)
versus an app that she understood and embraced immediately. The
only app, the only system, that she immediately adopted as her own
way of communicating.
I think the best solution is to port the code over to android. You might be disallowed from selling your app on any marketplaces, but there's nothing preventing you from running it on your own device.
I don't do IOS development, but from what I hear you still need a developer account (which costs money and I'm assuming can be revoked) and there exists an install limit for your dev app (though I hear that limit is a lot higher than it used to be).
Their goal is also to provide this to other families. I don't think you can expect everyone that wants this tool to have apple hardware to compile on as well as a developer account.
That's a lot of hoops to get through when the alternative is as simple as attaching your .apk in an email or posting it online.
I wouldn't update to a major new iOS version (to avoid incompatibility issues), but there's no reason to turn off WiFi or not sync it. Like Google with Andriod, Apple has the ability to remotely remove apps from devices, but unlike Google [1] [2] I've never heard of them using it and I can't find any articles that suggest they have.
I assume that it's only for malware (given they haven't removed tethering apps, for example) so I wouldn't worry.
Ok, I've read it twice. I'm not sure I understand the argument. It reads like the argument is "This technology helps handicapped people so you shouldn't allow it to be patented." Is that a reasonable argument? PRC seems to have a valid patent, they sell a device the people in the article could use, Speak For Yourself infringed without a license and they are the good guys why?
The patent argument would go, "PRC figured out how to do this thing (invented it), we give them a limited monopoly so that they will continue to invest in doing things like this."
Now I completely agree that if there is litigation in progress that it's uncharitable for Apple to pull the app without a court order but it is their playground. And as everyone points out its not like they reach out and delete it on your iPad (which is why VLC still lives on mine btw)
The problem is that putting patents and similar legal steps exclusive ownership of ideas in place doesn't guarantee that they'll be used in the best ways.
Personally I think that patents and similar should be treated as property, and licensing should be required. The patent owner sets the price and it's taxed yearly based upon that price, whether products are made or not. This is similar to how real estate taxes are done in many places.
Also, at some large multiple of the price, it's possible to buy out the patent, putting it in the public domain. This way truly useful things deliver a windfall to their creators, or are licensed (possibly for much longer than patent protection allows today) creating recurring revenue.
clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy? It's a perfect parallel to ASL. And there's enough social utility that we should help companies gouge parents $8k a pop [1] instead of $400 ipad + $unknown for software?
"clicking glyphs on a screen and having a device speak the words the glyphs represent is patent worthy?"
I wouldn't think so, this patent is #5,920,303 which relates to a way of making is easy and efficient to access a large vocabulary from a screen with limited space. Reading through the patent just now I wouldn't say it is particularly obvious that this would be the best way to go about things. Its got about 5 years left in its lifetime.
Is it possible the folks at SfY saw one of PRC's devices and say "Hey would could code that up in an App!" and didn't check to see if it was patented? I don't know, just reading and wondering.
Finding a patent triples your vulnerability to infringement claims, and since the USPTO is rubber-stamping overbroad garbage rather than sanely enforcing the novelty and non-obviousness requirements, the answer to "is this patented?" is basically always yes.
Edit: I'm not claiming that this particular patent is invalid (I can't safely read it, of course), only that invalid patents are so prevalent and dangerous that merely looking has a huge negative expected value for any practitioner.
I agree, but there are times when you might want to check. So "Speak For Yourself" was founded by two Speech Pathologists [1] and they have been working with Autistic children for years. PRC's product seems to be the market leader (and of course its patented) and perhaps in part because it is patented it is very expensive. They had to have seen one, I expect they have even used them, and I would speculate they thought "gosh these are too expensive we could make an iPad app that is much cheaper."
Now if you are going to develop something, and it seems "easy" to do, and the existing product is expensive. I think a quick patent check is in order before you start. Here is a very real tale from my own life.
My sister owns a treadmill, its boring to walk on it, she and I both have iPads, she said "I'm sure you could whip out an app that would play a video of a walk that I like while I'm walking on the treadmill, that would be so cool, I'm sure lots of people would love it." I agreed, and the new iPad has bluetooth support that is compatible with various pedometers, so I figure hey, we can even tie the video to the walk and if we encode it in a street viewish way you could turn your iPad left or right and see various scenes along your route. Then we could TaskRabbit folks to 'take a hike' where something which is a cross between a Hero2 HD and a disco ball, and put together walks. Cool idea right? (well I thought so) and I wondered why the hell isn't this already out there? And there are kinda sorta things out there, and there are very expensive screens for treadmills out there. So I thought, why not check the patent database. Sure enough the whole space around exercising + video has the CRAP patented out of it. With feedback, without feedback, with advertising, without, on treadmills, on bikes, on rowing machines, on simulated ornithopters. Basically that is why that App doesn't and won't exist for another 10 years. It sucks, and the people who own the patents are leaving a lot of money on the table since they overprice their products because they 'can.' And in 2022 all that stuff will be free and clear and everyone will have one.
So you do your research, you figure out a way to do what you want to do which doesn't infringe. Document it. And then you go to market.
I'd argue that any "invention" that falls into the "wouldn't it be neat if..." domain is obvious, and under existing law should be rejected outright as the basis for a patent.
In this particular instance, was you sister "skilled in the art" of developing treadmills or software? If not, and it's obvious her her, chances are it's blindingly obvious to someone who is skilled in those arts, and presumably works in those fields.
Untrue. ASL is its own, unique language with distinct vocabulary, syntax, morphology and grammar. It's actually of significant interest to linguists due to the interesting spatial frames that appear to be unique to visual language.
You clone my app (that I've spent months creating) and sell it for 0.99 instead on 2.99. Now, I'm not rich and can't afford a lawyer or a lengthy lawsuit; it would ruin me. I want your app removed from the store NOW, and the manager of the store MUST have the right to judge what is right or wrong without a court order (that could take months and ruin businesses).
I'm not sure that the argument is the important part of this article; a lot of it was about lamentation. The author admits to having little knowledge of patent laws, and is offering their story for perspective.
As far as I can tell there were two points being made:
1. Apple might have been premature in pulling the app from the App Store. Not being under any immediate legal obligation to block the app, nor a ruling on whether there was infringement.
2. It might be unethical to go as far as having the app removed from the store this early on in their litigation. That move might take speech away from people who depend on Speak for Yourself.
I'm not saying those are good arguments, but they are what they are.
Also worth noting is the cost of SfY vs PRC products:
- The Speak for Yourself app cost $190, on top of the price of an iPad. The least expensive PRC product is $2,595. It seems geared towards the very young, or otherwise those with a fairly limited speech/thought faculties, hence they call it "SpringBoard Lite". The rest of PRC's products range from $7500 - $15,000.
I mention the prices because I wondered why the author couldn't just go buy one of PRC's products. They may be prohibitively expensive.
Perhaps SfY is seen as the good guys as they've been able to deliver a quality product at an attractive price point, on commodity hardware? As compared to thousands of dollars for clunky hardware? Not to mention that patents are generally harmful, and this patent does not seem to be contributing anything truly groundbreaking...
> PRC seems to have a valid patent, they sell a device the people in the article could use, Speak For Yourself infringed without a license and they are the good guys why?
The question of whether or not they've infringed is currently being litigated, so it's premature for you to say "Speak For Yourself infringed". And, therefore, it's premature for Apple to have removed the app. Does this mean you can take any app off of the store just by making a claim against it?
It's not just "uncharitable" for Apple; the action they took hurts people. And the "it's their playground" argument is getting old--yes, it's their playground, but it's perfectly reasonable for the rest of us to have (and discuss) our own opinions about how they run it.
This has a come up a couple of times, but I'll bring it up specificially:
"... the action they took hurts people. "
Yes and no. So my experience has been with VLC and App in the app store where the question of its 'open sourceness' came up and Apple removed it from the App store. I have it, I got it when it was there, and its still on my iPad, sync after sync, upgrade after upgrade, even from one device to another. It didn't go away and Apple didn't 'forward delete' it from my device. I suppose they could but they did not. Its not clear at all that they have made any move to delete anyone's SfY app either, they removed it and new users can't down load it, and the SfY gals get no revenue because it isn't being sold. So it hurts people who don't yet have it, and it hurts the SfY folks who might need that revenue to pursue their legal case, but it won't 'silence' Maya if here parents back up her iPad AFAICT. None of the articles linked mention that Maya's version of the App is in danger of being deleted, and it shouldn't be. Even if you buy a patent infringing device, the manufacturer can be banned from selling them but they cannot be forced to take yours back and destroy it.
Cynically: He knew the value of PR. Less cynically: He knew the value of children, and that such a situation would be deserving of secondary review and a conservative (in the non-political sense) course of action -- or inaction, until such time as a legal determination was made.
This might be one of those situations to benefit from that occasional, "direct line" to Jobs.
Regardless of the final determination of intellectual property rights, you don't cut kids off from such transformative assistance. You. Just. Don't.
If you've worked with such kids, you know how precious it is.
P.S. And yes, my grandparent post was somewhat rhetorical. In the small hope that such attitude, expressed more broadly, might provoke Apple into a further review and perhaps a "wait and see" position.
I don't want to be impolite or start a personal attack, but if you really don't consider what he did philanthropic, then you must re-consider your definition of this word.
He wasn't the only on, but was one of those guys who created this device that's giving this child a voice in the first place. You don't have to give huge chunks of money to charitable causes to be a philanthropic, you can use that money to build a company that makes people's lives better. Not that donating money is bad, just that there are different kinds of philanthropy. Jobs could've retired when he was 24 - he had about 400 million dollars then. But he tried to create a better company and lost almost all of it, and only years later regained his old wealth (in 2000+ he got I think hundreds of million of AAPL shares, and some years later got 7B selling Pixar to Disney).
He spent years and years of his life (yeas he could've enjoyed in Hawaii) building this very device; so, it's really unfair to not credit him for what he always aspired: changing the world (a little) and making a (small) dent in the universe.
And just to be clear: I'm not against capitalism. As much as it looks bad and IS bad, without capitalists we would have less progress in the world. As much as I love communism and socialism, they don't work really well in the real world (due to human nature, that's un-alterable).
So, don't judge entrepreneurs too harshly for not giving away their money.
>He wasn't the only one, but was one of those guys who created this device that's giving this child a voice in the first place.
That's a matter of happenstance, though. Jobs and Apple didn't create a device altruistically to be used by the disabled, they created a very popular piece of consumer electronics.
Nothing more. Any other light touchpad device with a similar app would fit Maya's use case, which could just as easily have been a Galaxy Tab or a Thinkpad X.
This is going to sound really bad, so please don't take offense, but what you're saying sounds very similar to Apple marketspeak. "The magical, world changing device" and whatnot. Let's try to keep perspective here.
That's my point: It could've been a cheap Android clone; but it wasn't. It was an iPad. Why? (who knows, but maybe) because Jobs & co., with their fiendish desire to create a useful device, were able to create something that people would actually use, create apps for AND purchase from its curated (and sometimes, unfair) stores. IF there wasn't a curated store, and a good device, maybe there would not have been an SfY right now; someone would eventually create something like this, but that could've been 5 years from now (IF Apple had not created iOS, Android wouldn't be what it is NOW, because of competition. It would be as good as it is in 3-4 years, but not right now). So, little Maya would've been voiceless for the past months; as she couldn't use those $15,000 devices.
And, personally, I really don't care about intents. Some believe there is a God and he judges based on your intents. I like to be more pragmatic and judge by impact. Lewis Carroll was a pedophile, so Alice shouldn't be called a great children books that millions of kids have had a great time reading. I couldn't care less if he was a pedophile, or Mother Teresa's assistant. Likewise, I don't give a damn if Jobs was a money-loving, dictator bastard. He was a major component in PC revolution, smartphone business and tablets. So, I respect him and credit him for a lot of lives that has changed by these devices. If I could, I would create a big statue of him, just to inspire others to take lead from him (it doesn't mean that I think he's a saint or I agree with more than 1% of the things he has done in his life, it just means that I think this guy, with all his faults and shortcomings was at least somehow useful for the world; what most of people are not and die without trying to change the world a better place).
Your world view very well might be different than mine, and that certainly changes the way you feel and think about Jobs, Gates, or other rich people. :)
Wrong. By your rationale every person in charge of a business is a philanthropist because they make other people's lives better. Like, let's say, British Petroleum, Bank of America, Electronic Arts, Blackwater, Heckler & Koch, people baking bread, and so on.
They are still a business, and they still make money. When they return some of the money they earned back to society without expecting them back, THEN you can call them philanthropic. That's how it works.
Don't try to rewrite the definition of a word just to fit your nice picture of the world, and please don't give us this upside down logic of "oh I'm such a philanthropist because I allow you to buy my products". Sorry, Jobs was not philanthropic. We are not inside the church of Apple so you'll have to deal with it.
No, not all of them. Just those that try to make a buck and try hard to make the world a better place by creating useful things (what have they given away? not their money; their time, which is the most important thing they have. they could go on vacation 200 days a year, but instead they try to create things to enrich the world and themselves).
Flawed logic again. They have not given away their time, they get paid for their time, like every other business out there. The more it sells, the better they get paid. They are not performing community service, they SELL stuff. SELLING stuff is not philanthropy, no matter how useful the product is.
Sure, they could go on vacation 200 days a year but the fact that some don't doesn't mean that they are philanthropic, it just means that they like their work or they get off on running a big company, or some other reason.
Sorry, you still have not managed to prove Jobs was a philanthropist, and you will not be able to to so by using sophisms. Try again.
Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money.
I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent allegations! Screw the people that rely on the products we're suing about, they won't mind". How dare they take away a person's ability to communicate? Tell me, is there any reasonable situation where it's acceptable to deny a child's ability to speak?
Oh, you mean that same money that is literally the only reason that they provide these "essential" products?
That simply isn't true.
I know a lot of people who work on apps similar to this, or in related fields, and money is far from the only reason they do it. Infact, I know people who literally give away their work to make sure people can use it.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" - US Constitution Section 8
At the time of the writing of the Constitution something was needed to help spur innovation. It was written in the time of inventions like the cotton gin (easily copied 100x over by anyone who bought 1). But make no mistake, patents and copyrights have been implemented solely to help improve society as a whole since day 1. Enriching inventors is a by product of the desire to push science and art forward, not the raison d'être.
Now it seems that patents, taken as a whole, inhibit innovation. Most entrepreneurs view patents as an obstacle to be overcome, not a reward for their efforts.
I think it's time we either abolish them or vastly raise the bar on what it requires to get a patent. We have several orders of magnitude too many patents on the books today.
Have you ever wondered why bands are allowed to "cover" other bands music without any kind of prior permission? It is because the US Congress wrote something called a compulsory license into the copyright law. Music was thought too important to our culture to allow one person to have control over a new song.
I say it is time we brought the idea of a compulsory license to patents.
It's definitely the case that Congress should take action on non-practicing entities being able to put up a tollbooth on others efforts; there is no way that qualifies as promoting the useful arts and sciences.
I'm of the opinion that a patent that has not been reduced to practice should be regarded as ineligible for any enforcement action. If you can't make it work, you should not be able to tax the people who did make it happen. And you definitely should not be able to prevent certain technological developments using the legal system just to protect your existing business.
That is definitely a good idea, but what about the patents that are so blatantly vague or obvious, that many people are unknowingly violating them. It seems it's easier to prove non-infringement rather than prior art with most software patents.
The patent grant puts the burden of proof on the alleged infringer, on the theory that a granted patent has been pre-vetted for all the right criteria. But when I look at patent litigation, it seems (and perhaps this is a selection bias problem) that in most cases, about 90% of the patent claims get immediately thrown out. Doesn't it seem that the presumption that the patent grant is a strong enough process to force the burden of proof onto the infringer is just a social mistake? If the burden of proof shifted to the patent holder, it would totally change patent litigation, while maintaining all the abilities we applaud about the patent system -- the ability of a patent holder to sue an infringer who stole their idea, and get compensated.
Patent claims get thrown out because that's how patents are designed. The idea is to break your invention down into an onion of claim layers so that when it comes to court, if a claim is thrown out as being partially or totally invalid, it's just like peeling as small a layer off the onion as possible. The point is that you can't be sure exactly where the court are going to stop peeling, but by breaking it down into layers you can be more sure that there'll be something useful left when they do, and you minimise the risk of their going too far. I don't think that strategy is dependent on which direction the burden of proof lies.
Could you imagine having to pay a compulsory license to use something like Amazon's patented one-click ordering? There's nothing so horribly wrong with the patent model; there's something wrong with the system that decides one-click is worthy of patent protection.
You would not be required but would have the privilege of licensing Amazon's patent. As it is now Amazon can prevent anyone from duplicating there patent for 20 years.
The US constitution section is much better than the closest bit of the EU equivalent (Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union). It just say (Article 17.2): "Intellectual property shall be protected.".
Does SfY have iOS specific functions? If not, one option would be to port it to Android, and then use it on a rooted android device. Since android doesn't depend on a single marketplace, it would be harder to remove it completely.
Just to clarify, there's no need to root the android device to run an app that's not on Google's market. There's a checkbox you fill that allows installation from "unknown sources". SfY could sell directly from their website if they wanted.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. One of the villains in this piece is Apple. Many of the people reading this comment are talented engineers. What Apple needs to survive, more than anything, are talented engineers. So don't work at Apple. Don't work for companies that compromise ethics in this way.
There's a reason Microsoft has been failing to compete for a while. It's because its practices got so evil that if you got offered a job there, your friends would make ha-ha-only-serious jokes about you going to work for Darth Vader. And so the best engineers, the one with options, went looking elsewhere. We need a culture like this now around Oracle, around Apple.
I don't agree that public shaming is the primary reason for Microsoft's demise -- there are lots of people who are attracted to work for the least ethical firms, just like Wall Street.
But, I agree with you, there should be more shaming when working for certain companies or in certain jobs. For instance, the companies that produce internet filters that are suitable for monitoring the traffic of entire countries.
The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.
If PRC was able to prove that to Apple, you hadn't read the OP but PRC had posted something about how people they trained stole their technology, would you direct the word "villain" towards Apple, PRC, or the makers of SpeakForYourself?
If I had a choice I'd keep the app on the app store. But, its important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively.
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.
Apple's needlessly abusive design is the sole reason you don't have that choice. They reserved for themselves the power to obstruct the author's use of her own tools, which should be a human right second only to food and shelter.
Don't Apple devices have locked bootloaders? I think it's a little disingenuous to say that Apple doesn't obstruct her from using Android when they have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure you can't run Android on an iPad. (Not to say you can't, but Apple has intentionally put up barriers to prevent it.)
Apple doesn't own the product; they sold it to her, and shouldn't obstruct her from using it as she sees fit. Your sentiment seems to imply that no one actually buys anything from Apple, they merely rent, and Apple rightly has the final say over how the renter uses the product. I don't see how the idea that she can simply choose to use another product really makes sense unless she's renting it.
Someone probably sold you a microwave. How easy is it to install Linux on it? They haven't provided you a way to and may have even erected barriers to stop you from doing so. Wouldn't that put any and all embedded device/"appliance" manufacturer in the same boat?
As far as I know, Apple doesn't want people to think of the iPad as a "computer" but as a device or appliance.
I'm a vegetarian; I see what Apple has done as more akin to selling a microwave that detects when there's meat in it and refuses to power on. Sorry, it's not a microwave, it's a vegetable cooker.
Microsoft had a monopoly, >95% market share at the time of the anti-trust suit. They deliberately blocked other OSes from manufacturers' PCs (BeOS, for instance, from Compaq's lineup). Apple may have the largest single share, but they are not in a monopoly position.
Well, iOS is also the only OS to run on iDevices. You can't switch to Android on your iPhone, you need to get a new phone altogether, just like you would've had to get a new Mac, instead of just installing another(BeOS) OS.
Actually, BeOS ran on macs. But the point remains, Apple is not in the market position to force out OS competition. They're in a position to make Their consumer device run their OS more easily than an alternate OS. They don't prevent anyone else from launching Android or Windows mobile devices, and they aren't in a position to. Their strongest anti-consumer position is the app store (in the sense that there is a gateway preventing consumer choice), but if you really care you can get around it by jail breaking, or just leave the platform. And if developers cared about their position, they should flood the android market with the apps needed to drive consumers away from iOS.
I guess Apple should keep it in the store and take one on the chin when they get sued for millions of dollars by the patent holders. It's not like they have anything better to do.
It is important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively. That's why I think it's manipulative to inject emotion into this like the post does. It's one thing to empathize with this poor mother and quite another to consider the facts and have an honest, serious discussion. What has happened to this family is awful. There's no question about that and I feel just as bad for them as anyone. But now we can't expect anyone to keep a cool head because of the way the issue was presented. Injecting emotion into the discussion is manipulative and effectively halts any critical thinking that might have gone on otherwise.
Disagree. In the comments on HN we are free to discuss this without emotion, or referring to emotion but keeping it in check with logical arguments that respect the system, the inventor(s) and the critical user.
I find it unreasonable to expect a mother, on her personal blog, to keep the same detached sentiment when her child's literal voice is threatened.
Emotion is not an inherently bad thing. It has a bad name among us geeks because it sometimes creeps into purely technical discussions where it has no place, to be sure. But when an unjust law is used to perpetrate evil - and make no mistake, that's what's happening here - the emotion of anger is entirely justified and appropriate.
A simpler explanation is that Microsoft's fortunes are tied to the PC. As that market matured, so did MS's profits. Now PC's are being disrupted by ARM/touch/mobile devices and their OS's, and MS is not dominating that area - just as Christensen's theory predicts. Of course, you'll be happier working for a company you like.
Note 1: MS made $5.11B profit last year.
Note 2: Apple's star is rising with the new devices.
I would definitely add Google to that list as well.
Their continued support of Motorola Mobility's behaviour in abusing FRAND rules is unconscionable and has the ability to undermine the entire industry.
How comes that the VFAT patent (held my Microsoft) is not considered FRAND?
After all, it's part of the UEFI specs, SD card specs, and so on. And what about the new exFAT stuff (required for some of the newer SD specs, SDXC or something like that)?
Microsoft certainly leverages those (esp. the VFAT stuff) against Linux in general, and Android specifically.
It is all about the dtandards body. I don't know which orgs are responsible for UEFI specs and SD format specs. It's up to the standards body to demand FRAND licensing.
There aren't any international standards that demand a vfat file system, are there? Are the vfat patents still in force, because I haven't payed anyone for those on any of my Linux systems. Is SD an ISO standard or just a consortium standard? (I don't know)
I'm not trying to say Microsoft has the cleanest hands with respect to patents, but in this case, it seems clear cut.
Quoting from Wikipedia (they link to the lawsuit):
"In October 2010, Microsoft filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola alleging several patents (including two of the FAT32 file system patents) were not licensed for use in the Android operating system."
If you think these patents are valid and that Microsoft should be permitted to demand licensing for them despite the direct connection to the monopoly they abused... well, I hope you don't use FAT32 on any of your Linux systems or that you're planning to call up someone in Redmond ASAP.
The VFAT patent isn't FRAND because it was just a de-facto standard that became popular because it was compatible with over 95% of desktop and laptop computers at one point in time.
Of course, you'd think that a convicted monopolist might have some obligations with respect to licensing patents essential to de-facto standards created by the same monopoly power. In today's world, unfortunately, you'd be wrong.
It's so ironic to read this story after having seen the keynote video proclaiming how iOS has changed so many lives in such profound ways, and having Tim Cook proclaim how "It’s a great reminder of what it’s all about, and why all of us do what we do". [1]
I get the fact that the way apple handled this is fairly standard, but it is still disheartening.
What's so special about this application that a concerted week of coding could not duplicate? It seems like a list of icons, and when you touch an icon a word is spoken. There is a facility to add new icons. The application also seems to permanently fix the location of each "learned" icon, so that as the child grows their vocabulary consists of an expanding set of "muscle memory" movements. There is also a facility to flag attempts to add duplicate icons. [1]
This reminds me of India telling Big Pharma to bugger off, they would not let AIDS people die to protect their profits.
Patents are supposed to be beneficial to society because they give incentive to the inventor to invent. But inventors inventing stuff doesn't seem to be a problem in computer technologies. We don't need these useless patents.
Most of it is in defense of their lawsuit, while the last paragraph is in defense of their request to remove the app from the Apple store.
Last week Prentke Romich Company (PRC) learned that Apple removed a language assistance app from its iTunes® store pending the outcome of a patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company that developed the iPad® app.
PRC and the licensor of the Unity™ system that powers our language devices jointly filed the lawsuit after our patent attorney found numerous instances of infringement on Unity patents in the “Speak for Yourself” app. Apple has a process that allows third parties to provide notice of infringement concerns as part of its terms and conditions. Accordingly, we reached out to Apple on two occasions. We provided Apple with a copy of the lawsuit, expressing our concerns about the “Speak for Yourself” app. We then responded to a later request from Apple asking for an update on the lawsuit. Last week, Apple elected to remove the app.
The Unity system is the result of the long commitment and hard work of Bruce Baker and his company, Semantic Compaction Systems (SCS). His life’s work, which he has refined over decades, created life-changing technology that has given a voice to thousands of individuals with profound disabilities. SCS and PRC filed the patent infringement lawsuit after we reached out to the app company’s founders and offered various business solutions, but were refused.
It is important to emphasize that while there are many useful language apps in the marketplace, “Speak for Yourself” is the only app named in the lawsuit because of its flagrant infringements on Unity patents.
There’s a reason patents are in place, to protect decades of hard work and research that go into our devices. To take someone’s life work and market it as your own is simply wrong. The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.
We do recognize that new consumer technology, such as tablet-based apps, are playing a useful role in assistive technology, although it is unlikely they will be the best option for all clients. We intend to participate in this space but will only do so in a way that supports the best possible language outcomes for those clients with severe communications disorders.
The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.
This is irrelevant to this discussion as long as none of the knowledge used was a trade secret. An employee is free to use expertise developed while at a previous employer.
>>> There’s a reason patents are in place, to protect decades of hard work and research that go into our devices. To take someone’s life work and market it as your own is simply wrong.
This appears to be the crux of it: is the technology that SfY 'copied' actually the direct results of decades of effort, or could it have been created by a few designers and developers looking at the problem of assisting disabled children over a few months?
If the approach that is used is trivial to think of and/or implement, then maybe it's not really "marketing someone else's life's work", but just re-implementing a simple-enough idea. If patents are granted for ideas as simple as that, then clearly patents are broken.
>>> We intend to participate in this space (new consumer technology / tablet apps) but will only do so in a way that supports the best possible language outcomes for those clients with severe communications disorders.
I hope that includes pricing a product well within range of most potential customers, and not at $2,500+ prices.
If the entire approach of an app is easily copied, it hardly has the right to expect to not be copied (except when patent protected). It's funny, we get much more complicated algorithms and systems implemented for free in free/open software, while these families have to pay the economic rent imposed by a patent-holder for a relatively simple design that IMO could be easily re-invented by a few product designers focusing on the problem.
The problem is that software is such an odd field that one man's "life's work" can easily be another's "weekend project".
Whenever I start feeling a bit full of myself after battling a week or so on some particularly difficult problem, I try to remember that there are people out there who could kick my ass in the time it takes to air an episode of The Simpsons.
In the end, this is why the whole notion of "software" patents is probably doomed from the start.
the technology that SfY 'copied' actually the direct results of decades of effort, or could it have been created by a few designers and developers looking at the problem of assisting disabled children over a few months?
You are making the classical developer mistake of thinking that programming is the hard part. Generally programming is the easy part. Domain knowledge is the hard part.
Let me give you an example, anyone could write an app to calculate e=mc^2. It took Einstein years to come up with that formula in the first place. Do you think because you could write that app in 5 minutes, you're as smart as Einstein?
And you make the classic mistake of faulty analogizing.
I totally acknowledge that it takes domain knowledge to come up with a good solution. However, I specifically ask this question because it looks likely to me that that doesn't apply in this particular case. An app that uses a hierarchical display of symbols to allow input of language seems to me like a natural, intuitive approach to allowing a user to generate speech. I believe if a few people were to iterate on an app for this purpose, they'd probably have come across this approach pretty quickly. In other words, I'm saying this is more an archetypal case of a broken software patent, rather than of a specialized domain invention that just happens to use computer hardware.
I could not have come up with the equation e = mc^2, but I believe I could have come up with the basic idea of a hierarchical icon display used to input language without years/decades of research. It would have been even easier for a speech pathologist to achieve that in this era of software and programmer abundance, even if PRC had never developed their system and gotten their patents.
(Of course, if I've misunderstood the scope of the patents involved, I apologize.)
Things like this make me wonder if we're missing something by decrying the patent trolls.
When the patent holder is a non-practicing entity, there is no incentive for the holder to interfere with the creation of competing products (abusive attempts to extract a settlement notwithstanding). Anything covered by the patent is a potential source of licensing fees, simple as that.
I'm going to start thinking out loud here: Imagine patent holders are disallowed from directly exercising the techniques covered by their patents. Corporations that patent technology in their field essentially have to sell their patents to NPEs and license them back. The researching corporation gets an up-front return on their R&D investment (and a potential head start in implementing the new patents before the rest of the public actually sees them) and the public suffers none of the side effects of a government-granted monopoly.
The biggest wrinkle in a system like this would be the whole mess of submarine patents. If NPEs could be incentivised to make their patents broadly known, and approach licensees before they implement those patents, they could actually become a real value-ad to the system rather than a parasite: Imagine a one-stop shop where you could license a patent, get a reference implementation, and access experts who could help you apply that patent to your product. It could be similar to companies like ARM that license reference chip designs to manufacturers.
Again, I'm just thinking out loud here, so feel free to let me know if I'm off-base here.
The idea that we need patents to foster innovation is a self-serving lie. Most of human progress -- everything that got us to where we are now -- happens faster the more copying everyone does.
America industrialized faster than Great Britain thanks to widespread copying -- and this saved countless human lives by lifting millions of people out of poverty faster than otherwise possible. Today China is industrializing faster still by rampant copying, and good for them.
This story is just another great example. The patent holder is reluctant to enter the iOS market because they know it will cannibalize their existing very-expensive-device market. Too bad for them. The market should punish them for being slow to serve people in the best possible way. I don't care how much they invested in the idea. That investment has zero value to customers unless it's actually being applied to serve them on the terms they want.
> The idea that we need patents to foster innovation is a self-serving lie. Most of human progress -- everything that got us to where we are now -- happens faster the more copying everyone does.
This completely misunderstands the historical reason for patents. Patents do not stifle copying: they encourage copying by transforming a permanent monopoly of secrets into a temporary monopoly of open information.
Patents were created to break the back of trade guilds. Trade guilds were organizations whose primary job was to protect (often on pain of death) trade secrets such as how to create gunpowder or how to mix a crucial sealant for a boat. Trade guilds completely stifled the advancement of technology. Patents broke them by offering a government-guaranteed but temporary legal monopoly instead of a permanent monopoly which required constant vigilance.
Trade guilds and jealously (and dangerously) guarded secrets still exist in certain trades not protected by patents. Most famously, candy-makers are notoriously vicious in protecting their secrets: indeed, Roald Dahl novelized this fact.
And we have the same situation now, don't kid yourself. If patents were to disappear tomorrow, we'd see the elimination of new generic drugs, industrial companies permanently hiding assembly secrets, and an awful lot more security through obscurity in software -- NOT good.
China's copying is not happening despite the patent system, but rather because of it. Because patents make secrets open, Chinese companies can see them and copy them (illegally). Without the patent system, companies would be extremely secretive about their processes and China would be still be in the dark ages.
[btw, if we're talking about copy cultures, the most famous one by far is Japan, which has been a copy culture for over 2000 years]
I think the main problem is that the length of protection is far too long for the IT industry - something more like three to five years would be more appropriate in my opinion given how fast it changes. And then there is also the problem that most software patents should fail the prior art or obviousness tests, but it costs so much to fight them that most companies settle...
This is correct and I agree with all your statements except for the last: China's copying is not _illegal_. China is not subject to US law. US Patents prevent copying _in the US_, but this restriction doesn't apply within China. You could argue that the uninhibited copying in China is depriving Americans of rightful patent license revenue, but that's still a matter of morality and not legality.
No, for the most part it IS illegal in China. That fact is used by government officials to extort bribes from vendors. When it suits their purposes, the government will pick out a pirate they don't like and literally shoot him in the head, giving themselves something to point at when accused by developed nations of soft on piracy and ensuring that rest of the pirates will keep the bribes coming.
I agree that these were historical arguments for the patent system. But I don't think those arguments were entirely valid then, and they're even more suspect today.
The end of trade guild secrecy had far more to do with the advent of mass production than with the patent system. Highly trained craftsman could be organized into a guild. But large numbers of easily replaceable workers necessarily couldn't.
As for the elimination of generic drugs, the drug makers themselves argue that figuring out how to copy most new molecules is so cheap and easy that they need strong patent protection to recoup their research costs. Reverse engineering drugs is cheap and getting cheaper.
Software is not going to get more secretive without patents. It's hardly possible that it could -- almost all commercial source code is already treated like trade secrets. The implication that software developers actually utilize techniques gleaned from patent applications is pretty far-fetched.
Security-by-obscurity is orthogonal to the issue of patents. All the peer-reviewed security algorithms that actually get used are unencumbered by patents, which is precisely why they actually get used. (The slow adoption of elliptic curve cryptography has been blamed on the existence of certain patents.) There's no incentive to design your own crypto algorithm and keep it secret -- that's unnecessarily expensive and stupidly risky. People share these techniques out of self interest, not because they enjoy patent protection.
The cost of spreading information continues to plummet. Conversely, the cost of keeping secrets continues to increase. I don't think the premise of a permanent monopoly of secrecy is remotely plausible. Even military technology (which of course relies only on secrecy, not patent protection) seems to proliferate on time scales shorter than patent lifetimes, though this is a hard contention to prove.
Blaming the patent mess on the Chinese is misguided. If a company felt harmed by a cheap version (that is branded clearly) then that might be a good time to reevaluate there business strategy. After that, go to the ITC for an injunction to protect their lack of market success.
There is a particular issue with software though. A software patent for the one-click-buy is more like a patent for explosive powder, rather than the exact composition of gunpowder. It is more like a drug to reduce brain swelling, which would not be patentable because the implementation is not obvious. With software, there are many ways to implement the same feature, so you can implement something in an entirely novel way and yet infringe a patent.
Patenting the workings of an internal combustion engine is one thing, patenting a horseless carriage is another.
ok, but can someone who has this app copy it into a jailbroken device? this way OP could have a backup device (or even two iPads!) with this software on, just in case.
Sorry, but fuck patents when its comes to human life. And silencing this kid is like taking life out of her and her parents.
I think presenting issues in this way is manipulative. Before I explain, I want to be clear that I truly do feel for this mother and her situation. I also think the patent system is irredeemably fucked to out it nicely. But if you're going to talk about real issues then you can't use stories like this to illustrate them because it's manipulative. Tugging on people's heart strings to push forward your philosophy/beliefs/ideas is a cheap ploy as old as time and it works because a story like this totally derails your ability to think rationally.
I wasn't clear on if the author of this piece was simply telling her tale of how the patent system had a profoundly negative impact on her and her family's lives or if it was meant to push ideas about patent reform or both. As far as the author goes, it doesn't matter because it's irrelevant. I feel for her no matter what her motivations were. We all do I'm sure. What is relevant is why it was posted on HN and it's not hard to guess it was to start a discussion on patent reform.
Now, I'm not stating a position for or against anything here (though I agree with the majority opinion here if you really want to know). What I am saying is that if you want to have a serious discussion about any issue you have to leave these emotional stories out of it because it's not fair and it's a cheap trick. People on both sides of any issue, yes, any issue, can come up with a heart wrenching story to get support.
If you want to discuss and debate an issue then debate it on facts and merit. If you want to empathize with people on either side of an issue then you're also free to do that too. One thing you cannot do, however, is both at the same time. Again, I have to reiterate that I'm totally on this mother's side. I have to keep repeating that because that's what these stories do! They suspend logic, get people all emotional, and the next thing you know people are reacting to things out of pure emotion without thinking no matter how logical the person they react to is being. Using emotion to put forth ideas is a manipulation that aims to hinder or completely stop any real, substantive discussion.
This is a cause we, as a group (i.e. majority of the hacker news readership) really support --- weakening the clusterfuck of a patent system we have today. So maybe you are uncomfortable watching these dark arts deployed, and maybe you have a point, but I, for one, welcome our Karl Rovian allies.
At this point, it may be all that's left that can move the political process forward.
But it is not a systemic issue that represents the state of patent law.
If for example the child's Ipad was taken away because it was found out to be stolen property it would have an equally negative effect on her development. It would still not be a call to arms to change legislation.
Appeal to emotion is wrong in an adult debate.
I feel very bad for the mother and I wish her and her daughter the best. But if the story was about a guy who lost his fortune to copycats and thus can't feed his handicapped daughter, it would be equally as sad and equally as manipulative from my point of view.
That said I do believe the patent system needs a massive reform. I just appreciate honest and fair debates.
> If for example the child's Ipad was taken away because it was found out to be stolen property it would have an equally negative effect on her development.
No, it would not. In that scenario, her parents would have a straightforward recourse - go and buy her another iPad. The closest parallel would be a law that forbade her from using any portable computing device regardless of where it came from. And yes, that would be a call to arms to change legislation. Appeal to emotion is wrong in a technical debate. It is not automatically wrong in a moral debate. Emotion is where our sense of morals - of which the law is supposed to be an implementation - comes from in the first place.
I disagree. In this scenario her parents do have a straightforward recourse - go and buy her the physical device sold by the patent owners (who's interface is apparently almost exactly the same, hence the patent infringement claim).
Now, you could argue that the patent isn't legit (it may not be) or that the dedicated device is prohibitively expensive (it may be), but both of those arguments are tangential to the point you were trying to refute.
"Interestingly, we also carefully considered purchasing a communication device from PRC, and met with one of their representatives in November, nine weeks before a post on my Facebook wall introduced me to SfY (and seven weeks before it even existed in the iTunes store). We examined PRC’s devices and were disappointed to see that they weren’t a good fit for Maya. For us, this wasn’t an issue of an expensive device versus a “cheap” app. This was an issue of an ineffective device (for Maya) versus an app that she understood and embraced immediately. The only app, the only system, that she immediately adopted as her own way of communicating."
I agree. This is a legal issue about 1) patent law, 2) Apple store policies. Whether your kid really needs the app or not is pretty irrelevant. I don't mean to sound heartless, but I think the emotional outpouring weakens the case for what you're hoping to achieve. The way it reads to me is "SfY is probably in the wrong here so I'm not going to defend them, but please just let everyone keep using this infringing software."
My whole take is that a patent for a device that plays a sound when you push a button with a picture on it is a complete joke. Surely there is prior art.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadAnd I can also sympathize with the idea that you might lose the sudden gains. Our son didn't walk until he was 3-4 years old, and then at about 9 years old his knees started degrading. Which leaves me with this ... sometimes all I can do for my son is to pray and I'll do that for you too. But I'm also going to send my elected officials your story. It needs to be heard.
Unfortunate that a legal battle puts you in that position, but if this app is as important to her life as she says, she should be perfectly fine freezing that iPad where it is and not treating it like an iPad any more. It is now a dedicated appliance, not a general-purpose iPad. Buy another one for everything else.
Sucks, but, best solution given the circumstances, I think. Obviously, it'd be great if the circumstances changed.
(Edited to add backup.)
Modern computer equipment is not designed to last forever. Computer equipment that is heavily used by a 4 year old is even less likely to survive. (I just was trying to talk in my pool/sandbox/mud/...!)
Now, if it's not remotely equally useful, sue them for something for screwing your life with false claims.
Because never the article talk about it. So either it's cost prohibitive, our they couldn't even find it's existence. But again... If it were life changing...
Their goal is also to provide this to other families. I don't think you can expect everyone that wants this tool to have apple hardware to compile on as well as a developer account.
That's a lot of hoops to get through when the alternative is as simple as attaching your .apk in an email or posting it online.
I assume that it's only for malware (given they haven't removed tethering apps, for example) so I wouldn't worry.
1. http://www.dailytech.com/Google+Uses+Its+Remote+Kill+Android... 2. http://www.neowin.net/news/google-to-remote-kill-malicious-a...
The patent argument would go, "PRC figured out how to do this thing (invented it), we give them a limited monopoly so that they will continue to invest in doing things like this."
Now I completely agree that if there is litigation in progress that it's uncharitable for Apple to pull the app without a court order but it is their playground. And as everyone points out its not like they reach out and delete it on your iPad (which is why VLC still lives on mine btw)
So what exactly is the question?
Personally I think that patents and similar should be treated as property, and licensing should be required. The patent owner sets the price and it's taxed yearly based upon that price, whether products are made or not. This is similar to how real estate taxes are done in many places.
Also, at some large multiple of the price, it's possible to buy out the patent, putting it in the public domain. This way truly useful things deliver a windfall to their creators, or are licensed (possibly for much longer than patent protection allows today) creating recurring revenue.
Not patentable are:
"discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods;
aesthetic creations;
schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers;
presentations of information."
[1] http://store.prentrom.com/
I wouldn't think so, this patent is #5,920,303 which relates to a way of making is easy and efficient to access a large vocabulary from a screen with limited space. Reading through the patent just now I wouldn't say it is particularly obvious that this would be the best way to go about things. Its got about 5 years left in its lifetime.
Is it possible the folks at SfY saw one of PRC's devices and say "Hey would could code that up in an App!" and didn't check to see if it was patented? I don't know, just reading and wondering.
[1] http://www.google.com/patents?id=SRQZAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
Edit: I'm not claiming that this particular patent is invalid (I can't safely read it, of course), only that invalid patents are so prevalent and dangerous that merely looking has a huge negative expected value for any practitioner.
Now if you are going to develop something, and it seems "easy" to do, and the existing product is expensive. I think a quick patent check is in order before you start. Here is a very real tale from my own life.
My sister owns a treadmill, its boring to walk on it, she and I both have iPads, she said "I'm sure you could whip out an app that would play a video of a walk that I like while I'm walking on the treadmill, that would be so cool, I'm sure lots of people would love it." I agreed, and the new iPad has bluetooth support that is compatible with various pedometers, so I figure hey, we can even tie the video to the walk and if we encode it in a street viewish way you could turn your iPad left or right and see various scenes along your route. Then we could TaskRabbit folks to 'take a hike' where something which is a cross between a Hero2 HD and a disco ball, and put together walks. Cool idea right? (well I thought so) and I wondered why the hell isn't this already out there? And there are kinda sorta things out there, and there are very expensive screens for treadmills out there. So I thought, why not check the patent database. Sure enough the whole space around exercising + video has the CRAP patented out of it. With feedback, without feedback, with advertising, without, on treadmills, on bikes, on rowing machines, on simulated ornithopters. Basically that is why that App doesn't and won't exist for another 10 years. It sucks, and the people who own the patents are leaving a lot of money on the table since they overprice their products because they 'can.' And in 2022 all that stuff will be free and clear and everyone will have one.
So you do your research, you figure out a way to do what you want to do which doesn't infringe. Document it. And then you go to market.
[1] http://www.speakforyourself.org/About_Us.php
In this particular instance, was you sister "skilled in the art" of developing treadmills or software? If not, and it's obvious her her, chances are it's blindingly obvious to someone who is skilled in those arts, and presumably works in those fields.
Untrue. ASL is its own, unique language with distinct vocabulary, syntax, morphology and grammar. It's actually of significant interest to linguists due to the interesting spatial frames that appear to be unique to visual language.
However, this mechanism for communication does parallel books that have been used for years and electronic devices involving Bliss symbols (a paper from 1981 describing this: http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publications/files/qpsr/1981/1...)
Yes, it's Apple's playground. But that doesn't mean they won't receive bad PR, lost sales, and a public backlash based on a boneheaded policy.
You clone my app (that I've spent months creating) and sell it for 0.99 instead on 2.99. Now, I'm not rich and can't afford a lawyer or a lengthy lawsuit; it would ruin me. I want your app removed from the store NOW, and the manager of the store MUST have the right to judge what is right or wrong without a court order (that could take months and ruin businesses).
Isn't Pepsi a clone of Coke? It's not exactly the same recipe, but functionally it's pretty damn close.
As far as I can tell there were two points being made:
1. Apple might have been premature in pulling the app from the App Store. Not being under any immediate legal obligation to block the app, nor a ruling on whether there was infringement.
2. It might be unethical to go as far as having the app removed from the store this early on in their litigation. That move might take speech away from people who depend on Speak for Yourself.
I'm not saying those are good arguments, but they are what they are.
Also worth noting is the cost of SfY vs PRC products:
- The Speak for Yourself app cost $190, on top of the price of an iPad. The least expensive PRC product is $2,595. It seems geared towards the very young, or otherwise those with a fairly limited speech/thought faculties, hence they call it "SpringBoard Lite". The rest of PRC's products range from $7500 - $15,000.
I mention the prices because I wondered why the author couldn't just go buy one of PRC's products. They may be prohibitively expensive.
He covered that: He said that he'd spoken with PRC and Maya couldn't use their device (PRC's).
The question of whether or not they've infringed is currently being litigated, so it's premature for you to say "Speak For Yourself infringed". And, therefore, it's premature for Apple to have removed the app. Does this mean you can take any app off of the store just by making a claim against it?
It's not just "uncharitable" for Apple; the action they took hurts people. And the "it's their playground" argument is getting old--yes, it's their playground, but it's perfectly reasonable for the rest of us to have (and discuss) our own opinions about how they run it.
"... the action they took hurts people. "
Yes and no. So my experience has been with VLC and App in the app store where the question of its 'open sourceness' came up and Apple removed it from the App store. I have it, I got it when it was there, and its still on my iPad, sync after sync, upgrade after upgrade, even from one device to another. It didn't go away and Apple didn't 'forward delete' it from my device. I suppose they could but they did not. Its not clear at all that they have made any move to delete anyone's SfY app either, they removed it and new users can't down load it, and the SfY gals get no revenue because it isn't being sold. So it hurts people who don't yet have it, and it hurts the SfY folks who might need that revenue to pursue their legal case, but it won't 'silence' Maya if here parents back up her iPad AFAICT. None of the articles linked mention that Maya's version of the App is in danger of being deleted, and it shouldn't be. Even if you buy a patent infringing device, the manufacturer can be banned from selling them but they cannot be forced to take yours back and destroy it.
To me you would just need to remove a few words : "technology shouldn't be patented".
At the very worst, patents should be allowed to last for 6 to 12 months, not 10 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXBb_30NNYE
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/36460
This might be one of those situations to benefit from that occasional, "direct line" to Jobs.
Regardless of the final determination of intellectual property rights, you don't cut kids off from such transformative assistance. You. Just. Don't.
If you've worked with such kids, you know how precious it is.
P.S. And yes, my grandparent post was somewhat rhetorical. In the small hope that such attitude, expressed more broadly, might provoke Apple into a further review and perhaps a "wait and see" position.
Haha! Unless their name was Lisa!
Steve Jobs initiated the corporate culture that continues to this day at Apple. He would not have changed anything in this situation.
So, maybe we should stick with the cynical explanation?
In any event, I don't think he would let this situation get too FUBAR.
Many anonymous, large donations have been attributed to him.
CTRL+F philanthropic
He wasn't the only on, but was one of those guys who created this device that's giving this child a voice in the first place. You don't have to give huge chunks of money to charitable causes to be a philanthropic, you can use that money to build a company that makes people's lives better. Not that donating money is bad, just that there are different kinds of philanthropy. Jobs could've retired when he was 24 - he had about 400 million dollars then. But he tried to create a better company and lost almost all of it, and only years later regained his old wealth (in 2000+ he got I think hundreds of million of AAPL shares, and some years later got 7B selling Pixar to Disney).
He spent years and years of his life (yeas he could've enjoyed in Hawaii) building this very device; so, it's really unfair to not credit him for what he always aspired: changing the world (a little) and making a (small) dent in the universe.
And just to be clear: I'm not against capitalism. As much as it looks bad and IS bad, without capitalists we would have less progress in the world. As much as I love communism and socialism, they don't work really well in the real world (due to human nature, that's un-alterable).
So, don't judge entrepreneurs too harshly for not giving away their money.
>He wasn't the only one, but was one of those guys who created this device that's giving this child a voice in the first place.
That's a matter of happenstance, though. Jobs and Apple didn't create a device altruistically to be used by the disabled, they created a very popular piece of consumer electronics.
Nothing more. Any other light touchpad device with a similar app would fit Maya's use case, which could just as easily have been a Galaxy Tab or a Thinkpad X.
This is going to sound really bad, so please don't take offense, but what you're saying sounds very similar to Apple marketspeak. "The magical, world changing device" and whatnot. Let's try to keep perspective here.
And, personally, I really don't care about intents. Some believe there is a God and he judges based on your intents. I like to be more pragmatic and judge by impact. Lewis Carroll was a pedophile, so Alice shouldn't be called a great children books that millions of kids have had a great time reading. I couldn't care less if he was a pedophile, or Mother Teresa's assistant. Likewise, I don't give a damn if Jobs was a money-loving, dictator bastard. He was a major component in PC revolution, smartphone business and tablets. So, I respect him and credit him for a lot of lives that has changed by these devices. If I could, I would create a big statue of him, just to inspire others to take lead from him (it doesn't mean that I think he's a saint or I agree with more than 1% of the things he has done in his life, it just means that I think this guy, with all his faults and shortcomings was at least somehow useful for the world; what most of people are not and die without trying to change the world a better place).
Your world view very well might be different than mine, and that certainly changes the way you feel and think about Jobs, Gates, or other rich people. :)
They are still a business, and they still make money. When they return some of the money they earned back to society without expecting them back, THEN you can call them philanthropic. That's how it works.
Don't try to rewrite the definition of a word just to fit your nice picture of the world, and please don't give us this upside down logic of "oh I'm such a philanthropist because I allow you to buy my products". Sorry, Jobs was not philanthropic. We are not inside the church of Apple so you'll have to deal with it.
Sure, they could go on vacation 200 days a year but the fact that some don't doesn't mean that they are philanthropic, it just means that they like their work or they get off on running a big company, or some other reason.
Sorry, you still have not managed to prove Jobs was a philanthropist, and you will not be able to to so by using sophisms. Try again.
Nothing instills rage in me more than companies, knowing how essential what they sell is, slagging each other for petty, pointless money.
I hate to be dramatic, but these are disabled adults and children for christ's sake, people who need things like SfY. I just do not understand how someone at the litigating company thought "hey, let's go sue a company over some very complex and possibly unfounded patent allegations! Screw the people that rely on the products we're suing about, they won't mind". How dare they take away a person's ability to communicate? Tell me, is there any reasonable situation where it's acceptable to deny a child's ability to speak?
The humanity of it all :/
/rant
Oh, you mean that same money that is literally the only reason that they provide these "essential" products?
That simply isn't true.
I know a lot of people who work on apps similar to this, or in related fields, and money is far from the only reason they do it. Infact, I know people who literally give away their work to make sure people can use it.
Speak for Yourself don't seem to be doing it only for the money (given their prices anyway).
At the time of the writing of the Constitution something was needed to help spur innovation. It was written in the time of inventions like the cotton gin (easily copied 100x over by anyone who bought 1). But make no mistake, patents and copyrights have been implemented solely to help improve society as a whole since day 1. Enriching inventors is a by product of the desire to push science and art forward, not the raison d'être.
Now it seems that patents, taken as a whole, inhibit innovation. Most entrepreneurs view patents as an obstacle to be overcome, not a reward for their efforts.
I think it's time we either abolish them or vastly raise the bar on what it requires to get a patent. We have several orders of magnitude too many patents on the books today.
Have you ever wondered why bands are allowed to "cover" other bands music without any kind of prior permission? It is because the US Congress wrote something called a compulsory license into the copyright law. Music was thought too important to our culture to allow one person to have control over a new song.
I say it is time we brought the idea of a compulsory license to patents.
I'm of the opinion that a patent that has not been reduced to practice should be regarded as ineligible for any enforcement action. If you can't make it work, you should not be able to tax the people who did make it happen. And you definitely should not be able to prevent certain technological developments using the legal system just to protect your existing business.
No limits, no greater good…
Since the app is a basic necessity for its user, customers wont mind going extra mile and root their device and use the app.
There's a reason Microsoft has been failing to compete for a while. It's because its practices got so evil that if you got offered a job there, your friends would make ha-ha-only-serious jokes about you going to work for Darth Vader. And so the best engineers, the one with options, went looking elsewhere. We need a culture like this now around Oracle, around Apple.
But, I agree with you, there should be more shaming when working for certain companies or in certain jobs. For instance, the companies that produce internet filters that are suitable for monitoring the traffic of entire countries.
The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.
If PRC was able to prove that to Apple, you hadn't read the OP but PRC had posted something about how people they trained stole their technology, would you direct the word "villain" towards Apple, PRC, or the makers of SpeakForYourself?
If I had a choice I'd keep the app on the app store. But, its important to keep a cool head and consider things objectively.
Source: http://www.facebook.com/PrentkeRomichCompany
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.
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.
Again, I vote that the app stays up. But you are being silly by portraying Apple as evil.
Apple doesn't obstruct her from using Android. She can choose not to use Apple products.
Edit: keep in mind this is what I was replying to:
They reserved for themselves the power to obstruct the author's use of her own tools, which should be a human right second only to food and shelter.
As far as I know, Apple doesn't want people to think of the iPad as a "computer" but as a device or appliance.
I find it unreasonable to expect a mother, on her personal blog, to keep the same detached sentiment when her child's literal voice is threatened.
Their continued support of Motorola Mobility's behaviour in abusing FRAND rules is unconscionable and has the ability to undermine the entire industry.
After all, it's part of the UEFI specs, SD card specs, and so on. And what about the new exFAT stuff (required for some of the newer SD specs, SDXC or something like that)?
Microsoft certainly leverages those (esp. the VFAT stuff) against Linux in general, and Android specifically.
There aren't any international standards that demand a vfat file system, are there? Are the vfat patents still in force, because I haven't payed anyone for those on any of my Linux systems. Is SD an ISO standard or just a consortium standard? (I don't know)
I'm not trying to say Microsoft has the cleanest hands with respect to patents, but in this case, it seems clear cut.
"In October 2010, Microsoft filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola alleging several patents (including two of the FAT32 file system patents) were not licensed for use in the Android operating system."
If you think these patents are valid and that Microsoft should be permitted to demand licensing for them despite the direct connection to the monopoly they abused... well, I hope you don't use FAT32 on any of your Linux systems or that you're planning to call up someone in Redmond ASAP.
Of course, you'd think that a convicted monopolist might have some obligations with respect to licensing patents essential to de-facto standards created by the same monopoly power. In today's world, unfortunately, you'd be wrong.
I get the fact that the way apple handled this is fairly standard, but it is still disheartening.
[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/654641-apple-s-ceo-presents-...
Have I missed something here?
[1] http://www.speakforyourself.org/About_The_App.html
Edit: Some interesting links:
Open Source Assistive Technology Software: http://www.oatsoft.org/
A collection of 5000 pictograms, necessary for an AAC application, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA: http://www.oatsoft.org/Software/arasaac-pictograms/
Edit:
pVoice, open source Augmentative and Alternative Communication: http://www.oatsoft.org/Software/pvoice
I wondered about that, although I am not a programmer. Thanks for the pictogram reference!
Please base the project outside the US, and build it for Android/Linux!
Patents are supposed to be beneficial to society because they give incentive to the inventor to invent. But inventors inventing stuff doesn't seem to be a problem in computer technologies. We don't need these useless patents.
Most of it is in defense of their lawsuit, while the last paragraph is in defense of their request to remove the app from the Apple store.
Last week Prentke Romich Company (PRC) learned that Apple removed a language assistance app from its iTunes® store pending the outcome of a patent infringement lawsuit filed against the company that developed the iPad® app.
PRC and the licensor of the Unity™ system that powers our language devices jointly filed the lawsuit after our patent attorney found numerous instances of infringement on Unity patents in the “Speak for Yourself” app. Apple has a process that allows third parties to provide notice of infringement concerns as part of its terms and conditions. Accordingly, we reached out to Apple on two occasions. We provided Apple with a copy of the lawsuit, expressing our concerns about the “Speak for Yourself” app. We then responded to a later request from Apple asking for an update on the lawsuit. Last week, Apple elected to remove the app.
The Unity system is the result of the long commitment and hard work of Bruce Baker and his company, Semantic Compaction Systems (SCS). His life’s work, which he has refined over decades, created life-changing technology that has given a voice to thousands of individuals with profound disabilities. SCS and PRC filed the patent infringement lawsuit after we reached out to the app company’s founders and offered various business solutions, but were refused.
It is important to emphasize that while there are many useful language apps in the marketplace, “Speak for Yourself” is the only app named in the lawsuit because of its flagrant infringements on Unity patents.
There’s a reason patents are in place, to protect decades of hard work and research that go into our devices. To take someone’s life work and market it as your own is simply wrong. The founders of the company marketing this app are speech-language pathologists who were trained by PRC, and who used their knowledge of the Unity system to develop a Unity-like app of their own and market it in the Apple iTunes store.
We do recognize that new consumer technology, such as tablet-based apps, are playing a useful role in assistive technology, although it is unlikely they will be the best option for all clients. We intend to participate in this space but will only do so in a way that supports the best possible language outcomes for those clients with severe communications disorders.
[1] http://www.facebook.com/PrentkeRomichCompany
This appears to be the crux of it: is the technology that SfY 'copied' actually the direct results of decades of effort, or could it have been created by a few designers and developers looking at the problem of assisting disabled children over a few months?
If the approach that is used is trivial to think of and/or implement, then maybe it's not really "marketing someone else's life's work", but just re-implementing a simple-enough idea. If patents are granted for ideas as simple as that, then clearly patents are broken.
>>> We intend to participate in this space (new consumer technology / tablet apps) but will only do so in a way that supports the best possible language outcomes for those clients with severe communications disorders.
I hope that includes pricing a product well within range of most potential customers, and not at $2,500+ prices.
If the entire approach of an app is easily copied, it hardly has the right to expect to not be copied (except when patent protected). It's funny, we get much more complicated algorithms and systems implemented for free in free/open software, while these families have to pay the economic rent imposed by a patent-holder for a relatively simple design that IMO could be easily re-invented by a few product designers focusing on the problem.
Whenever I start feeling a bit full of myself after battling a week or so on some particularly difficult problem, I try to remember that there are people out there who could kick my ass in the time it takes to air an episode of The Simpsons.
In the end, this is why the whole notion of "software" patents is probably doomed from the start.
You are making the classical developer mistake of thinking that programming is the hard part. Generally programming is the easy part. Domain knowledge is the hard part.
Let me give you an example, anyone could write an app to calculate e=mc^2. It took Einstein years to come up with that formula in the first place. Do you think because you could write that app in 5 minutes, you're as smart as Einstein?
I totally acknowledge that it takes domain knowledge to come up with a good solution. However, I specifically ask this question because it looks likely to me that that doesn't apply in this particular case. An app that uses a hierarchical display of symbols to allow input of language seems to me like a natural, intuitive approach to allowing a user to generate speech. I believe if a few people were to iterate on an app for this purpose, they'd probably have come across this approach pretty quickly. In other words, I'm saying this is more an archetypal case of a broken software patent, rather than of a specialized domain invention that just happens to use computer hardware.
I could not have come up with the equation e = mc^2, but I believe I could have come up with the basic idea of a hierarchical icon display used to input language without years/decades of research. It would have been even easier for a speech pathologist to achieve that in this era of software and programmer abundance, even if PRC had never developed their system and gotten their patents.
(Of course, if I've misunderstood the scope of the patents involved, I apologize.)
When the patent holder is a non-practicing entity, there is no incentive for the holder to interfere with the creation of competing products (abusive attempts to extract a settlement notwithstanding). Anything covered by the patent is a potential source of licensing fees, simple as that.
I'm going to start thinking out loud here: Imagine patent holders are disallowed from directly exercising the techniques covered by their patents. Corporations that patent technology in their field essentially have to sell their patents to NPEs and license them back. The researching corporation gets an up-front return on their R&D investment (and a potential head start in implementing the new patents before the rest of the public actually sees them) and the public suffers none of the side effects of a government-granted monopoly.
The biggest wrinkle in a system like this would be the whole mess of submarine patents. If NPEs could be incentivised to make their patents broadly known, and approach licensees before they implement those patents, they could actually become a real value-ad to the system rather than a parasite: Imagine a one-stop shop where you could license a patent, get a reference implementation, and access experts who could help you apply that patent to your product. It could be similar to companies like ARM that license reference chip designs to manufacturers.
Again, I'm just thinking out loud here, so feel free to let me know if I'm off-base here.
America industrialized faster than Great Britain thanks to widespread copying -- and this saved countless human lives by lifting millions of people out of poverty faster than otherwise possible. Today China is industrializing faster still by rampant copying, and good for them.
This story is just another great example. The patent holder is reluctant to enter the iOS market because they know it will cannibalize their existing very-expensive-device market. Too bad for them. The market should punish them for being slow to serve people in the best possible way. I don't care how much they invested in the idea. That investment has zero value to customers unless it's actually being applied to serve them on the terms they want.
This completely misunderstands the historical reason for patents. Patents do not stifle copying: they encourage copying by transforming a permanent monopoly of secrets into a temporary monopoly of open information.
Patents were created to break the back of trade guilds. Trade guilds were organizations whose primary job was to protect (often on pain of death) trade secrets such as how to create gunpowder or how to mix a crucial sealant for a boat. Trade guilds completely stifled the advancement of technology. Patents broke them by offering a government-guaranteed but temporary legal monopoly instead of a permanent monopoly which required constant vigilance.
Trade guilds and jealously (and dangerously) guarded secrets still exist in certain trades not protected by patents. Most famously, candy-makers are notoriously vicious in protecting their secrets: indeed, Roald Dahl novelized this fact.
And we have the same situation now, don't kid yourself. If patents were to disappear tomorrow, we'd see the elimination of new generic drugs, industrial companies permanently hiding assembly secrets, and an awful lot more security through obscurity in software -- NOT good.
China's copying is not happening despite the patent system, but rather because of it. Because patents make secrets open, Chinese companies can see them and copy them (illegally). Without the patent system, companies would be extremely secretive about their processes and China would be still be in the dark ages.
[btw, if we're talking about copy cultures, the most famous one by far is Japan, which has been a copy culture for over 2000 years]
Here in Uruguay, lawyers are much cheaper but justice is extremely slow (also not good).
The end of trade guild secrecy had far more to do with the advent of mass production than with the patent system. Highly trained craftsman could be organized into a guild. But large numbers of easily replaceable workers necessarily couldn't.
As for the elimination of generic drugs, the drug makers themselves argue that figuring out how to copy most new molecules is so cheap and easy that they need strong patent protection to recoup their research costs. Reverse engineering drugs is cheap and getting cheaper.
Software is not going to get more secretive without patents. It's hardly possible that it could -- almost all commercial source code is already treated like trade secrets. The implication that software developers actually utilize techniques gleaned from patent applications is pretty far-fetched.
Security-by-obscurity is orthogonal to the issue of patents. All the peer-reviewed security algorithms that actually get used are unencumbered by patents, which is precisely why they actually get used. (The slow adoption of elliptic curve cryptography has been blamed on the existence of certain patents.) There's no incentive to design your own crypto algorithm and keep it secret -- that's unnecessarily expensive and stupidly risky. People share these techniques out of self interest, not because they enjoy patent protection.
The cost of spreading information continues to plummet. Conversely, the cost of keeping secrets continues to increase. I don't think the premise of a permanent monopoly of secrecy is remotely plausible. Even military technology (which of course relies only on secrecy, not patent protection) seems to proliferate on time scales shorter than patent lifetimes, though this is a hard contention to prove.
Patenting the workings of an internal combustion engine is one thing, patenting a horseless carriage is another.
I wonder if this removal will be a net loss for them.
[1] I've linked it twice on this thread, and its in the original post's conclusion
Sorry, but fuck patents when its comes to human life. And silencing this kid is like taking life out of her and her parents.
I wasn't clear on if the author of this piece was simply telling her tale of how the patent system had a profoundly negative impact on her and her family's lives or if it was meant to push ideas about patent reform or both. As far as the author goes, it doesn't matter because it's irrelevant. I feel for her no matter what her motivations were. We all do I'm sure. What is relevant is why it was posted on HN and it's not hard to guess it was to start a discussion on patent reform.
Now, I'm not stating a position for or against anything here (though I agree with the majority opinion here if you really want to know). What I am saying is that if you want to have a serious discussion about any issue you have to leave these emotional stories out of it because it's not fair and it's a cheap trick. People on both sides of any issue, yes, any issue, can come up with a heart wrenching story to get support.
If you want to discuss and debate an issue then debate it on facts and merit. If you want to empathize with people on either side of an issue then you're also free to do that too. One thing you cannot do, however, is both at the same time. Again, I have to reiterate that I'm totally on this mother's side. I have to keep repeating that because that's what these stories do! They suspend logic, get people all emotional, and the next thing you know people are reacting to things out of pure emotion without thinking no matter how logical the person they react to is being. Using emotion to put forth ideas is a manipulation that aims to hinder or completely stop any real, substantive discussion.
At this point, it may be all that's left that can move the political process forward.
A child is using an assistive technology, but may face its loss at a cognitively critical time in her intellectual and social development.
How is that not a 'real issue'?
Perhaps my definition of a 'real issue' is different from yours.
But it is not a systemic issue that represents the state of patent law.
If for example the child's Ipad was taken away because it was found out to be stolen property it would have an equally negative effect on her development. It would still not be a call to arms to change legislation.
Appeal to emotion is wrong in an adult debate.
I feel very bad for the mother and I wish her and her daughter the best. But if the story was about a guy who lost his fortune to copycats and thus can't feed his handicapped daughter, it would be equally as sad and equally as manipulative from my point of view.
That said I do believe the patent system needs a massive reform. I just appreciate honest and fair debates.
No, it would not. In that scenario, her parents would have a straightforward recourse - go and buy her another iPad. The closest parallel would be a law that forbade her from using any portable computing device regardless of where it came from. And yes, that would be a call to arms to change legislation. Appeal to emotion is wrong in a technical debate. It is not automatically wrong in a moral debate. Emotion is where our sense of morals - of which the law is supposed to be an implementation - comes from in the first place.
Now, you could argue that the patent isn't legit (it may not be) or that the dedicated device is prohibitively expensive (it may be), but both of those arguments are tangential to the point you were trying to refute.
"Interestingly, we also carefully considered purchasing a communication device from PRC, and met with one of their representatives in November, nine weeks before a post on my Facebook wall introduced me to SfY (and seven weeks before it even existed in the iTunes store). We examined PRC’s devices and were disappointed to see that they weren’t a good fit for Maya. For us, this wasn’t an issue of an expensive device versus a “cheap” app. This was an issue of an ineffective device (for Maya) versus an app that she understood and embraced immediately. The only app, the only system, that she immediately adopted as her own way of communicating."
My whole take is that a patent for a device that plays a sound when you push a button with a picture on it is a complete joke. Surely there is prior art.