I hope he sues and wins. Frikkin apple. The new microsoft.

This is hardly novel. Many people complained about the lack of wifi syncing when the iPhone came out. I do think that he will probably get a settlement but is this really such a big deal?

Apple have done this kind of think for years (ref Sherlock/spotlight etc). They have in the past also paid for things they liked to take in house - the coverflow system for one and iTunes was actually a third party app at one point. However, I'm not sure the plaintiff can claim syncing over the air was 'his idea' in any real sense. First of all iPhones have always synced some data over the air - email, calendar events etc - just not music and video. Plus wifi syncing with iTunes has been a request virtually since the iPod started - or at least since wifi became widespread, which predates the iPhone too. I just don't see how the guy can claim any intellectual property over the concept and he's going to have a very hard time convincing people Apple actually stole his code. He's made half a mill, If I was him I'd quit while I was ahead. I'm pretty certain however it ends his lawyer will make more out of it than he does.

As to the notifications thing, I think it's a reasonable argument Apple might have got the idea from the umpty-million Android phones in existence rather than a jailbreak iPhone app that's been downloaded maybe a few thousand times. Which means he's going to be behind Google in the queue to sue and I think they have many more lawyers than he does. In fact if he pushes it he may find Google asking him where he got the idea from and that's not a discussion he wants to get into.

Yep, Apple stole the ideas, from somewhere at least. It wasn't the first time they did it, everyone else does it, they'll all do it again in the future. Arguably, the guys who made the jailbreak apps stole the ideas, or at least didn't actually come up with them themselves. It's just the way the world is. if they can get some money out of it good luck to them but they're not on a firm enough footing to take the moral high ground.

Jon

As the internet says 'Haters gonna hate'.

Jon

Have you seen the icons for the two apps? Pretty similar.

Totally, I do not think this is a big deal as you have pointed out. I do think that he will get a settlement of some kind. I think that I am more balanced that that, ie I do not slag off Microsoft at every opportunity like some here.

Yes and his icon is startlingly similar to aspects of the icon for iSync, an app which Apple pretty much deprecated a couple of years ago but which did exactly what his app does with third party phones over a wireless connection (Bluetooth rather than wifi, but nevertheless). I used it for that purpose when I had a Nokia 6300 phone. In fact if you took the menu item for iSync and pasted the menu item for AirPort over it, you'd get his icon exactly. Both of which significantly predate his app. So who is copying who here?

Jon

Yes I still have iSync in my dock because I have older phones that I use to sync it with. So the combination of the Airport icon and iSync icons would give you the combined icon. So it would look like he merged two Apple icons to get his icon. In that respect he cannot claim copyright.

But Apple developers looked at the code, and said they admired it, even if it wasn't suitable for including in the store... Then Apple releases the "same thing", using the same name and the same logo (well, they did at least change the colour). That smells a lot like IP theft, and as they had the source code, they will have a hard time proving they clean-roomed the concept.

Why can't Apple be up front about this sort of thing? They could have told him, it wasn't suitable for inclusion in the store, but they'd like to include it in iOS as a core feature and paid him a reasonable sum for it. Instead, they try and steal it and include it through the backdoor and walk straight into more bad publicity...

I like Apple products, but they are overpriced and their corporate ethics are getting more evil, self righteous and plain wrong with each passing second.

They really need to get a new marketing and publicity team in there to save their image, before it is too late.

I'm just losing my faith in Apple.

Look at the Store policies for in-app purchases, they are now quickly backpeddling here, they steal code from small developers, without compensating them, they deny security problems, until the entire tech community is laughing at them... They really aren't doing themselves any favours at the moment.

But Apple should have offered him a deal from the get-go, not wait until they get bad publicity for "stealing" it.

Yes but how do we know that this was already a planned upgrade many years ago? The iPhone has had regular incremental upgrades to the hardware and software. Users moaned that many features that they expected were simply not there, like cut and paste. Yet a while later they introduce it. They probably had this as part of their routemap for years. They simply did not disclose that fact. They did apparently offer him a job. Which he turned down.

No, they didn't. Very specifically, they didn't look at his code or we'd be in a whole different kettle of fish. You don't have to submit source code for appstore approval, only the binary. OK, they could have decompiled it but that won't give them 'his code'.


They took the graphic they've used for every single syncing process any Apple software or hardware uses and combined with the icon specifically suggested by the Wi-Fi Alliance to signify wireless communications. And they applied that to an app that does wifi syncing and called it 'wifi sync'. The name is entirely generic (which is probably partly why the plaintiff apparently failed to legally protect it in any way) and the icon if anything is him copying them.


Or, alternatively, they already had people working on the system themselves so paying him for code would be a waste of time (note, if you read the jailbreak forums, his app apparently doesn't actually work all that well a lot of the time..) . Coverflow is an obvious example of someone coming up with something novel and Apple paying them for it. There are plenty of other examples where third party developers have come up with nice apps/tools and Apple have offered/given them a job - Delicious Monster are always complaining Apple are pinching their staff for example and Panic also have lost staff to Apple. The fact they merely asked the kid to submit a CV suggests they were quite interested but not enough to straight out offer him a job. It seems possible that if he'd followed it up successfully his first day at work would have been 'OK, these guys are already doing exactly what you were doing, go work with them'.


No disrespect but
a) They don't care
b) You were somewhat naive to have 'faith' in a corporation anyway...

I use Apple's kit rather than the competition because it fulfills certain criteria I have better than the competition. But I wouldn't trust Apple Inc. further than I could throw an angry bear.


They made him an offer, he went for Cydia instead. His choice.

Jon

Register clicky

Neowin excluded this key quote from the original article:




a) Doesn't bother me, but they aren't getting much more money out of me. I'm disappointed with the direction of the iPhone, their Macs are just too overpriced - I bought my original iMac, because it was about 10% more expensive than a standard desktop + 24" monitor, now they are over 60% more.

I can get a decent 21,5" monitor for around 110€ and a PC of a similar spec would cost around 600€. The base iMac costs 1150€.

The same with my laptop, I was looking at a MBP 17", ended up with a more powerful Sony for less than half the price...

b) Good, "faith" is perhaps not the right word. But they put forward an image perfectness, that everything they do is high quality (given the number of dead iPhones we've swapped out recently - my boss is on his 5th iPhone in 18 months!) and their attitude to security problems is abysmal.

That gives me less and less confidence in their products.

Asking a student for his CV, isn't an offer. If they had offered him a job, once he had finished his course, or sponsoring his studies would have been an offer.

Apple have agreed that some ideas didn't actually didnt belong to them and have paid Nokia an undisclosed sum and ongoing royalties to allow them to use these non Apple ideas.
clicky
At the time of writing Jobs is in a coma from the shock of Apple actually not having the idea in the first place but is reported to have cried out before passing out "but we made them magical and revolutionary, its just not fair!!!" .. (allegedly )