Thread

US jury says Apple owes record $5.7B in haptic technology patent case

77 points · 67 comments · onemoresoop

smalltorch · 1790442053 · focus · HN ↗
Wow, that's a lot of money for a little buzz. I mean what could possibly be such sacred knowledge that a vibration could even be patentable.
You spin a unbalanced thing in a circle and it creates a vibration. Make it less unbalanced and you get a smoother vibration.
1. bigyabai · 1790442710 · focus · HN ↗
  Why do people cry foul like they've lost a limb when OpenAI steals Apple IP, but then shirk away from condemning Apple stealing Taction or Masimo's IP?
  The community has to pick a lane. Either IP theft is good and promotes competition, or IP theft is bad and we have to apply the law equally.
  1. smalltorch · 1790442873 · focus · HN ↗
    I need more details which the article doesn't provide but I'm pretty sure vibration is common knowledge and what could the design possibly done that was so patentable
    bigyabai · 1790442975 · focus · HN ↗
    Vibration might be, but the Taptic Engine is differentiated and trademarked as Apple's own unique feature: <a href="https://uspto.report/TM/86543432" rel="nofollow">https://uspto.report/TM/86543432
    californical · 1790455965 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s like saying light is common knowledge, creating a device that emits light couldn’t possibly be patentable. Or heat is common knowledge, induction stoves shouldn’t be patentable. Like if that’s your threshold then nothing is patentable
  2. nozzlegear · 1790443414 · focus · HN ↗
    Goomba fallacy, they're not the same people
  3. eecc · 1790444273 · focus · HN ↗
    Like the parent wrote: one “patent” is a miniature vibrator, something like those found in cheap sex toys, the other consists of poaching people working on the frontiers of knowledge, corrupting them to steal such unique ideas for money.
    Tell me you’re not so thick
    Rohansi · 1790448904 · focus · HN ↗
    > one “patent” is a miniature vibrator, something like those found in cheap sex toys
    I'm no expert but they use completely different technologies. Apple's Taptic Engine is not just a motor spinning an off balance weight like massagers.
    [deleted] · 1790451670 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    fennecbutt · 1790519276 · focus · HN ↗
    Apple's "taptic engine" is just a linear actuator aka solenoid and it has been done before.
    Apple's "liquid retina display" is just LG/Sharp/Etc IPS LCD - aka what they should be called, just like everyone does. None of this "magical Apple words" to make it sound like their own tech.
  4. andsoitis · 1790444455 · focus · HN ↗
    > The community has to pick a lane.
    There isn’t one mind. We are unique individuals with different opinions. Opinions of an individual can even be contradictory!
  5. amelius · 1790444563 · focus · HN ↗
    The whole patent system sucks. It has nothing to do with reality.
    The aspect of "you are granted a monopoly on a technology for a period of time" is something that is especially bad.
    eastbound · 1790447020 · focus · HN ↗
    Before patents, scientists wouldn't share their findings. Patents are an excellent way of making things public domain 20 years later.
    We should have the same with software.
    ndriscoll · 1790447448 · focus · HN ↗
    Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source, the right to have someone change/fix it for you, and the right to share your changes/fixes under a right-to-repair umbrella. Maybe retain a limited (e.g. ~5 year) distribution monopoly on the original (so you could distribute patches but not the full thing).
    Source is less important with LLMs now, but it's wasteful and destructive to the planet to have everyone need to use them to reverse engineer things for no reason.
    An economy built around not making knowledge prolific is obviously a bad, inefficient idea, and in the end will be our downfall.
    jmalicki · 1790448435 · focus · HN ↗
    So you're saying you strongly support software patents?
    ndriscoll · 1790453866 · focus · HN ↗
    Literally nothing in what I wrote would suggest that. In fact the initial "or" contradicts that. There's no need for patents of you just require the knowledge be made available in consumer protection law.
    andsoitis · 1790449963 · focus · HN ↗
    > Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source,
    That would infringe upon my freedom as a creator of software. No thanks.
    ndriscoll · 1790453911 · focus · HN ↗
    Consumer protection laws infringe on the freedom of manufacturers to screw consumers, yes. That's the idea.
    armchairhacker · 1790447973 · focus · HN ↗
    Why? Open source is doing fine.
    Instead of patents, the government could just pay scientists who make useful things. Sure it costs government money, but so do the lawsuits.
    amelius · 1790493957 · focus · HN ↗
    > Before patents, scientists wouldn't share their findings.
    But most of science is funded by the government ... shouldn't the taxpayer get something in return?
    onel · 1790507152 · focus · HN ↗
    Fun fact, a lot of software patterns are banned in the EU. Especially pure software patterns.
  6. to11mtm · 1790448506 · focus · HN ↗
    FWIW, I think it was determined that the patent violation here was not 'willful'.
    That said, we are talking about patents here, which are sometimes their own minefield of bullshit.
    For example, Having to deal with a jury that may or may not be able to discern (Especially how a patent is written nowadays) versus an alternative but non-infringing design that accomplishes the same thing, and/or being able to properly discern similarly alternative 'prior art' from before the patent existed.
    I don't know how guilty Apple is, or isn't, to be clear, but I remember how close to 25-ish years ago, a paintball company named Smart Parts managed to snatch up certain patents and then bully most of the industry into either paying them royalties or ceasing manufacture of electronic paintball markers, even despite the presence of prior art [0] and in many cases a very different fundamental design [1].
    Or, as another curiosity, the whole thing where Doom 3 only got EAX support to keep Creative Labs happy, about them holding a patent on Z-Fail that Carmack didn't know about when he independently discovered it. And hell, the irony is, the technique is still instead known as 'Carmack's Reverse'.
    Or, I remember the time I was at a company and I got to sign patent rights away for a dollar. The overall concept was so vague, I had to cringe in every meeting around describing the so-called 'novelty'.
    tl;dr - patent 'infringement' is a murky field, and certainly different from hoovering up material protected by copyright, regardless of your opinions on current copyright laws (I do think they are way way way too long, also I think patent law has changed for the worse in the last 20-ish years.)
    [0] - Specifically, there was a patent for a US Navy 'Pneumatic machine gun with photo cell interrupted circuit' that was actually listed as a prior art citation on the Smart Parts Patent, but most of the companies that were truly non-infringing were also too small to have the cash to fight in court.
    [1] - The original Smart Parts markers used a mechanical/electrical switch, board controlled air valve to move bolts and hammers back and forth, but they would even go after manufacturers that used a mechanical solenoid and hall effect sensor to do the trigger pull. i.e. Smart Parts markers were designed for electronic valves from the start, whereas many of the other manufacturers pursued, the 'electronic' upgrade was just a different Grip and trigger setup.
  7. redwall_hp · 1790448679 · focus · HN ↗
    A civil dispute over patent details (which is basically business as usual in technology) is not the same thing as orchestrating a criminal corporate espionage ring to exfiltrate inside information.
    One is arguing over the legal application of publicly filed information, the other is literal espionage, which not only impacts non-public trade secrets and insider (i.e. stock implications) information, but also raises questions about external agents secretly making actions that could undermine operations.
    Nobody goes to prison for patent infringement, but you absolutely can for the latter.
    TeMPOraL · 1790496980 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  8. fennecbutt · 1790519092 · focus · HN ↗
    Apple good. Other ba-aa-aa-d.
2. devindotcom · 1790444484 · focus · HN ↗
  i assume this matter was discussed
  1. [deleted] · 1790450483 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
3. gherkinnn · 1790444722 · focus · HN ↗
  That little buzz feels like a click on my Air's trackpad and like a tap on my iPhone's keyboard. Any other vibration thingy I came across feels like a vibration thingy, not like a click, not a tap.
  As nobody else seems to care or is able to build the same, maybe it is worth a dollar or two. Though 5.7B is a bit much.
  1. sokoloff · 1790446569 · focus · HN ↗
    A dollar or two? Per device that infringes?
    Apple has sold over 3 billion iPhones and 4.5 billion iPhones, iPads, and iPods together.
    $5.7B seems low if every one of those devices infringes.
    If it’s iPhone 6s and later and all watches (for taptic input), that’s around 2 1/3 billion phones and 1/3 billion watches, so even just $2/device gets you into that range.
    rogerrogerr · 1790448000 · focus · HN ↗
    iPads and iPods don’t infringe because they’ve never had any kind of haptic feedback.
    dd8601fn · 1790451508 · focus · HN ↗
    Also the pencils, magic keyboards, magic trackpads…
4. pdpi · 1790445085 · focus · HN ↗
  The thing that is patentable isn't "a vibration". It's the exact, specific means through which you produce that vibration.
  We've gone from completely dumb eccentric rotating mass vibration to trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking, or the Ice Cubes demo in in Nintendo's 1-2-Switch[0], both of which use linear resonant actuators. Those actuators are themselves a complex enough piece of technology to warrant a patent, and the techniques to simulate the feel or real physical objects using those actuators are pretty damn non-trivial as well.
  As a general rule, I find that the patent system is problematic but, within the scope of the system as it exists today, these are perfectly reasonable things to patent.
  [0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtlqvVfk1-Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtlqvVfk1-Q
  1. euroderf · 1790446745 · focus · HN ↗
    > trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking
    Like my Mac's trackpad ? Can someone ELI5 how it works ? It's gotta be magic-adjacent cos when the machine locks up, the trackpad is deader than a doornail.
    zeptonix · 1790447793 · focus · HN ↗
    Have noticed exactly this behavior as well, it's one of the better indicators actually the system ain't coming back.
    rogerrogerr · 1790447959 · focus · HN ↗
    Fun fact, the other thing that can cause this is a Bluetooth mouse in a backpack that is being clicked continuously. Confused me to no end for fifteen minutes.
    redwall_hp · 1790448093 · focus · HN ↗
    It's the same technique of the "3D touch" the iPhone 6S had, though that was discontinued. Capacitive sensors measure microscopic changes in the glass, as it slightly flexes when you press it. Then a haptic motor does a little kick to simulate the feel of it being pressed down.
    They've been doing this since 2015 or so. Prior Macs didn't click on the top 1/4 of the trackpad, because there was basically a "hinge" there and the glass would actually press on a physical button.
    euroderf · 1790450781 · focus · HN ↗
    So there's a big big matrix of tiny tiny motors under the trackpad ?
    dijit · 1790451566 · focus · HN ↗
    no, it sends a large “click” across the whole surface which your finger registers as a local click, they have two large and two small haptic motors in a line iirc and they do some software magic to cancel out the click so it feels extremely localised.
    ehe78qhe · 1790453461 · focus · HN ↗
    I just tried on my macbook trackpad and if I rest a finger in on part and click with a finger in another part both fingers feel the click. But I suspect this is a feature, not a bug, for multi-touch interfaces.
    euroderf · 1790485654 · focus · HN ↗
    This sounds very complex and it explains why nobody explains it :)
    I wonder if there's a teardown that has really dug into it.
  2. nomel · 1790458165 · focus · HN ↗
    It's literally a voice coil with a mass on it. Literally anyone who has ever played with a solenoid, and hooked it up to a speaker, has made one. I did it when I was a kid, decades ago, and watched it vibrate on the table and in my hand. When I tried the first haptic thing I knew exactly how they did it. It's so incredibly obvious I don't understand how it's even patentable, with all the prior "make thing vibrate with electromagnet" work.
    It's not really "high tech", it's just tuned well, with some high power for the size.
    TeMPOraL · 1790497472 · focus · HN ↗
    I think the bit where you tune it to share around a big mass around it may be the non-obvious part.
    Because frankly, I played with and disassembled many speakers of various sizes too when I was young, and one thing I internalized then is that speakers are piss poor at shaking anything except their own membrane. You can't just make things vibrate with a small speaker glued to a random thing. That's why as a kid I was not surprised to discover vibrators are spinning some unbalanced weight around - obviously that would shake things (as experienced by anyone who saw a washing machine decide to take a walk).
    nomel · 1790638236 · focus · HN ↗
    That's why I say solenoid, not speaker.
5. fennecbutt · 1790518978 · focus · HN ↗
  For the same reason that "rounded corners" was patentable I guess. Now all things being equal of course Apple should pay as Samsung has in the past.

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