Sorry, it loaded without a paywall when I originally found it.
kirklennon
joined 2 years ago
Short on time but they’re identified early on in this decision:
https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Smartflash_LLC_v_Apple_Inc_No_20161059_2017_BL_62739_Fed_Cir_Mar_
I'm not sure if you're aware, but games consoles are a completely different market with completely different laws and standards governing them. Game consoles are not general purpose devices. They are closed platforms where you gotta sign lengthy NDAs and pay thousands just to get yourself a fucking dev kit.
iPhones are a closed platform. Ditto for iPad and Apple Vision Pro. They are essentially an app console. They have never been sold to consumers or presented to developers as anything else. For what it’s worth, almost all of the in-app revenue at the center of this discussion is gaming revenue. Everything else is a rounding error.
No, we are discussing services not sold through their store and not using their payment provider. That is literally the topic of the post.
This is about purchases of virtual goods made by users of the app either directly in the app (30% combined commission and payment processing fees), or who click a link in the app to make the purchase using an external payment provider (27% commission). In all cases, these are sales originating from within the app.
Third party console games don't literally pay money to not use services.
I’m not sure if there have been any changes in the last few years (I doubt it), but developers paid Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony a 15% “licensing” fee for physical media games sold for their consoles. That has been the basic business model for all consoles for decades.
You also forget they also charge 30% for anything sold through their store.
That’s literally what we’re discussing.
Not for services they aren't providing, it isn't.
Third-party console game developers paid money to the console maker even for physical sales.
Again, these are for services that are being provided. Apple is charging people to not use their own payment service.
The payment service is 3%; the commission is the other 27%. That’s what a commission is. It’s for access to the market.
That’s why it would need to be a small piece of a greater set of information. Imagine a person walking through an office and into a stairwell. If you know the person is there, and you know the stairwell is darker than the office, you could infer the appropriate location of the person in the building
That has nothing to do with the technique described in the article. It's also still quite a stretch. Holding up a piece of paper and casting a shadow on the ambient light sensor will also make it appear darker. Are they in the stairwell or is Bob from accounting stopping by to tell a "funny" anecdote and blocking the afternoon sun? If you've managed to compromise a device enough to access sensor data, you're not bothering trying to make sketchy assumptions based on the light sensor.
Nobody is going to use it against you, but a state actor could use it against a specific target like a politician or military to develop a more accurate assessment of information they already have been collecting.
I read the whole article and I think even that is a ludicrous stretch. In order to get a vague image of your hand it requires either several minutes of projecting a precise black and white bright checkered pattern on the screen, or over an hour of subtly embedding varied brightness in a video. The checkered pattern represents a best/worst case scenario for this kind of attack, and even that is completely impractical for anything in the real world. This is literally zero risk for everybody. Forever.
It's a commission for access to a lucrative market that Apple created. Apple gives away the developer tools and charges an extremely modest annual App Store fee, which also covers the review process and hosting. It's been common for platform creators to charge third-party developers in some capacity for many decades. Some do it by charging high costs for the developer tools, others by charging a commission based on sales. I don't think any strategy is necessarily better or worse than the other on a legal or moral basis; they're just business decisions. Previously Apple has combined the commission and payment processing costs into one fee. Apple made a decision on what they wanted to offer developers on that platform and Epic wasn't satisfied with it. They got a court to agree on what is ultimately a minor technical point in how Apple's deal is packaged so Apple is offering an alternative that they don't want to but complies with the law. It's, ultimately, a worse deal for the developer. Developers don't have a right to demand that some arbitrary percentage is the right one, tough. Apple offered a deal: take it or leave it. Developers are perfectly free to leave it.
This seems like an entirely academic, theoretical technique with literally zero real world risk, and without any path forward to ever turn it into a practical attack.
As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.
Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.
Why are they just outright stripping this feature instead of just paying the patent fee? (As in literally removing the chips, actually stripping it.)
They're not. Despite some misleading press coverage, Apple never remotely suggested they were removing any hardware. They're just going to start importing them without the "functionality." They're disabling it in the US via software while they go through the legal process. When it's all done, they can activate it for everyone.
As for why they're not paying, Apple's position is that their product does not infringe any patents, and this is not an outlandish position. Apple has already had most of Masimo's patent claims from a dozen total patents invalidated. The ITC ban is a result of a single patent still currently left standing that Apple believes should never have been issued and is working to have invalidated.
I think there's a very good chance Apple succeeds and Masimo is left with no relevant patents. If they go through everything and Masimo is still left with something, at that point Apple can negotiate with them on a reasonable fee, and they'll be doing so from a position of relative strength. Masimo was obviously hoping an ITC ban would cause Apple to blink and pay whatever Masimo wanted. Clearly that didn't happen and Apple would prefer go for total vindication.
You’re not missing anything. There was a period of time where a lot of patents were granted for “basic idea, but on a computer!” The USPTO stopped doing it and these patents, which should have never been issued, have been systematically invalidated, including most of this guy’s. He’s a classic patent troll suing over patents that were then invalidated.