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Comment by raganesh | Hacker News Reader

If you are accusing her of bribery, that is a very serious allegation.

Imagine if such a thing happens and is eventually exposed. What a scandal would it be. I don't think any large company, let alone Apple, would want to be involved in any such mess.

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Corruption isn't as straight forward simple as Hollywood movies make it out be "Here take this dollars and do this for me". It's usually a complex net of interests and favors trading, that's really hard to prove. Maybe someone at apple just happen to contribute to someone's political campaign, who is proposing legislation that just so happens would benefit the judge's family business. This level of corruption happens every day, everywhere in the planet. People are trading favors as we speak.

The part that makes it difficult, is where exactly do you draw the line between "trading favors" and "corruption"?

Making a legal decision based on your own personal gains and not the data?

It is completely reasonable to investigate bribery where there is a perceived unreasonable decision and a heavy financial motive.

Individuals working at large companies do bribe people in a variety of situations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/business/wal-mart-bribery-...

Okay. Let me qualify my point. I find it hard to believe such a high profile bribery can happen in the US (the article you have posted is a case of bribery by an American company in Mexico). And given Apple's profile and a lot of entities already pursuing their case (ex: NYT's iEconomy series), they would never do such a big blunder.

Abe Fortas of Gideon's Trumpet fame resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court following ethics allegations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abe_Fortas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideons_Trumpet

The reason it is hard to believe is that people question decisions like the one made and are willing to investigate without government help. While it is unlikely, it should still be questioned.

Remember the Kids for Cash scandal?

1) Looking at your previous comment, you are an Apple fanboy. So you probably know NOTHING about what's happening here and you just want to support apple for Fuck's sake.

2)You don't live in the US. So keep your hard-to-believe's to yourself.

3) Read 1) again.

He didn't investigate it. He said, "here's what I did" which fell far short of any investigation. He had no reason to post how far he got along in his little dirt digging campaign.

There's a valid point in his statement. Its just that you haven't thought about it deeply yet. A dozen OEM's including HTC, Samsung and the rest, have about a 50 phone models in total (assume 50 for simplicity). Atleast one phone model from these OEM's is under litigation and/or have been banned w.r.t patents. Apple, is a single company with just 2-3 phones and NONE of these phones have been banned yet. This must mean 1) ALL the phones, with various flavors of Android are some how violating Apple's patents OR there is something unfair happening here. The possibility of about 50 (remember, we're assuming 50 is for simplicity) phone models violating a single company's patents is just ridiculous. This must mean these makers of these 50+ phone models haven't thought about these patents OR it clearly means something unfair is happening. To assume, these WELL-EXPERIENCED (Eg: HTC) Phone makers of these 50+ models haven't thought about these patents is plain stupidity, which leads us to the conclusion, there's something unfair going on.

Or it could be that android is violating lots of patents, and the common thread is they are all making android phones. Note that they are also all paying Microsoft. It seems the common thread isn't apple and Microsoft doing something wrong, rather it is android.

Most of these companies even manufacture Windows Phones, so it makes sense to license them with Microsoft (Eg: HTC, LG). And, the patent that Microsoft is suing OEM's with is related to ActiveSync. While Apple is ridiculously suing these OEM's for other pretty trivial patents which are not related to anything like ActiveSync. So, Apple and Microsoft are not on the same track as you think.

>>the patent that Microsoft is suing OEM's with is related to ActiveSync

Can you provide citation for the above?

As far as I know, neither Microsoft nor any of the Android H/W manufacturers have revealed any details on which patents are covered as part of the licensing agreement.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Microsoft-Wins-...

That article is about a law suit involving motorola; not a license agreement MS has with several companies including Samsung & HTC. What about these other Android companies that have got license agreements with Microsoft? They have never publicly talked about patents covered by the agreement.

I don't know about this case, but I think ITC has been suspiciously anti-Google for the past few patent cases. In almost every single instance they've ruled in favor of Apple or Microsoft, and against Google.

Setting aside your confirmation bias, I'll point out that Google haven't themselves brought these patent cases to the ITC in the same number or with the same force as have Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else. Google has filed fewer cases with a smaller patent portfolio.

It's almost as though the findings are not a random glitch.

You mean largely against non-US companies that wants to sell Android handsets on the US market.

If we posit that these decisions are biased rather than just an effect of the broken US patent system, I think it's more likely that the ITC is merely pushing a protectionist agenda that is being enabled by having somewhat plausible complaints from US companies than that there's somehow corruption going on.

Confirmation bias?

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/xbox-itc-motorola/

That's a big one.

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