Category: Apple Insider

 

By Mike Wuerthele
Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 03:32 am PT (06:32 am ET)

Following a July planning meeting with US Attorney General William Barr, individual states appear poised to launch their own antitrust investigations of big tech sooner rather than later.

Up to 20 states are said to be participating in the coordinated investigation, following a preliminary meeting in July. A formal announcement about the effort is expected before the end of September.

“The attorneys general involved have concerns over the control of personal data by large tech companies and will hold them accountable for anticompetitive practices that endanger privacy and consumer data,” a spokesman for New York Attorney General Letitia James told the Wall Street Journal.

When asked for comment, Google pointed to Congressional testimony in July. At the time, Google’s Director of Economic Policy Adam Cohen said that the company had “helped reduce prices and expand choice for consumers and merchants in the U.S. and around the world.”

Apple also pointed the Wall Street Journal to previous testimony.

The expansion and escalation follows the meeting with Barr that focused on “big tech companies stifling competition on the internet” according to Barr’s office. Companies that are reportedly being investigated are Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook.

Eight state attorneys were reportedly in attendance, with four states positively identified as attending. For certain, representatives from Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New York are involved in the probe.

The U.S. Department of Justice will also be holding a series of antitrust reviews into Facebook and Google, and their affect on competition in fields like search, social media, and online retail. There are also separate probes by the US DOJ into Apple and Amazon’s alleged monopolization, but elements may overlap with the new DOJ review.

The Federal Trade Commission has also been working on its own antitrust efforts since February, appointing a task force to monitor the industry.

Representatives from each of the four companies have already spoken to the House Judiciary Committee on the topic, with the House Antitrust Subcommittee investigating “platform gatekeepers” and “dominant firms.” The subject of antitrust has also been brought up in the 2020 Presidential race, with a break-up of big firms called for by Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

This is not the only technology-related area Barr has waded into as of late. On July 23, Barr rekindled the ongoing encryption debate, claiming encryption is “already imposing huge costs on society” by making it hard for law enforcement to investigate crimes, while also calling for tech firms to stop producing “dogmatic pronouncements” against backdoors and to instead produce them.

 

By Malcolm Owen
Monday, August 19, 2019, 04:46 am PT (07:46 am ET)

Apple is promoting Apple Pay with a charitable offer to users based in the United States, with a pledge to donate $10 to the National Parks Foundation for customers spending money at Apple Stores using the mobile payments platform until August 25.

From August 17 and running through the week until August 25, purchases made using Apple Pay at any Apple Store, the Apple website, or the Apple Store app will make a donation to the National Parks Foundation. The Apple Pay website specifies it is a $10 donation per transaction with a minimum purchase of $10.

The promotion is also limited to the first 100,000 qualifying transactions, which means as much as $1 million could be headed to the National Parks Foundation.

The advisement that Apple is “celebrating our national parks” relates to the centenary of the Grand Canyon National Park, which was designated as a national park 100 years ago. The UNESCO World Heritage Site features the famous crevice and is the destination for approximately six million visitors each year.

Apple is also celebrating with a health-related achievement on August 25. Apple Watch owners are encouraged to walk a minimum of three miles, roughly the same distances as the beginner-friendly Cedar Ridge hike on the South Kaibab Trail at the Grand Canyon, in exchange for a special award.

 

Exclusive

By AppleInsider Staff
Saturday, August 17, 2019, 07:02 pm PT (10:02 pm ET)

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Apple has requested for a review to potentially invalidate a patent owned by high-performance camera maker Red relating to its proprietary Rawcode RAW recording format, a legal argument that could enable Apple to use Rawcode in its products without paying a licensing fee.

Filed on May 6, the petition from Apple to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office calls for an Inter Partes review of patent number 9,245,314 titled simply “Video Camera.”

The patent largely describes a camera that can “capture, compress, and store video image data in a memory of the video camera, but really it pertains more to Rawcode, Red’s format for holding RAW footage, unprocessed imaging data from the sensor. Apple believes that some of the claims of the patent are “unpatentable,” and that the patent itself should be invalidated.

Apple’s arguments start with how the patent does not provide “written description support” for some claims, such as the disclosure of “outputting the raw mosaiced image data at a resolution of at least 2k and at a frame rate of at least about 23 frames per second.” While the patent describes decompression and demosaicing algorithms, it “does not disclose image resolution or frame rate parameters, let alone a camera system capable of meeting such parameters.”

There is a lack of description of “mosaiced” image data, with it only referencing “demosaic” and other tenses of the term. There is also the argument of “Demosaiced Motion Video Data” being undefined properly, and the meaning of “Substantially Visually Lossless.”

The patent describes the memory device for the last phrase to be “sufficiently large to store image data from the compression module corresponding to at least about 30 minutes of video at 12 megapixel resolution, 12-bit color resolution, and at 60 frames per second.”

Apple notes there is no mention of the capacity of memory required for such a device, but based on the mention of a “compression ratio of at least six to one,” the company reckons there needs to be a total memory capacity of 324 gigabytes, a considerably high amount of data from the time of the patent’s creation.

Speaking to NewsShooter, Red Digital Camera president Jarred Land advised “This is standard operating procedure for patent holders. It’s not the first time someone has challenged the Redcode patents and each time our patents have held fast. Red fully anticipates its patents will be held valid again.”

Land also insisted “We have a fantastic relationship with Apple and as they publicly announced in June we continue to work on incredible things with them. “

The invalidation of the patent would provide a number of benefits to Apple, including being able to effectively use aspects of Rawcode in its products, or in its entirety, without paying a licensing fee to Red. It is also plausible that the patent review request is in response to legal action from Red against Apple, possibly over the iPhone maker’s ProRES RAW format.

The exact reason for Apple’s review request may not necessarily be known until more legal activity between the two companies comes to light.

Apple has previously sold Red camera bundles in its stores, with the 2017 Red Raven camera kit including the Raven camera body and everything needed to produce cinematic video for $15,000.