Last month, for the first time in over one-hundred years, a design patent was front-and-center in a Supreme Court case. The world’s two top smartphone manufacturers, Apple and Samsung, have been battling since 2011 over design patents that cover essential features of their ubiquitous smartphones.1 It started with late Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ vow to…
Tag: Apple
Alphabet Dethrones Apple As World’s Most Valuable Company – Can It Maintain Momentum?
Alphabet, the recently formed holding company of Google, Inc., has officially surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable corporation, a title Apple has held since 2012, as trading markets closed on Tuesday, February 2, 2016.1 It achieved this with a rather brief market capitalization of $528 billion, becoming the 12th company listed officially as the…
U.S. v. Apple: Was the Second Circuit Wrong in a Novel Antitrust Case?
On June 30, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Apple Inc. had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by conspiring to fix prices for e-books with the six largest U.S. publishers.1 The case was, at heart, a question of “whether the vertical organizer of a horizontal conspiracy” to fix prices…
Securing the Glass House: Apple, Encryption, and the Fight Over Backdoors (Part II)
The conversation the previous blog post in this series discussed shows no signs of abating, although recent news suggests evolution with respect to the government’s position on backdoor access. Within the past three and a half weeks, it has come to light that the Obama administration, as suggested by James Comey, the current director of…
Securing the Glass House: Apple, Encryption, and the Fight Over Backdoors (Part I)
This summer, as the world eagerly awaited the latest i-offerings from Cupertino, the city associated with the latest in cutting-edge and fashionable tech from computer behemoth Apple Inc., James Comey, the current director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, published a list of concerns online regarding recent evolutions in encryption.1 According to Director Comey, the…