Categoria: HardwareSoftware

Shenzhen company plans to appeal

Over the weekend, a Beijing court overturned a local intellectual property bureau’s ruling that Apple had violated a defunct Shenzhen company’s patented design with the iPhone 6. The ruling is the latest indicates that Chinese courts will not always rule in favor of its home markets.

In May 2016, the Beijing Intellectual Property Office issued a ruling that Apple Inc. had violated the design patents of Chinese smartphone maker Shenzen Baili with its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus designs. The Chinese company alleged that Apple had copied its own Baili 100C smartphone.

When the Wall Street Journal attempted to track down Baili and inquire into its operations the following month, it found no signs that the company was still operational. Phone calls to the company went unanswered, the company websites had been deleted, and visits to three addresses in Shenzhen found no remaining company offices at those locations.

The company’s lawyers, however, insisted that it remained operational. Though it can be assumed this was mostly for the sake of extending its claims against Apple. Following the ruling last year in Beijing, Apple was given an injunction to stop selling its iPhone 6 models in that market, though it was able to quickly file an administrative appeal to sell these units again until further review by the court. Of course, by the time the court had reviewed its appeal, the iPhone 7 was already well into production and scheduled to ship over the new few months, resulting in minimal damage to the company’s gross profit margins.

Baili 100C (left) and iPhone 6 (right)

Then on Friday, The Intellectual Property Court ruled that Apple “[had] not infringed the design patent filed by the company Shenzhen Baili,” according to the verdict reported by People’s Court Daily. The court claimed that the iPhone 6 had features that “completely changed the effect” of the product, leaving it clearly distinguishable with Baili’s 100C and asserting the Chinese company’s claim had lacked a legal basis.

“Apple’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have minor differences from Baili’s 100C. The differences are so tiny that the average customer could not notice,” the ruling said. “So this case falls into the patent rights protection category.”

Baili originally took on Apple in December 2014 as a promising Chinese electronics firm based by Beijing Internet giant Baidu. The company was then hit by a series of public criticisms in its smartphone build quality in a market saturated with competitors vying for market share from Apple, Meizu, Huawei, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, ZTE and others. Little information has been available about Shenzhen Baili, though research from China International Capital Corp. was able to find that the company had ¥29.6 million ($ 4.5 million) in 2013 operating income.

Some reports have noted that the latest IP decision reflects a tendency for China’s courts to not always rule in favor of its home market brands. Back in May, Apple faced the reverse outcome when the Beijing court ruled in favor of a local handbag company that had expressly printed the “iPhone” brand name on several of its leather goods.

Since the court decision, Shenzhen Baili’s legal team says it plans to appeal the recent patent ruling. Meanwhile, Apple has yet to respond for comment but is likely concerned about having to deal with another appeal against its operations in the Chinese market.

Companies should take “more active role” combating criminal violence, hate messages

In the ongoing battle between state governments and national security agencies to ascribe regulations for encrypted IP-based communications, the UK government has now asked WhatsApp to open its encryption to security services in the world effort to combat off-grid cyberterrorism efforts.

Citing the example of Khalid Masood, who killed four people in London last week and used WhatsApp shortly before beginning his attack, UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has begun a series of lecture pitches to urge online companies to become more aggressive in shutting down sites exploited by terrorists.

In addition to Rudd, several other government ministers have sharply criticized online companies for taking inadequate steps to stop the spread of criminal violence. The latest security concerns surround the inability of government and security agencies to intercept end-to-end encrypted communication data that is sent over IP-based mobile apps such as Apple’s iMessage platform, WhatsApp, Confide, Telegram and other services offering services where only communicating users can read the messages.

In one prominent example from December 2015, the Brazilian government blocked WhatsApp from its mobile telecom networks after the company refused to allow the government to see communications between alleged drug dealers involved in a criminal case. Then in July 2016, the Zimbabwe government blocked the WhatsApp service to its citizens as country workers heeded calls for a “national shutdown” to put pressure on the Southern African regime that has been in power for almost four decades.

UK Home Secretary Rudd says the Internet is “serving as a conduit, inciting and inspiring violence, and spreading extremist ideology.” She has asked executives from several Internet companies to convene during a meeting this week. “They’re going to get a lot more than a ticking off,” she explained.

The contentious efforts by federal agencies to request confidential end-to-end encrypted data have been gridlocked by a series of rulings stemming from court cases and even Constitutional rights or common law, depending on country and region. In the UK, end-to-end encryption was banned in December 2016 under Section 217 of the Investigatory Powers Bill, allowing government agents with access to any communications needed for investigation. In the US, most companies have cited First Amendment protections against viewpoint discrimination in being compelled to write new software, as in the Apple vs. FBI case from last February. In that dispute, the company challenged at least eleven court orders citing the All Writs Act of 1789 – which as of 1977, gave courts the power to demand “reasonable technical assistance” from a phone company in accessing call records.

Of course, government agencies themselves are not any better at leading by example to the general public regarding the prevention of cyberterrorism over end-to-end encrypted communications. It was revealed in January that the Trump administration and White House staffers have been using end-to-end encrypted app Confide to send untraceable messages to one another containing data that should otherwise be kept for historical preservation under the Federal Records Act of 1950. The act places responsibility on each US federal agency to establish an ongoing records management program to keep communications that have “administrative, historical, informational or evidentiary value” for later retrieval and historical significance.

But Rudd’s point is more about the urgency to mitigate terrorist abuse of platforms such as WhatsApp, Google, Twitter and other prominent social media platforms. Her argument insists that companies need to be significantly more aggressive dealing with suspicious activity, which would imply a request to transform these companies from mere “gatekeepers” of encrypted information into active participants with federal agencies requesting information. This is something end-to-end encryption cannot provide by its very nature, however, as the encryption keys cannot be remade for offline use as some cryptographic researchers have suggested.

The only way that governments can obtain access to information contained within the guarded walls of WhatsApp and other similar apps is through a forced backdoor into a compromised mobile operating system. Federal decryption of firmware code is something both Apple and Google have publicly acknowledged in the past, often well before their product release dates.