Daily Archives: April 25, 2023

Apple App Store Policies Upheld by Court in Epic Games Antitrust Challenge – Apple can continue monopoly and massive 30% charges in app store USA (but not in EU)

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Apple Inc. won an appeals court ruling upholding its App Store’s policies in an antitrust challenge brought by Epic Games Inc.

Monday’s ruling by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower-court judge’s 2021 decision largely rejecting claims by Epic, the maker of Fortnite, that Apple’s online marketplace policies violated federal law because they ban third-party app marketplaces on its operating system. The appeals panel upheld the judge’s ruling in Epic’s favor on California state law claims.

The ruling comes as Apple has been making changes to the way the App Store operates to address developer concerns since Epic sued the company in 2020. The dispute began after Apple expelled the Fortnite game from the App Store because Epic created a workaround to paying a 30% fee on customers’ in-app purchases.

“There is a lively and important debate about the role played in our economy and democracy by online transaction platforms with market power,” the three-judge panel said. “Our job as a federal court of appeals, however, is not to resolve that debate — nor could we even attempt to do so. Instead, in this decision, we faithfully applied existing precedent to the facts.”

Apple hailed the outcome as a “resounding victory,” saying nine out of 10 claims were decided in its favor.

[…]

Epic Chief Executive Officer Tim Sweeney tweeted that although Apple prevailed, at least the appeals court kept intact the portion of the 2021 ruling that sided with Epic.

“Fortunately, the court’s positive decision rejecting Apple’s anti-steering provisions frees iOS developers to send consumers to the web to do business with them directly there. We’re working on next steps,” he wrote.

[…]

Following a three-week trial in Oakland, California, Rogers ordered the technology giant to allow developers of mobile applications steer consumers to outside payment methods, granting an injunction sought by Epic. The judge, however, didn’t see the need for third-party app stores or to push Apple to revamp policies over app developer fees.

[…]

US and European authorities have taken steps to rein in Apple’s stronghold over the mobile market. In response to the Digital Markets Act — a new series of laws in the European Union — Apple is planning to allow outside apps as early as next year as part of an update to the upcoming iOS 17 software update, Bloomberg News has reported.

[…]

Source: Apple App Store Policies Upheld by Court in Epic Games Antitrust Challenge – Bloomberg

It’s a pretty sad day when an antitrust court runs away from calling a monopoly a monopoly

WebLLM runs an AI in your browser, talks to your GPU

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This project brings language model chats directly onto web browsers. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and accelerated with WebGPU. We can bring a lot of fun opportunities to build AI assistants for everyone and enable privacy while enjoying GPU acceleration.

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These models are usually big and compute-heavy. To build a chat service, we will need a large cluster to run an inference server, while clients send requests to servers and retrieve the inference output. We also usually have to run on a specific type of GPUs where popular deep-learning frameworks are readily available.

This project is our step to bring more diversity to the ecosystem. Specifically, can we simply bake LLMs directly into the client side and directly run them inside a browser? If that can be realized, we could offer support for client personal AI models with the benefit of cost reduction, enhancement for personalization, and privacy protection. The client side is getting pretty powerful.

Won’t it be even more amazing if we can simply open up a browser and directly bring AI natively to your browser tab? There is some level of readiness in the ecosystem. WebGPU has just shipped and enables native GPU executions on the browser.

Still, there are big hurdles to cross, to name a few:

  • We need to bring the models somewhere without the relevant GPU-accelerated Python frameworks.
  • Most of the AI frameworks rely heavily on optimized computed libraries that are maintained by hardware vendors. We need to start from scratch.
  • Careful planning of memory usage, and aggressive compression of weights so that we can fit the models into memory.

We also do not want to only do it for just one model. Instead, we would like to present a repeatable and hackable workflow that enables anyone to easily develop and optimize these models in a productive Python-first approach, and deploy them universally, including on the web.

Besides supporting WebGPU, this project also provides the harness for other kinds of GPU backends that TVM supports (such as CUDA, OpenCL, and Vulkan) and really enables accessible deployment of LLM models.

Source: WebLLM github

Grimes invites AI artists to use her voice, promising 50 percent royalty split

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Canadian synth-pop artist Grimes says AI artists can use her voice without worrying about copyright or legal enforcement. “I’ll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with,” she tweeted on Sunday. “Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.”

The musician’s declaration comes in the wake of streaming platforms removing an AI-generated song using simulated voices of Drake and The Weeknd. Universal Music Group (UMG), which represents both artists, called for the purge after “Heart on My Sleeve” garnered over 15 million listens on TikTok and 600,000 on Spotify. UMG argued that publishing a song trained on its artists’ voices was “a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law.”

Grimes takes a considerably more open approach, adding that she has no label or legal bindings. “I think it’s cool to be fused [with] a machine and I like the idea of open sourcing all art and killing copyright,” she added.

[…]

Source: Grimes invites AI artists to use her voice, promising 50 percent royalty split | Engadget

A very practical approach to something that is coming anyway

Samsung to pay out $303M for memory patent infringement to Netlist.

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Samsung Electronics has been stung for more than $303 million in a patent infringement case brought by US memory company Netlist.

Netlist, headquartered in Irvine, California, styles itself as a provider of high-performance modular memory subsystems. The company initially filed a complaint that Samsung had infringed on three of its patents, later amended to six [PDF]. Following a six-day trial, the jury found for Netlist in five of these and awarded a total of $303,150,000 in damages.

The exact patents in question are 10,949,339 (‘339), 11,016,918 (‘918), 11,232,054 (‘054), 8,787,060 (‘060), and 9,318,160 (‘160). The products that are said to infringe on these are Samsung’s DDR4 LRDIMM, DDR5 UDIMM, SODIMM, and RDIMM, plus the high-bandwidth memory HBM2, HBM2E and HBM3 technologies.

The patents appear to apply to various aspects of DDR memory modules. According to reports, Samsung’s representatives had argued that Netlist’s patents were invalid because they were already covered by existing technology and that its own memory chips did not function in the same way as described by the patents, but this clearly did not sway the jurors.

However, it appears that the verdict did not go all Netlist’s way because its lawyers had been arguing for more damages, saying that a reasonable royalty figure would be more like $404 million.

In the court filings [PDF], Netlist claims that Samsung had knowledge of the patents in question “no later than August 2, 2021” via access to Netlist’s patent portfolio docket.

The company states that Samsung and Netlist were initially partners under a 2015 Joint Development and License Agreement (JDLA), which granted Samsung a five-year paid-up license to Netlist’s patents.

Samsung had used Netlist’s technologies to develop products such as DDR4 memory modules and emerging new technologies, including DDR5 and HBM, Netlist said.

Under the terms of the agreement, Samsung was to supply Netlist certain memory products at competitive prices, but Netlist claimed Samsung repeatedly failed to honor these promises. As a result, Netlist claims, it terminated the JDLA on July 15, 2020.

Netlist alleged in its court filing that Samsung has continued to make and sell memory products “with materially the same structures” as those referenced in the patents, despite the termination of the agreement.

According to investor website Seeking Alpha, the damages awarded are for the infringement of Netlist technology covering only about five quarters. The website also said that Netlist now has the cash to not only grow its business but pursue other infringers of its technology.

Netlist chief executive CK Hong said in a statement that the company was pleased with the case. He claimed the verdict “left no doubt” that Samsung had wilfully infringed Netlist patents, and is “currently using Netlist technology without a license” on many of its strategic product lines.

Hong also claimed that it was an example of the “brazen free ride” carried out by industry giants against intellectual property belonging to small innovators.

“We hope this case serves as a reminder of this problem to policymakers as well as a wakeup call to those in the memory industry that are using our IP without permission,” he said.

We asked Samsung Electronics for a statement regarding the verdict in this case, but did not hear back from the company at the time if publication.

Netlist is also understood to have other cases pending against Micron and Google. Those against Micron are said to involve infringement of many of the same patents that were involved in the Samsung case. ®

Source: Samsung to pay out $303M for memory patent infringement • The Register