Move to England?

Are you reading between the lines here? I didn't read fake business name. I read 1) business name 2) personal account.

Fake business name is just another word for business name, also called doing business as, and fictitious name.

It just means it's a name you are using, but it's not your name.

All non-corporation company names are legally fake names.

I think the implication of 'fake business name' is business name that is not registered as your business. Otherwise, why have a qualifier?

Anyway, what I mean is that the OP messed up with registering his business.

Not all states require businesses to register DBA (doing business as) names.

An unregistered DBA wouldn't have a location.

You guys are assuming that the specifics of DBA works the same in England.

There's no point in setting up a DBA with a limited liability entity. Why? You're basically saying, "I don't want the limited liability".

I don't know the specifics of this transaction, and it really, really looks sketchy. The only reason I even think it has credibility is because it was posted in detail on HN. In most other forums, I would chalk this up to a Nigerian scam. Seriously.

I still think there may be a way to pull out the money if the English Ltd has actually been established and the OP has control over it. Having the English Ltd establish a bank account, pull the money from that. If Apple balks over that, than that really is Apple's fault. As the situation stands though, if the OP went public over this, I think I'd have the same reaction as the lady who sued McDonald's over spilling her own coffee on her lap, or those patent trolls out in Texas.

Google's job is to help you search through the masses of uninteresting stuff and get to the stuff you care about.

I wish Google would just hurry up and buy or copy dropbox.

I don't want to make online backups of my offline data, offline backups of my online data & all that mess. I just want my docs in my dropbox folder, edited with Google docs, Zoho, Word, OO or a hammer n chisel and still available to any of the others when I'm done. No uploading/downloading a mess of files and recording them on tape. If I want another backup, I just want to plug in Time Machine. That's how I do backups. Other people like to do them differently (why? Time Machine works great), they should be able to do their thing.

I don't want to upload/download files via the browser. I don't want files called G.Docs-old-new-good-partial.zip sitting around everywhere. I don't want to think about my files. I especially don't want to think about my files if some of them or on my machine, some of them or on Google, some of them some startup's servers. That last one is a real problem because I need to read Techrunch to hear about them going under in advance and transfer all the files to whatever new startup they're covering.

The cloud isn't replacing the desktop today. No one uses only Google docs or stores documents only in the cloud. People do both. They might always do both. I want a bridge.

I didn't know it was possible to be a long time Google Docs user.

Well, we've been using it for over 3 years. I guess that's a long time in Internet years :)

The point is still a good one though. The market was fractured when they entered. It is still fractured & it doesn't seem to need Google to stay that way.

I always wonder if MSFT FUD more than everyone else or if media just like to portray them like this.

I think this is just semantics, the definition of 'launch' for this purpose can be pretty flexible.

My Favourite soundbite"

"Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it."

That's a great way of figuring out how the law is broken."Un-willful" patent infringement shouldn't be stopped. If a patent is likely to be violated without intention, that really means that the (social good) justification for the patent isn't very strong. The only reason it is even illegal is to stop companies from being willfully ignorant but still take advantage of the idea's prior existence.