Apple Attempts to Patent Pre-Existing Display Software Idea

Nuclear Elephant writes "Apple appears to be taking ideas from commercial software already being sold and is attempting to patent the concepts as their own. According to Apple Insider, Apple has recently filed a patent application for a notification screen on the iPhone. The only problem with this is that Intellisync has been using this concept in their popular iPhone notification screen software for over a year now, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is a clear rip-off. Apple recently became famous (or infamous) for stealing other people's ideas when they rolled out their Dashboard in Mac OS X, which had many similarities to a desktop widget program named the Konfabulator, which later became Yahoo widgets. The case here isn't a simple hijacking of an idea, however — Apple is applying for a patent on Intelliscreen's concept, which could be detrimental to the original manufacturer of the software, who is actively selling it for Jailbroken iPhones"

Comments

Re:Well...

[2nd Post!]

Why not?

Read the patent and Intellisync. They are different.

The patent is to make available all the data when the phone is unlocked; Intellisync makes the data available when the screen is locked!

Good GOD can people READ??

[danaris]

First and foremost, and very generally: just because a patent is superficially like something that already exists, that in itself doesn't mean the patent was either obvious, or automatically invalidated by prior art.

Second, and more topically, I don't know when this IntelliScreen softwareâ"which, by the way, is NOT an SDK app, but only for people who have a jailbroken iPhoneâ"came out, but the AppleInsider article clearly states that the "quick settings" patent was filed last December, and the "notification screen" patent was filed a few months before that! That is a little hazy, but could easily mean that it was filed before the iPhone was actually released to the public.

So while it is certainly possible that the filing still post-dates the release of the IntelliScreen software, I don't see how Apple can be expected to troll through every completely unsupported hacked up app for the iPhone just to see if something they've got planned to patent has already been thought up. That may not prevent the patent from being invalidated by the (potential) prior art of IntelliScreen, but it certainly puts the kibosh on the idea that Apple "stole" the idea. (I pay pretty close attention to news & stuff about the iPhone myself, and this is the first time I've heard about anything remotely resembling IntelliScreen, so it can't be a ubiquitous killer app).

But no, the truth, however obvious it may be, is boring. It's far, far more fun to run around screaming and pointing at Apple and saying, "THEY'RE STEALING OUR IDEAS! EVIL! EVIL!"

Good bleeding grief, Jonathan Zdziarski, grow up, get a clue, and stop trying to get page hits on your blog.

We have been trolled.

Dan Aris