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Apple Sued Over iPhone Browser
SpuriousLogic writes "A Los Angeles real estate developer is suing Apple for patent infringement over the way the iPhone navigates Web sites. The suit, which was filed on behalf of EMG Technology, seeks unspecified damages.
EMG Technology is a company that holds the patents of Elliot Gottfurcht, the real estate developer, as well as Marlo Longstreet and Grant Gottfurcht. The company claims that the iPhone infringes on patent 7,441,196 — a patent that was approved only last month, after a filing process that began on March 13, 2006.
That patent is for an invention that displays 'on-line content reformatted from a webpage in a hypertext markup language (HTML) format into an extensible markup language (XML) format to generate a sister site.' This sister site is a simplified version of the original site that is then displayed on any number of devices — including cell phones, EMG says."
Unfortunately, this patent contains apparatus claims as well as method claims.
The Bilski decision was limited to method claims, and so it won't apply without a fairly liberal extension of that holding.
No, it's worse than that. They basically patented XSLT, and the application of it to target different devices.
Another completely retarded patent.
The patent examiners seems to have missed all the prior work at WWW. For instance,
Juliana Freire, Bharat Kumar, Daniel F. Lieuwen: WebViews: accessing personalized web content and services. WWW 2001: 576-586
Anyone reasonably skilled in the art could have gone from my paper to that claim without much trouble---we use htmltidy to turn html into xml and used xpath to extract pieces out of it which we could transcode in various ways including in voicexml. We built a system that did just that. And thats just one paper. WWW had a number of papers, any which of them should have killed this patent if the patent examiner had done the proper due diligence.
Opera has been doing this kind of stuff (the specific things discussed in the patent, I mean, not the patent trolling itself) since they got heavily into the mobile business anyway. Opera Mini, specifically, was officially launched on 2006-01-24, which is before that patent was filed. Earlier releases, which already used methods and apparati addressed by this patent, were already deployed in 2005.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Apparatus claims are not sufficient to get around In re Biski. Simply adding the words "On a computer" or "On a handheld device" (or long drawn-out complicated descriptions which equate to the same), to a process that is, in itself, purely algorithmic or an abstract process that could equally apply to any number of pre-existing machines, does not rise to the level of the machine requirement in In re Biski.
I like to put it his way (though this is overly simplified, perhaps): If you come up with a novel way to use a screw driver, you cannot patent your method, because you didn't have to invent the screw driver to do it. The screw driver already existed.
In this patent, you could substitute the words, "web page displayed in a browser, running on a hand-held computer with a touch screen" for the bulk of the claim copy. Well, none of that qualifies a process as unique to a specific machine. The fact that there are many different devices that meet his description, devices that are in no way intrinsically linked to this patent, brings this into direct conflict with In re Bilski.
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
From a completely subjective point of view, the thrust of your argument makes intuitive sense--why should a method that is not patent eligible be able to skirt this result by reciting a general purpose machine for its execution?
... comprising the steps of ...."
... executed by a computer processor, comprising the steps of ...."
...."
Unfortunately, in the legal world, intuition must sometimes give way to legal formalisms.
In this case the formalisms are the statutory categories of invention. Processes (methods) constitute one distinct statutory category, and machines (apparatuses) another.
Getting back to your point, you are correct to say that, after Bilski, a method (process) claim that is otherwise not patent eligible may not become eligible by simply providing that the disclosed method is executed on a general purpose machine (computer).
HOWEVER, an apparatus claim is separate and distinct from a method claim that is tied to an apparatus.
So while it is true that tying a method claim to a general purpose computer is not sufficient to overcome Bilski's machine requirement, it remains true that the holding of Bilski DOES NOT APPLY TO APPARATUS CLAIMS.
As an example, consider the following:
Method claim: "A method of
Method claim tied to a general purpose computer: "A method of
APPARATUS claim: "A computer readable storage medium containing instructions, when executed by a computer processor, operable to
Absolutely correct. The iPhone browser is a different UI built on top of a tweaked WebKit. It does not use XML or page simplification techniques in any way. I'm pretty baffled by this suit. About all I can imagine is that some web site served a simplified site to this company's iPhone based on a browser match and these folks with their complete lack of technical knowledge assumed that the iPhone did the simplification, which couldn't be farther removed from reality without talking about Internet gnomes sending messages through a series of tubes....
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