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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."
Let's hope this case is the first of many to be swiftly decided for throwing out the patent entirely based on In re Bilski.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
That is certainly a necessary invention for a real estate developer...otherwise how could they display information about their latest housing projects or large malls on an iPhone?!
-=Bang Bang=-
So- they essentially patented WAP? I think Apple can come up with enough "prior artwork" for this one. It's unfortunate though that companies like this (EMG) are allowed to even exist. When will it end?
So they got a patent on decoding and interpreting? Isn't that covered by prior art with things like PDFCreator, or is it enough to change file types to get it?
--- "When you gotta do something wrong. You gotta do it right. (Fighter)"
We need some serious patent reform. Patents are good and necessary in general but many of these go too far or are too vague or are not based on working prototypes.
How long before we see a patent on "a system of placing letters and numbers in sequential order in order to convey something meaningful"?
I know Opera Mini and some other mobile browsers do this, but I thought Safari worked on the HTML itself. Wouldn't that render the patent irrelevant?
I hope my patent for hamburgers is approved soon, i filed it in 1607 and want to sue mcdonalds. truth.
Safari doesn't create a different version of the web page. It shows the original HTML version, just graphically scaled down. So EMG should be suing all the other cell phone browser companies. As the article notes:
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Do both, and then walk in to your boss's office and give them a hug. Offer no explaination when pressed.
-=Bang Bang=-
So, at the end of the day, I fail to see how this applies to any modern smart phone. Only the older phones, or non-smart phones, can't render HTML as is. Of course most of these problems are caused by graphic designers not understanding HML, and borking the standard so we now have web pages that make no sense in almost an common browser.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Opera on my Zaurus has been doing this since well before 2006
this reads like the first chapter of every book about XML, titled "why use XML?". Gee - ship out XML and transform according the the display-location's needs and abilities.
I'm patenting a system wherein the movement of the person's diaphragm enables the lungs to draw i air thereby retaining consciousness and enabling continued living".
Worst... patent... ever...
Just kill patents now, please, they are just in the way and never ever actually protects individuals, only capital, and money should flow to help innovation, not be collected by greedy old men to lure attractive (but oh so dumb) women to be with them.
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.
This is just awesome. The "Dumbest Fuck Ever"-Award clearly goes to the lawyer who filed this laughably thin suit against a company that never has done anything funky to display HTML on its handhelds. The iPhone runs OS X, slightly scaled down for memory and power consumption gains.
Is today Patent Wednesday or something?
I know it is all flashy and high profile and profitable and stuff; but isn't the iPhone a really stupid target for this sort of thing? My impression was that mobile safari behaved almost exactly like desktop safari(in terms of rendering), which means acting pretty much like any webkit based browser. There are phone/mobile browsers that do all sorts of curious chopping and reformatting, possibly event patentable chopping and reformatting; but wasn't one of the perks of the iPhone that it didn't need to?
Um, wasn't there prior art on the Palm 7 *last century*?
Easy prior art :
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3c.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
</xsl:stylesheet>
XSLT clearly existed in 1999... And if you use an empty stylesheet, you get a (very) simplified document which only contains the text nodes, without any HTML (or other) tags...
That can easily be displayed on text-only devices.
If you add a
<xsl:template select="a"> />
<xsl:copy-of select="."
</xsl:template>
The links are preserved (but are the only kind of formatting preserved)... That's basic XSLT and I guess that many teachers who give XML lessons have used similar examples...
When does Apple ever do anything creative?
(WARNING: The above post contains a large amount of sarcasm. It is not intended to be taken seriously. If you feel a need to argue with this point ("No way, Dude! Apple is the bestest company in the whole wide world!). Go download an iPhone application. I hear there's a new one out that's nice and shiny. If you want to defend this post (Yeah, Apple Sucks!). Go back to your PC and marvel at the wonders of Vista. If you only use Linux as your operating system, let your parents know I feel sorry for them.)
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)
shouldnt they be suing google since they have been doing this as long as i have been using the web on my phone.
search anything on google via your phone, and it will pass the site through its own parser giving a mangled xml version of the site, and they even split large pages into multiple pages.
portfolio
Huh?
Your post rings a weird bell in my head that hasn't been rung before. Some completely new kind of ... lameness, maybe? Virgin territory to man, in any case.
since the submission date counts, i would disagree with you, however there are plenty of other cases of prior art.
i find your lack of faith in science disturbing!
First off, IANAL. I am a law student with IP and patent law classes under my belt, but I'm still just a law student. Take the following with a grain of salt.
In a lot of the patent articles on Slashdot, where someone will ask "Isn't X prior art?" Often, even though it seems intuitively that it should be, it's not.
Actual prior art, which would be sufficient to legally defeat a patent, must read on all of a patent's claims. Assume the patent in question has claims (basically, technical description of features) A, B, and C. You research patents, and you find older patents:
Patent 1 has claims A and B.
Patent 2 has claims B and C.
Patent 3 has claims A and C.
None of those will defeat the patent in question on prior art grounds, because none of them include all of the claims A, B, and C.
What you may have at that point is an obviousness objection. You could argue that because there are patents 1-3 exist, that combining them to create A, B, and C was so obvious to someone skilled in the art that the patent should be invalidated for failing to be non-obvious. But that's different than prior art.
Having a patent invalidated for prior art is actually pretty uncommon. Obviousness issues are more common, but often, it's cheaper to just settle.
Changing "prior art" to "prior artwork" paints an interesting picture of a potential courtroom exchange...
"I would like to present Exhibit A, "Motherboard Descending a Staircase" by Ed Picasso, painted in January 2006. Despite its neo-cubist style, this work shows an example of "client hardware architecture" much more clearly than the patent troll--I mean, defendant's patent documents.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Does this even require a patent attorney? The patent is quite specific in that it depends on re-rendering an HTML site into XML. The iPhone browser does not do this; it renders the HTML directly. Thus, whether or not the patent is valid, I don't see how it could possibly apply to the iPhone.
The patent is itself invalid, and should never have been granted. But in this case, it's not even relevant; it covers functionality the iPhone doesn't even have.
The patent doesn't claim that representing a web site in XML is original. Instead, it seems to be claiming patent rights on a caching mechanism somewhat like the tiling scheme used in Google maps, except that instead of converting a map into a series of image tiles, they convert a web page into a series of tiles on the server. In Google Maps, this allows a huge document, if you will, to be served in bandwidth efficient chunks to support a responsive user interface.
This tiling strategy is clearly not original, so the claim is for a mechanism for doing this by converting a web page, server-side, into an XML document, portions of which can be fetched (in cases of adjacent tiles preemptively) from the server, updating the display using DOM style manipulations. The HTML->XML transformation is used to try to convert a number of common practices, inventions:tiling and caching content, displaying advertisements in response to web page navigation events, doing said things on the server side or client side, doing it on mobile devices and set-top devices; doing it in response to voice command, doing it in response to keyboard entries, doing it in response to mouse clicks; allowing the user to zoom in on a tile, etc.
The supposed secret sauce is converting an HTML web site into geometric tiles represented by XML. That's what's supposed to make this thing stick when thrown against the wall. Everything else in the patent is there to maximize the size of the blob sticking to the wall. Oh, yes and mumbo jumbo that makes the idea sound a lot more mysterious than it really is.
I'm guessing that what they are going after is Apple's implementation of something analogous to tabbed browsing on the iPhone, an interface that has a coverflowish feel. The patent claims rights to using zooming/magnification with three dimensional representations of web sites created with their secret XML sauce. You can sort of imagine confusing the Safari interface with this if you had never seen it in action, but the inexplicable thing is that Apple isn't using the secret sauce of HTML-XML conversion to produce their interface. You can sort of imagine going after low end phone news and messaging browsers that use WML as looking something like the secret sauce in that it uses HTML to XML conversion, but it doesn't use it in the way specified by the secret sauce. And it's prior art.
Basically, this is a worthless BS patent. Even if this were not BS, what it describes doesn't apply to the iPhone browser. They don't have any chance at all. So I can only speculate they're trying to hype the value of their "property" to attract stupid investors.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Whether HTML to XML shouldn't matter, some webpage is modifed into another in some not too difficult way. I therefore assume the universal translator is prior art, and, much more fun:
http://www.psyclops.com/translator/
The linked article translated into
pcworld article in skinhead
Much better!
I'll have to visit the complainant the next time I'm in Tyler. (Which should be in January.) Somewhere I saw a scan of the filling, which looked like it was written on the back of napkins. I wouldn't have much confidence in the suit, but IAMNAL.
-- haaz.
The OS running on the iPhone vs. the OS running on a Mac is far more than "slightly scaled down."
Have a look at an architectural overview. There's some pretty significant differences between the platforms
You live by the sword, you die by the sword.
Apple has no problem using crappy intellectual property laws to hurt smaller players, so why should I care when they in turn are attacked?
Changing "prior art" to "prior artwork" paints an interesting picture of a potential courtroom exchange...
"I would like to present Exhibit A, "Motherboard Descending a Staircase" by Ed Picasso, painted in January 2006..
Picasso? Does this make sense?
No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit!
The defense rests.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Software patents generally suck, but it's generally not because of "prior art".
It's because the general trend of progress in this industry is to make small, incremental improvements on what exists. Patents are supposed to encourage big, radical (and *clearly radical) breakthroughs in technology.
When you focus on prior art, you fall into an argumentative trap where the troll says "yes, $priorArt did A, B, C, D, E, and F .. but see! I added G! Them's tasty intellectual properties!"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
... as about people being encouraged to create bogus issues in order to harvest money.
A previous poster cited the lawyer who filed this patent application as "dumbest fuck ever" but I feel reasonably confident he got paid to file the patent.
I'd be surprised if there are not several members of the legal profession getting paid to decide this matter, including a judge.
The legal system probably can't be trusted to stop these abuses, especially in jurisdictions that have actively encouraged this type of litigation. Quick; without looking it up, take a wild guess at which state the complaint will be filed in. I have not looked either, but even if it's being filed somewhere else, I bet most readers thought of the same place (perhaps even the same county)
Even if all patents were eliminated, do you think that the bickering over IP would stop ? No; I read here another poster was concerned that some gray haired judge would not be able to see the truth for what it was.
I would add to that concern about "rocket dockets" that have signaled a particular leaning toward litigants with money to spend in this way.
Sure, patents could be much improved, but there are problem with the legal system too. Eliminating patents would not eliminate trumped up bogus legal proceedings that favor wealthy litigants.
Nullius in verba
Judge: "The court finds the term patent troll to be quite accurate, please do continue"
patent troll, meet DMCA bully.
DMCA bully, meet patent troll.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
Oh c'mon, mod parent up! That was funny :D.
I wrote software to do exactly this back in 2003. We took pages written in XHTML and ran an XSLT transform on them generating simplified XHTML for the then-primitive Blackberry browser.
The idea was that we could write one rich user interface in XHTML, viewable through a regular web browser, and then used the XSLT transforms to degrade the interface for a simplified browser. This was supposed to be one of the miracles of XML. In practice of course it turned out to be more work than if we had just manually created a different set of pages.
Glad I've only done it dozens of times myself before 2006.
I'm not a lawyer, or even a law student, but am an engineer who has worked under the direction of patent attorneys to evaluate patents to determine whether or not my employer's work infringed or whether we could demonstrate prior art.
From my experience, patents consist of a series of claims that are independent and severable, except where they explicitly depend on one another. That is, a patent often consists of claims A, B and C, where B and C are both extensions of the idea in A.
Each independent claim contains multiple elements, and for prior art to apply, or a technology to be infringing, ALL of the elements of a given claim have to apply. It is not, however, necessary for all of the CLAIMS in the patent to apply. If I have prior art that covers everything in claim C, then claim C is invalidated. Since claim C is an extension of claim A, then the prior art also contains everything in A and it is invalidated. But if B contains elements that are not in the prior art, then that portion of the patent stands.
So far, this is consistent with what you said, but the point is that if B is the only claim left standing, then ONLY technologies that implement B can be infringing. So even when prior art doesn't completely invalidate a patent, it often dramatically pares down its applicability. Often to the point where it's a trivial matter to sidestep a patent.
Having a patent invalidated for prior art is actually pretty uncommon. Obviousness issues are more common, but often, it's cheaper to just settle.
True, but don't forget that prior art is often a key part of the settlement negotiations. If the alleged infringer can show prior art that would invalidate a large part of the patent, they can reduce the settlement to almost nothing. It's even been known to happen that in a case where the defendant has been able to come up with not only prior art but also some counter claims, that the plaintiff ends up paying a settlement to avoid having their patent dragged through court and invalidated.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You object to Picasso, but not Ed?
Portals/Gateway to recompress and simplify content have existed for almost as long as slow analog modems have appeared as a way to connect to the Internet.
Some even use more generic methods that the explicitely stated "HTML to XML".
Also they claim to be able to generate "sister sites" (i.e.: present the same content in a different website). Looks exactly like what content aggregation is, except that they don't have an actual RDF/RSS/ATOM file to begin with but have to generate an XML on the fly.
Lastly, mining HTML into XML is a common activity and I'm sure half of the /. readership have all already written such scripts. For as long as Perl has existed.
(I even personally have a couple of such HTML to XML mining scripts. Some of them where even used on portable device. Some of which device are so old that the company have long been bankrupt before TFA's troll even started considering filing their patent)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
1. Lie that you invented something novel 2. ??? 3. Profit!
People were doing this in the 90s. WAP's WML was just a form of XML.
You object to Ed, but not 2006? ;-)
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
I'd prefer Soft Construction with Boiled Capacitors: A Premonition of Browser Wars.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Shouldn't this lawsuit be against Opera Mini, since they reformat through their own proxy server? As far as I know, the iPhone uses WebKit and does not modify pages in any way, other than scaling to screen size.
I think these patents that specify "hand held device" are going to be extinct soon. The iPhone OS and Android are full blown operating systems, and the hardware they run on are more like handheld computers than anything else.
Not at all obvious, obviosity is in the hole of the behinder. First off, real estate "professionals"== car salesmen.
Second, they do not have "ideas", they, like micrososft, buy or steal them.
Third, this holding company is a team of Douchebags, that is nothing but a front for patent trolling.
Fourth invokes the LouisCK law: They must suck a bag of dicks.
These guys are some of those that sit around all day dreaming of ways to get rich off of other peoples work. If they invested half the effort into actual work they would be on an island somewhere spankin it on the beach.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
OK - I expected to be modded down for maybe not funny enough...
I have in my parent post attacked a patent troll, to vent my anger - and have been modded down as a troll.
Wow. No, really - wow.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Patenting the use of IMAP to retrieve an e-mail message if that message can be displayed on a secondary device.
HTML4 and XHTML That followed it were DESIGNED with the goal and one of the major objectives of device independence and portability in mind.
There is nothing "novel", no "invention" in using a standard for one of its intended and well-publicized applicable purposes.
The real-estate developer is essentially patenting use of the public standard in a very basic manner that the standard is expected to be used for by its designers.
The "invention" involved in their patent is HTML and XHTML. So a group of protocol designers can spend YEARS and thousands of man hours, and hundreds of thousands of $$$ in resources to develop standards, BUT it's still perfectly permissible for a third-party to come up with a (clearly anticipated) use for those file formats, and patent it as novel???
For over 3 years, it has been considered so important that the W3c has a working group dedicated to the objective of a device independent unified web.
I'll patent the idea of using a Microsoft .DOC file to store a contract in.
It's essentially a convenient document system that can be used for storing contracts. I can even include the concept of a program that can archive signed documents combined with use of a scanner that converts documents to .DOC or .PDF.
Surely these are just as great inventions as using something like XSLTPROC to trim down a HTML document and render a reduced XHTML version.
The rationale for the existence of patents is to promote innovation by guaranteeing the inventor of a new technology the opportunity to profit from it.
The patent system has degenerated into a game that awards profits and damages to the person that can most aggressively or audaciously prevent other people from innovating. I don't just prior art; I mean patents that are extremely obvious and can be easily thought of.
This in turn causes a bottleneck as innovations are covered by blanket patents that prevent more than one company from even *researching* the field (and providing more innovation).
Yeah, yeah, "anything is obvious when it's been thought of" and "first-come first-served" and "intellectual property". That's not the point. Lose the preconceptions of the patent system as it is now and tell me: What is the point of protecting ideas in the first place? As above, to encourage people to have them. This does the opposite.
Instead of promoting innovation, the patent system stifles it. It was invented in a time when technology progressed more slowly and innovation did not pay as much as it now does. We have overtaken the patent system, and it slows us down. Let the inventors freely crib and copy each other. This will accelerate innovation because in the fast-moving world of today, second-hand inventions are worthless unless you improve on them.
The general bias of this board seems to be anti-process patent. But with a great amount US GDP currently being derived from services and intellectual properties which include such processes, is there no benefit from awarding inventors if the only aspect of their invention is algorithmic in nature?
The general opinion of this board, as I see it, is that process patents retard production, especially but not only innovative production, more than they advance it. Can you quantify the "great amount of US GDP currently derived from services and intellectual properties which include such processes"? Once you have, can you honestly claim that taking all those patent-enforced methodological [I will not call this farce "intellectual"] monopolies off the open market really reduces GDP?
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Elliot Gottfurcht and Grant Gottfurcht are about to Gettfurcht by Apple.
Changing "prior art" to "prior artwork" paints an interesting picture of a potential courtroom exchange...
"I would like to present Exhibit A, "Motherboard Descending a Staircase" by Ed Picasso, painted in January 2006. Despite its neo-cubist style, this work shows an example of "client hardware architecture" much more clearly than the patent troll--I mean, defendant's patent documents.
You sir are a sick puppy lol :-P
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
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.'
I hold a patent for British English to American English translations. If you've ever watched a British show which used the word, "fag", and turned to a friend or family member and said, "cigarette", you owe me money. This patent is equally stupid and without merit. HTML is so close to XML it's sad and there has already been standardization efforts to create XML compliant HTML (XHTML). To make matters worse, they are using XML as intended so the patent is both obvious and as intended by the technology creators. Please find the patent agent which granted this patent and begin flogging him while forcing him to shoulder all legal costs to fight this patent which is woefully invalid.