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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
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.
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?
Someplace I have a Handspring Visor with a Xircom WiFi adapter that does this, too; it was from early in 2002. It might even still work, if Palm hasn't unplugged the proxy servers yet.
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)
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
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.
A debate about "slight" versus "significant" strikes me as silly. The page you linked to shows that the phone has a kernel that supports posix/BSD 4.4, and layered upon that are a lot of familiar APIs from the desktop version, with some things removed (printing, carbon,...) to reduce weight as appropriate for a mobile platform. UIKit is unique to the mobile version.
One could make a case for calling this slight - especially if juxtaposed against the architectural differences between the desktop and mobile versions of Windows. The iPhone OS is essentially NeXTstep on my phone. Windows Mobile is nowhere near "NT on a phone". So, in comparison between the two pairs, it is slight.
I suppose one could make a case for it being signifigant, as well -- but I'd be surprised if one could do it in a way that would undermine the validity of the other perspective. The page you linked to does as much to support "slight" as it does to support "significant".
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
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.
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.
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