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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.
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.
Do both, and then walk in to your boss's office and give them a hug. Offer no explaination when pressed.
-=Bang Bang=-
Four possibilities:
1) They wish to claim that "scaled down" is included in their definition of a "Sister site" (absurd)
2) They believe the Safari browser in the iPhone is not showing the "real" site (uninformed)
3) They are trying to use Safari as a test case since Apple's best argument is that it "doesn't scale things". Even if they lose, they can't point to this lawsuit and use it as a basis to force other cell phone makers to pay up (since they can't claim apple's defense) (unlikely, but plausible. IANAL)
4) They are going after Apple because its the "hot" thing with lots of money to go after (likely)
Anyone have any other ideas? :)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
5) They're a real estate company that doesn't know their head from their ass. -ets.
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?!
You're only allowed to invent something that you can personally use? You do know that tampons weren't invented by a woman, right?
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)
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.
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Your shitting me right?