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Apple Counter-Sues Nokia Over Patents
adeelarshad82 writes "About two months ago Nokia sued Apple for infringing Nokia patents in its iPhone. The 10 patents in the lawsuit, filed in the US state of Delaware, relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (LAN) standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. In the latest development to the case, Apple said Friday that it had filed its own suit against Nokia, countering Nokia's claims of patent infringement with its own."
Not really. Apple has only been in the cell phone business for a few years... Nokia is a granddaddy. If you look at the patents Apple is saying that Nokia is infringing, they're comparatively minor. Let's look at the patents...
No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system
No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system
No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call
No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display
No. RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system
No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system
No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load
No. 5,634,074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services
No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor
No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality
No. 6,343,263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data
Mostly we're talking fluffy software patents. The last few are potentially meaty, but given how little time Apple has been in this business, and how recent these were filed and granted, they're probably pretty specific (although I don't have the time to pick through the actual claims). Worst case scenario for Nokia is probably, they pull their smartphones from the US market for 6 months while they work around them. And the US smartphone market is a minor part of Nokia's business.
But Nokia... Nokia has patents on just about every wireless technology known to man. Worst case scenario for Apple is they can cancel the iPhone and put an ethernet jack in the next MacBook Air.
Apparently some people get the opposite effect from Jobs' reality distortion field. Let's see here...
Mach: It's open source. So long as Apple abides by the license (which they do), there is no possible way they can "steal" it.
Objective-C: Apple is far from the only ones to have an Obj-C language. And the funny thing is that NeXT was the first company to license it, which Apple later purchased. Yep, obtaining a license certainly equates to theft!
MP3 Players: Are you fucking serious? Apple was far from the first to make an MP3 player. They were simply the most successful. Holy crap, Sony ripped off the inventor of the wax cylinder by making the Walkman!
Multitouch: Apple purchased Fingerworks, who had developed a number of multitouch technologies and interfaces. Again, buying is stealing?
The App Store: You can't possibly be fucking serious.
Song recommendations: See above. You mean they can recommend something based on something else you bought? WOW, they stole that...from the rest of the ENTIRE FUCKING INDUSTRY.
Phone cameras: Holy. Fucking. Shit. I'm not even going to address this.
Words cannot describe just how incredibly stupid you really are.