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Apple Sues HTC For 20 Patent Violations In Phones
eldavojohn writes "Taiwanese HTC is being sued by Apple for 20 patents regarding the many phones HTC manufactures. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, 'We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Apple has similar patent litigation with Nokia and may be trying to scare the rest of the industry into licensing patents similar to the Microsoft-Novell and Microsoft-Amazon deals regarding patents covering Linux functionality."
Maybe Apple should pay Nokia's patent royalties first before they go bullying others? (you know, the company that spend billions for mobile technology R&D and who's technology it's almost all based on?)
Apple is just like a little kid trying to yell at the parents here. Too bad the mobile phone industry is a small one, everyone of the existing players cross-license between each one and ass behaving Apple is in serious trouble if the other companies stop licensing their technology.
Apparently, it seems to think so. From the complaint:
"The '381 Patent, entitled "List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And
Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display," was duly and legally issued on December 23, 2008 by
the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '381 Patent is attached hereto as
Exhibit D.
40. Apple is the exclusive and current owner of all rights, title, and interest in the
'381 Patent, including the right to bring this suit for injunctive relief and damages."
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Here's the software patent info I've gathered on these topics so far:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
We only learned of Apple's actions based on your stories and Apple's press release. We have not been served yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years.
Apparently some 700 pages were just filed and they aren't all in the court's record system yet. In addition some of the patents are pretty questionable. Crazy.
My work here is dung.
Remember this day. This marks the day that you were incredibly, horribly, enormously guilty of hyperbole.
Apple sort of deserves to profit from their R&D
And will Apple pay Xerox for inventing Graphical User Interfaces? Will they pay Nokia for developing cell phones and smart phones for years? Hypocrisy is the one of the most despicable traits imaginable. This lawsuit has that coming out of it's ears.
And as far is hugely innovative... I guessed the form factor in 2006. If I had a company built on the technology developed by others, maybe I could be the one running around like a greedy bitch pretending that I did it all on my own.
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=193127&cid=15847027
Fuck you Steve Jobs.
You think so?
Apple are well known for being litigious pricks, and for having a hard-on for dubious patents that just won't quit; but that doesn't seem to have hurt them much.
It would appear that the lesson that they learned from the "look and feel" lawsuit of the mid-90's was that everything is more fun with a giant pile of patents.
Maybe Apple should pay Nokia's patent royalties first
I think Apple would be happy to do so. The only problem is, unlike with every other company Nokia will not except ONLY money in the case of Apple - they also demand cross-licencing of patents (presumably similar to the ones in question).
Why do you think it's fair that Nokia can demand different terms from licensers of a technology, when Nokia supposedly set forth the licenses under the RAND construct? That stands for "reasonable and non-discriminatory". How is demanding specific patents from Apple non-discriminatory?
Apple has a lawsuit going there, demanding they be able to pay Nokia as per normal terms.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google does not build devices and is therefore harder to attack than a manufacturer/importer, who builds android devices. Google on the other hand might feel compelled to help HTC, if this is actually about Android.
Might be interesting to see how this plays out.
I was at a ski resort the other week, and I heard two people talking about iPhone vs. other smartphones. One person had an iPhone. The iPhone owner said something to the effect of "Does Android have pinch to zoom? If so, I will go check it out". The UI of the iPhone is Apple's invention and gives it a competitive advantage. Why is it wrong for them to defend that?
I guess Steve Jobs has had a change of heart on one his most used phrases? (See Steve Jobs "artists steal" quote)
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
The lawsuit is not "similar to Microsoft's" patents over Linux functionality.
Well, the Apple patents are basically software patents in relation to phones.
So, as the submitter, I saw a lot of similarities here. Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.
Now, you have Apple entering the mobile phone market and borrowing ideas from around the industry and innovating some. Then they patent their software "methods" on these phones and wait for everyone to adopt them. How many tens of millions of units have they let HTC ship? And now they're basically suing Nokia (of all companies) and HTC.
The post immediately denigrates the validity of the litigation by linking it to something that it is not.
Considering the above, I'm not sure which case is more degenerative ... but they're both pretty despicable in my opinion.
I am interested in your view of how these two cases are different. I don't think pointing out that someone may just be flexing their software patent portfolio against the industry is "editorializing" or "BS" when it appears this is exactly what both companies are doing with different results.
My work here is dung.
"similar to the Microsoft-Novell and Microsoft-Amazon deals regarding patents covering Linux functionality."
MS: You might be infringing on one or more unspecified patents.
Apple: You are infringing on these specific patents listed in the suit.
Not really all that similar. One is an empty threat, the other is serious legal action.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
The difference is, that hardware patents can usually be worked around, as long as you can keep the user interface stable. Changing the user interface on the other hand means that the enduser must adapt, which he usually is reluctant to do. It is a form of monopoly.
Imagine, for comparison, that Alfred Vacheron had patented the steering wheel in 1894 and had been unwilling to license it to competitors. The outcome could have been that dozens of different ways to steer a car would have been invented and users would have troubles switching between manufactures. A serious hindrance to a competitive market.
There's a patent for screen rotation and scaling? That's nuts.
Patented inventions are supposed to be novel and require some genuine inspiration, not something that's obvious. The idea that you can use orientation sensors and linear transforms to make a picture that's always right-side-up and that's different sizes is laughable -- as soon as you decide you want to do it, the way to do it is obvious. Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean that it required any patent-worthy cleverness to do it.
Patents are supposed to encourage invention and innovation by giving people who invent clever novel things a way to profit from them, not a way for some business to lock out competition. The screen-pinch-to-scale thing? Again, pretty obvious. (My eeepc has that on the touchpad, actually.)
As an example, suppose you wanted to make a mouse that could sense rotation/twist as well as translation. Any idiot would realize that an easy way to do this is to put two optical sensors (or balls) on it, one on each side, and do some simple math. Something like this shouldn't be patentable.
One rather ridiculous example is the Four Thirds imaging system. Olympus decided they'd like to use a different size CCD than other camera makers to make a digital SLR, and they actually patented it! They decided what size sensor, what size lens mount, what register distance, etc. to use, and then patented these engineering choices. There's nothing inherently different about the Four Thirds SLR's than any other digital SLR -- they work in the ordinary bog-standard way. (Patent absurdity aside, mine does take nice pictures.)
Patents need to be restricted to real inventions, not simple choices that anybody with a bachelor's degree could have come up with when faced by a problem. Fix this and you fix a lot of the problems with patent trolling.
Steve Jobs is a dick and the people who hang onto him are nuts.
This patent BS is a joke. Did HTC hack, steal or corrupt Apple's trade secrets? Not at all and nobody believes that. It is one thing if a company steals your stuff, it is completely different if they come up with a similar idea/process independent of you.
The part that makes this so laughable is that Apple is using the iPad name when two other companies already have claims to it. It is amazing to me that a company that bullies and takes from others with one hand has the balls to wave a finger at other companies (Especially ones that behavior better).
I love the iPad propaganda that says "you just do".
Really?
How do you "do" two apps at the same time? Who doesn't multi-task these days?
How do I "do" Java and Flash? I mean if it is the best way to browse the web, then I assume it supports key web technologies.
How "do" I drag and drop music and documents onto my iPhone/iPad from Linux and Windows? Am I free to not use iTunes?
How "do" I tether my laptop to my iPhone or ipad for internet access? Android has a wifi-tether app, is there an app for that on the iPhone?
How "do" people who don't have an Intel based Mac write apps? I can write Android and Blackberry apps without needed specific hardware.
How "do" I release iPhone apps, without giving away my intellectual property and source code? Does Apple allow me to protect my trade secrets like it does?
How "do" I not pay so much and have my choice of carrier? AT&T's network is cheap while the plans are expensive.
Respect the Constitution
The OP should have RTFA lol It's in the update with the complaint.
[quote]
certain mobile communication devices including cellular phones and smart phones, including at least phones incorporating the
Android Operating System (collectively, “the Accused Products”)
[/quote]
HTC(8.13B) is considerably larger than Palm (1.05B), but are both dwarfed by RIM (39.42B). Apple's market cap is 190.34B.
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Look, HTC builds H/W, they stick anything Linux or WinMo underneath and then slap a modular UI ontop (SenseUI)-- the UI is very portable and can mimic a lot. It's a great design-concept IMHO.
It's also becoming the best UI out there and seriously threatening Apple's bread-n-butter: its heavily advertised, "innovative" UI design (for the ipXXX's).
For one, this is a great marketing ploy by Apple to put a stick in the ground that they practically invented the mobile device UI (which it's "mainstream" customers like as it's branding and makes them 'feel' good buying an Apple product). And two, as SenseUI evolves, its design and Android's dev model allow it to evolve much faster than the iPhone UI. And we all know 2 independent dev teams will likely converge/create similar features overtime (think Gnome vs. KDE), since the user cases are the same! Hence, one can conclude HTC/SenseUI can claim [similar] newer UI features since they can release faster. Basically, Apple can't keep up. Hence suing will slow HTC down so Apple can release UI features before HTC does and claim it's a Apple "innovation".
Let's face it, patents aren't for protection anymore, they're tools for marketing strategy and engineering time-to-market, i.e. in other words, market control.
I guess there's a reason they call their site "folklore.com". While the author may have worked at Xerox at one time (installing copiers perhaps) it's clear that he never used a Xerox Alto.
Nobody who worked with an Alto would say that Smalltalk "had a three-button" mouse. Smalltalk was just a programming environment, not hardware.
RAND only applied to the companies that helped develop GSM. There are about a dozen companies with patents that helped create it, so they set up RAND to come to a mutually beneficial cross-licensing agreement. Apple had nothing to do with the development of GSM; they contributed nothing for which they should receive a favorable licensing agreement.
Now, in order to get a piece of the pie, Apple needs to bring something to the table, which they have been unwilling to do. Nokia has said "not good enough", and it's well within their rights to do so. They don't think Apple's patents are worth what their patents are worth, so they want Apple to share more. It's like trading a $20 dollar item for a $10 item, you wouldn't think it's fair either and wouldn't make the trade. For some reason, Apple seems to believe their $10 item is worth $200, and so we have a problem. I think some companies did give Apple favorable licensing, but by no means did they have to. They likely did not have the same level of investment in the GSM technology that Nokia has either.
In any case, what Apple can NOT do is just ignore the patents and make the phone anyway, that's called patent infringement and it's a whole lot worse if you do it on purpose than if you did it by accident.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Actually, GTK+ and the other GLib libraries that GNOME is based on are object-oriented.
I think he meant in the hearts and minds of geeks, not an actual decline. Microsoft is as strong as ever, yet it is the bottom of the barrel in opinion around here. Hell, Gates aught to be every nerd's hero, he's the richest man in the world (or one of, it fluctuates) for selling computer software!
Same with Apple, they really are a dirty, nasty company. For some reason putting out pretty products that aren't Microsoft makes you golden among geeks though. Never mind that they treat their employees, their customers, and developers like pieces of scum, and it is only by the grace of Jobbs that they are permitted to use their products at all.
Seriously, get over Apple. OSX is neat, Macs are solid, their iPods are the best, but the company is run by grade - A assholes who think you are pure trash. Great products, shitty ass company. I really wish people could see the difference.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-suit-against-apple-barred.html?pagewanted=1
Xerox sued Apple in December, seeking more than $150 million in damages. It asserted that the screen display of Apple's Macintosh computer unlawfully used copyrighted technology that Xerox had developed and incorporated in a computer called the Star, which was introduced in 1981, three years before the Macintosh...
G. Gervaise Davis, a copyright lawyer in Monterey, Calif., said the decision in the case ''is not a bit surprising.'' He said Xerox had waited too long to file a copyright infringement case and had to resort to a weaker charge of unfair competition. ''I think it's unfortunate,'' he added, ''because Apple is running around persecuting Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard over things that they borrowed from Xerox.''
But hey, your anecdote was great!
Actually Apple did offer to license the patents from Nokia but Nokia tried to get Apple to give them all of the family jewels instead of the reasonable licensing they offered the other smart phone makers. Apple offered to give them access to the patents that Nokia is being sued for violating but that wasn't enough for Nokia. Apple was sitting there taking it for a while but now that they are the target of all the other smart phone makers it's time to take off the gloves and get back in the game!
You're typing that from a coffee shop, from your macbook, aren't you?
... and by that I mean the high street, not certain high streets in US towns and cities, not certain self selecting demographics (/. readership), but actual high streets in other countries in the world...
I live in a city with 2,000+ years of history (Exeter, UK)
I live in a city with 50 mbit cable for approx 50 bucks a month.
I live in a city which is a big university town, and which also is home to the UK Met Office (I mention that because it is basically a tech institution)
You know how many iphones I have seen in the flesh?
NONE
NOT ONE
ZIP
ZERO
Nope, not a single one.
Flipside, I am one of the few people I know who does not own a fully featured smartphone less than 12 months old, I own a very old and very basic samsung phone.
iphone is available here, and competitive price wise, plus we have the ability here to just stick a sim card in and use any carrier you like, and the iphone was marketed harder than any other smartphone, so there really aren't ANY barriers to entry here for users.
except one.
they choose / prefer to buy a different make / model phone.
Apple (iphone) suing HTC over phone tech patents is like Apple (ipod) suing Sony over walkman tech patents.
The analogy is as the ipod is insignificant in the field of hi-fi hardware, the iphone is insignificant in the field of comms hardware.
Apple is a busted flush, suing instead of innovating.
No news here unless you are an Apple shareholder, if you are then this is news, a heads up to sell Apple stock asap and get into something else.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Maybe so, but it does mark a turning point. In the past, Apple primarily let their products speak for themselves-- or, at least, they let us think so.
I think what bugs The Steve is that a new competitor came up doing what Apple used to do: make great products. I still think Apple's products are highly refined, but I can't stand the lock-in. Their new business model (and the reason that they are wildly successful) is that they are now hybrid of the old Apple ("hip") and Microsoft ("shrewd"). In my mind, this is antithetical to the old Apple way of doing things, which was more of a hacker approach. The old Mac OS may be been a POS, but at least it was a hacker's POS.
It may be time to finally bury that old SE/30.
dude, you're so full of it.
First, unless you're one of the lawyers on the case (which I doubt) you have precisely as little idea as anyone else about the exact details of what Apple offered and what Nokia demanded. They're not made public and all we have is some Apple PR about how they were 'treated unfairly'. Maybe you're one of the guys who take a second helping on everything Apple dishes out, but I for one am skeptical of PR in general.
Second, stop bloody brandishing RAND. Key to RAND is reasonable. Going back to the post above about one offering $10 stuff for the other's $20 stuff, Apple can claim a dirty sock would have been a reasonable payment if they like, but just saying it won't make it true. So unless you can point out
kindly stop trolling about this matter. Once it goes to court and we all get to see the numbers (if that happens and they're not sealed) then we can argue who was in the wrong. Until then pretty please with sugar on top STFU about it.
First there's a patent that prevents the USPTO from rotating applications 180, and now they can't even turn their screen to read stuff?
Off-topic, but the reason the USPTO sends stuff back is because it's the job of the client-paid $600/hour patent attorney to file his or papers properly, not the job of a government-paid worker to dot their i's and cross their t's for them, and verify that every page out of several hundred pages is properly filed.
Just a few points:
RE: touch screens -- Fingerorks (owned by apple) just because you've seen it elsewhere doesn't mean Apple has no claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerworks
RE: NOKIA patents
Terms must be "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory." If they have pooled the patent, they need to offer the same terms to Apple as everyone else.
RE:
"Stolen BSD kernel"?
Get off drugs, scratchpaper!
-- My apologies if the above facts contain any opinions, or vice versa! --
NOPE. RAND only applies to the members of the GSM club. Apple want's to join that club and thereby gain access to RAND. Nokia is saying what they are bringing to the table isn't worth what they will get from it so they won't let them join the club without paying to join which would gain them access to RAND.
It would be clinically stupid of the GSM authors to allow anyone to join the club and get the patents for free. To get free access you have to bring something worthwhile to the group (and be approved by current members), without that value you must buy your way in. Apple is trying to bully their way in and I hope they lose badly. In fact I hope ITC bars imports of the Iphone.
If I had mod points, I'd give you all of them.
So many people fall into the same old predictable argument of "well clearly it wasn't obvious if no one else did it yet," and "sure it seems obvious after the fact." But you've illustrated exactly the problem with that line of thinking. These companies aren't patenting novel solutions to old problems; they're patenting the most obvious solutions to new problems. In our current patent system, the first person to encounter a new problem gets a patent. So if I'm making a portable music player and I ask myself, "What's the best way to scroll through my playlist with continuous motion, given limited space?" then I inevitably come to the conclusion that I need a circle. Unfortunately for me, Apple made iPods first, so if I want decent circular-motion-based controls, I'm dead in the water.
Just because you thought of a solution first does not mean that it wasn't obvious; in many cases it just means that you were the first one to encounter the problem.
There were very specific reasons why Apple stopped using the OS9 code - problems that MS has been facing in the many years since as it tries to hang onto all of its legacy code.
You can't turn this into a "too pathetic to use their own code" argument - the break from OS9 to OS X was a huge step and required a huge amount of work. They maintained the Classic environment for a long time after the break to provide backwards compatibility for old apps (and dual booting for a time).
OS X *was* a huge step forward, and Apple are well aware (and make no attempts to hide the fact) that is built on top of Darwin - a core system they continue to develop (and that has seen much benefit since Apple adopted it for OS X). It's not like they have called the core system done, they are continuing to work on it, and OSS projects that also use it (as well as many that don't) continue to benefit from that development. Isn't that one of the benefits of OSS? Mutual benefit for both parties.
I have seen comments on /. before about how MS really needs to do what Apple did and just start fresh with Windows and stop patching on top of patches - citing security and the age and complexity of the code as a problem. Whether that's the right thing to do is another matter, but it's not as cut and dried as you make out.
It's also not like Apple just grabbed some source code and replaced the word "Darwin" with "OS X" and put it in a box - a substantial amount of work has gone into making it the OS it is today, from its beginnings as NextStep.
Sometimes you just have to know when it's time to let your 17-year mature-but-dead-end product go and start again. This is not "the failure to use your own R&D and instead rely on someone else's" - it was a development decision for the future of the Mac platform.
If you think that the continued development of OS9 was the way forward at the time then you are looking at it through rose-tinted glasses - it really was ready to be put out to pasture.
A) We know nothing about the actual negotiations. Face it, no insider will talk openly about it.
B) By looking at the original Nokias complaint, there is no precedent on patent licensing without non-cross licensing additional patents. I infer that from the fact that Nokia asks to determine the price in the complaint(witch I actually read). So what Apple wanted as a fair price might have been really inadequate and baseless.
The N1 has clearly touched a nerve at Apple. And for good reason: Objectively it's just a better device: Thinner, much better display, much faster, better camera, gps navigation, faster browser, not locked, not tied to AT&T's network, and so on. (Disclosure: I own both.) The Apple execs feel the threat, even though I'm sure Android isn't yet making much of a dent in their sales. It's about wanting to be perceived as the innovator. When you don't have the best product in the marketplace, you try to maintain the high ground by accusing the other guys of stealing from you.
Yawn. Haven't we all seen this before? These patent fights never work. Remember when Apple sued Microsoft over their Mac GUI patents? How did that turn out?
In principle patents offer protection and exclusivity, but in practice they do not for these large companies. The USPTO has been granting excessively broad patents for decades, the result being that every major company with a portfolio of (excessively broad) patents can legitimately sue any other for patent infringement. So all of the big companies decide to in effect declare a truce, and cross-license their patent portfolios so that someone can actually release a product. The real loser is the innovative small company, which can't foot the $xxM legal cost of counter-suing, etc. when a big company decides to go after them, or hasn't yet accumulated a portfolio of (excessively broad) patents with which to credibly counter-sue. I don't believe this is the outcome the authors of the Constitution had in mind for the US patent system.
Apple of course understands this reality. This is just marketing and PR.
To clarify, by "the device" I was referring to the hardware. I would stand by my assertion that the N1 is better hardware than the iPhone, by just about any objective measure. Where the iPhone really shines is the OS; it's a little more polished than Android -- and for some people this may trump the hardware and carrier disadvantages -- although IMHO Android is catching up fast (and I could point to a few areas where Android is better).