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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."
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.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, and I'm sure there are a slew of fundamental patents held by other companies that can take Apple to the cleaners if they keep pulling this crap. HTC's been making smartphones for over a decade, so I hope they're able to fire back. Not to mention Google designed most of Android, so won't it be interesting if they join the fray?
I'll be interested to hear more about what specific patents Apple is trying to bludgeon HTC with, but I'll hardly be surprised if it's a bunch of trivial crap like basic UI elements.
Apple looks like a bully right now, and if that's the case, I hope the other kids on the playground gang up on Apple and teach them a lesson.
Remember this day. This marks the day that you were incredibly, horribly, enormously guilty of hyperbole.
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.
Because they did not invent pinch to zoom, it had been used before. Furthermore it is obvious, and therefore should be unpatentable.
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.
The details are here:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-patent-lawsuit-against-htc-is-all-about-android/
and yes, “Object-Oriented Graphic System” is one of them along with “Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics”.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
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 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!
Why bother
Thankfully patent examiners understand there is a difference between obvious after the fact and obvious before the fact.
When no one was doing it, then suddenly everyone wants to be doing it, that's a pretty good example of something that was clearly not obvious before the fact and was after.
That's true of any patent. To anyone mechanically inclined, a huge percentage of mechanical patents (say, as an example, rack-and-pinion steering) are totally obvious once you've been shown there was a problem and have seen someone'e solution. It doesn't mean, a hundred years ago, that rack and pinion steering wasn't patentable -- because the examiners know if it was obvious and there were a hundred inventors looking at the problem, they'd be sitting on a hundred patent filings.
Multi-touch is an obvious solution to how you provide more complex gestural indications to a touch device ... now. But five years ago when there were gobs of touch applications in industry, and gobs of touchpads on laptops there were gobs of people looking at how to provide better gestures, and not one of them came up with that *even though the hardware supported it in many cases*.
That tells you something about the patentability of multi-touch. Apple released it and suddenly everyone was wanting to duplicate it on phones, touchpads and touchscreen computers.
Patents are made to cover exactly that situation -- where someone finds a solution to a problem that no one else has *especially* where its obvious after the fact (since the obviousness makes it easy to copy).
Because they did not invent pinch to zoom, it had been used before. [citation needed]
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
In particular, look at the part about the digitial desk in *1991*. Yet another Xerox PARC technology Apple claims for themselves.
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?
Ahem.
"Apple reinvented the mobile phone in 2007 with its revolutionary iPhone®, and did it again in 2008 with its pioneering App Store, which now offers more than 150,000 mobile applications in over 90 countries. Over 40 million iPhones have been sold worldwide.
Steve Jobs was quoted as saying "We would like other companies to compete by re-reinventing their own phones, not stealing ideas like a screen you can touch or a program you can download for local use. These innovations are clearly thanks to us."
Yes, this phenomenon is known as Reality Distortion Field (or to use technical jargon, "lying scumbag executive").
A program you can download on your phone for local use? You mean like JavaME JAR files? Like the app store that GetJar started years and years before Apple?
A screen you can touch? Like the LG Prada, announced before the IPhone, or like hundreds of other touchscreen kiosks in the last three decades?
Yup. Apple. Re-inventing marketing.
Uh, you realize that Jobs's 'quote' above wasn't real, right?
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.
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.
This is a myth, stop perpetuating it.
Apple was given the same deal as any other manufacturer, Apple rejected this and demanded a special deal. The standard deal remained on the table until Nokia got sick of Apple's delay tactics and just sued for the value of the standard contract, why else is Nokia only suing for the standard license fees + court costs.
What Apple is suing HTC in a poor attempt to artificially increase the (perceived) value of Apple's (somewhat dubious) patent portfolio in an attempt to gain an unfair advantage in cross patent licensing. They are going after HTC because Google (the real target) or Motorola is too risky, in other words Apple is hoping to bully HTC to get a favourable outcome. They might be able to out lawyer HTC although I doubt it. Any decent lawyer will tear Apple's complaint to shreds(some blogs already have). Right now HTC is claiming hasn't received any court papers so they have no official position as yet but this may just mean the papers are taking their time (is Apple too cheap to pay for first class mail?).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.