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Multi-Touch Tech Firm Seeks iPad Sales Injunction
An anonymous reader writes "Taiwan-based Elan Microelectronics just filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission alleging that Apple is infringing on its patents and violating the Tariff Act, and is seeking a ban on imports of the iPad as well as an order to stop selling the mobile device along with iPhones, iPods, and Macs. The move was taken as a 'continuation of our efforts to enforce our patent rights against Apple's ongoing infringement,' the company said." Considering many iPad pre-orders have tracking #s already, I suspect it might be a little late.
Yes I know that prior art is not a slam dunk defense but with all of the prior art regarding 'multi-touch' I can't understand how these companies
managed to get it patented.
It seems that everyone has patented the idea except for the people that had it first!
And it appears that it was not Apple, Google, HTC, or even these guys....
I should patent something random and start to sue people myself, obviously someone is making money doing it.
Apple bought fingerworks in 2005. They have their implementation of multitouch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
That doesn't say who owns the patents, but this shows how stupid America pushing IP is... it's just going to bite us back bigtime when India/China compete on the high end.
This kind of confusion is what comes of seeing a patent that covers a method of doing something that facilitates X, and calling it "the patent on doing X". It's not. There is no such thing as "the patent on multi-touch".
There can be, and probably are, many patents related to multi-touch. It's quite possible, since there's more than one way to implement multi-touch, that you could own a patent related to mullti-touch and I could make multi-touch devices without licesning or infringing your patent.
I think that depends on the "fix". I've seen some pretty fantastic ones that are funny, insightful, or both. Of course I also see a lot of stupid ones, but if we stop the "fixed that for ya" replies a new meme will just step in to fill the void because the real problem is people who think something like that takes the place of quality content rather than accenting whatever is (or isn't) there to begin with.
This is why I don't want to take out patents for my invention. They don't seem to actually protect you from litigation, and they hinder the development and deployment of new technologies. Why should I have to wait until some worthless dipshit company's patent expires to buy an iPad? Why should there be a million lawyers involved in developing new technology (about the only people worse for technology than politicians are lawyers). Patents are a terrible idea. All the most successful technology companies simply ignore them (in a practical sense) and leave the issue for their lawyers to deal with.