David/Goliath Story Brewing Between Apple and iControlPad Makers

relliker writes "Apple has just patented a design for an iPhone gaming add-on after admitting that the iPhone is somewhat hard to use as a games machine. The catch is that the design is not theirs. It was designed by a team of gaming aficionados, one member of which, Craig 'craigix' Rothwell of OpenPandora fame, is already twittering like mad about the shot just fired by Apple in their direction. The iControlPad team are in contact with their IP lawyer, since their design is already in production. Will Apple still try to steamroll right through them?"

Comments

Yay for big corporations.

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll steamroll right over them, and no lawyer will be able to help the poor devs. Like the KGB fellows used to say, "for every man, for every deed, there is a paragraph. And if there is none, then a new one shall be written".
Hooray for big corporations.

Re:Yay for big corporations.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There is another, perhaps ultimately more dangerous, angle.

Apple doesn't need a patent here. They hold the keys to the device. Unless they feel like blessing your hardware or software, your market is limited to jailbroken devices only(and the 100 or whatever individually authorized test devices, for what good it will do you).

That is the real danger of going up against Apple. They control the sole distribution channel, as well as developing the APIs for the device, and can authorize and deauthorize at will(and, since they can deauthorize at will, they have very strong leverage against just about anybody who hopes to, or has, published on the platform).

Apple certainly isn't above crushing people in litigation, they can, in fact, be mean bastards about it. However, if Apple really felt like crushing these guys, here's how it could go down, no patents required:

Step 1. Apple releases some sort of gaming peripheral, to make up for the fact that physical buttons are, in fact, pretty useful.

Step 2. Apple releases a minor iPhone OS update, giving that specific peripheral a nice API interface and maybe some configuration options in the system configuration menu.

Step 3. Because of step two, makers of iPhone games find it relatively easy to support Apple's peripheral, and generally do, because it is easier than supporting one or more third party peripherals.

Step 4. If the above steps don't succeed as well as Apple would like, they can always make support of their peripheral compulsory and support of 3rd party peripherals competitive with it grounds for termination from the app store.

Seems Apple also patented the Nintendo DS...

[NeutronCowboy]

See figure 5 of the patent application. Not sure what this means for the whole thing. Did someone at Apple just throw together a few ideas, and patent them all? The language and the "art" seems vague enough for it. Unfortunately, I'm not a lawyer, so I have no clue whether something like this means that the entire patent application can be tossed out, or whether vague language means it can't be enforced.

Either which way, this is about as lame as patent applications come. It really sounds like someone looked around at existing platforms and said "let's patent them all."

Re:Short answer:

[The Empiricist]

How on earth does a company like Apple seem to think they can steal someone's idea and get away with it?

How do you know they stole the idea? Independent invention is possible. If the iControlPad creators had filed for a U.S. patent, there is a good chance that they would be engaged in interference proceedings to determine who has the right to the patent.

In the United States, an inventor has twelve months after an invention becomes known to file for a patent. The fact that Apple filed for the patent after iControlPad became known doesn't mean anything by itself. What matters is whether Apple's employees were the first inventors (based on factors such as conception date and diligence in reducing the invention to practice).

am I missing something?

[ConfusedVorlon]

Why is anyone patenting the idea of docking some controls to an iphone?

seriously - how is this non-obvious.

let's have some prior art

1) keyboards (yup, they connect to most things)
2) any number of gaming controls for phones

blah blah blah

go make one, sell it, I wish you luck.

keep the patent lawyers out of the game.

Re:am I missing something?

[cbreak]

Have you even read the patent? No way keyboards or gaming controls for phones are a prior art.

1. A hand-held game accessory to physically receive a portable electronic device to enhance the playing of games, the game accessory comprising:a recess to physically receive at least a substantial portion of the portable electronic device;a plurality of input controls that may be actuated by a user while playing a game;first circuitry to communicate with the portable electronic device, the communication relating to the actuation of a plurality of input controls; andsecond circuitry to retain information about a game after the portable electronic device is removed.

The thing retains information about the game, like a memory card or something.

4. The game accessory of claim 1 further comprising a connector insert for mating with a connector receptacle located on the portable media player to form a path for the communication, wherein the connector insert rotates to allow the game accessory to physically receive the portable electronic device.

So the connector has to rotate. So to find a prior art, you have to find a controler with a rotating connector that has embedded memory to store score. Here's the link to the patent if you care

*sigh* This is why we have a patent process.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

iControlPad didn't patent their device, they don't even have a device on the market, and they've been working on it for nearly 2 years now. They had a 6 month head start on Apple announcing *anything* and they didn't bother talking to an IP lawyer about filing a patent first? You've got to be kidding me.

I hope the iCP team learns something from this.

Re:Short answer:

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously Apple somehow is coated in teflon while the big bad wolf MSFT is guilty of wrong doing just at the mention. How hard is it for people to understand that ALL of the big players try to steal from the little guy. This includes such stalwarts as Adobe, Google(one of the worst), Apple,Corel,MSFT,Intel,AMD,NVIDIA. And most of these will also sue when their products can't sell on their own (Do I hear Opera, NVIDIA,AMD,Real,etc)? And yet we are bombarded with how terrible THE ONE (MSFT)is.

Re:Apple

[mattack2]

Well, both System 7.5 and System 8 were nothing but Apple ripoffs of extensions and control panels stolen from the community and packaged into overpriced OS upgrades

[citation needed]

(Was 7.5 a paid update? I honestly don't remember.)

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_8#Mac_OS_8.0

That certainly seems like a lot more than "Apple ripoffs of extensions and control panels stolen from the community".

You're definitely insulting those of us who worked on it.

what else is new?

[pydev]

I looked through Apple's patents that they are asserting against Nokia and have been following Apple patents in general.

My observation has been that many of Apple's patents are write-ups of well-known techniques or even small variations on other people's existing products. This is the way Apple operates.

I'm glad this patent illustrates that a bit more clearly than others, but it's basically standard operating procedure for Apple.