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Apple Counter-Sues Motorola Over Touchscreen Patents
Earlier this month, we discussed news that Motorola had sued Apple, alleging infringement of 18 patents involving the iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. In response, Apple has now launched a pair of lawsuits alleging that Motorola is the infringing party, pointing to a number of patents involving touchscreen displays and multi-touch technology, and also methods for interacting with settings and data on a device. Apple wants the court to award them damages and prevent Motorola from continuing to sell the offending devices, which include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, BackFlip, Devour i1, Devour A555, Cliq, and Cliq XT.
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This whole patent war reminds me of the famous computer science analogy: the dining philosophers.
If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
Clearly someone thought of the poor struggling lawyers. They needed some love too. There can only be one winner here, and it won't be companies who are suing each other.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
No wait, that's not it...
1. Do something. Or perhaps nothing.
2. Sue!
3. Profit!!! [1]
[1] Profit only available to lawyers and other assorted douchebags.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I'm just glad to see another example of patents promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts.
Because we all know that without these patents, Apple would never have bothered to produce devices with multitouch, nor would Motorola, nor would anybody. And really, the whole idea of using compound gestures like pinching is completely non-obvious. And we wouldn't want little startup companies to make multitouch products; we only want big companies with lawyers to be able to do it.
Can't you just feel the Progress?
Go, Apple! Cry havoc and let slip the lawyers of litigation!
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
Is there a reason this still makes the news every time?
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money. Sometimes the price might be too high, of course. But there's always a price.
Will this add a Hamilton cycle to the who-sues-whom graph of smartphone makers?
What's your point? Your particular "winner" didn't get picked? Patents have always been about a particular winner. The whole "advancing society" comes with the expiration of the patent much like with copyright. During the patent any benefit we gain comes from how well the patent holder executes their idea. That's the way it has always been. As for the obviousness of it, are you by any chance an expert in the particular field the patents are in? Seems that's one of the requirements, not "armchair expert" who slept at a Howard Johnson's.
Apple has long over charged for their hardware. Notice their massive profits? Reason is they have massive margins. They charge much higher margins than other electronics makers. They get away with it because their products are trendy, fashionable, and fashion is one area where consumers' normal price sensitivity doesn't apply. You'll notice that the iPod was not the first MP3 player, nor the first portable music device. What it was was a fashion accessory, you had to own one to be cool. The white earbuds were very much a status symbol, to the point that high end earbud makers suddenly had requests for white earbuds, something they'd not had before (black is less visible, more understated). People wanted better quality IEMs, but wanted the status symbol of white/iPod earbuds.
That's the reason the iPad is as much as it is. Not patents, Apple's business plan. So long as people continue to buy their stuff to be trendy, they can keep doing it.
Multitouch is a gimmick, something Apple can use to distinguish themselves from the rest. It's like their menu bar and their Finder.
Anybody who thinks that multitouch helps usability hasn't tried explaining it to their mother. And even for experienced users, it's an exercise in frustration: it works in some apps and not in others, it does different things, and you need to cover up even more of the screen with your hand. Furthermore, it doesn't carry over to pen-based input, and as the number of handwriting and drawing apps on App Store shows, people want pens.
Let Jobs pursue his insane obsessions. Google should focus on usability, do everybody a favor, and eliminate multitouch from Android.
Every tried gaming on a non-multitouch phone? Since the screen can not report two locations at once, you can't hold down two virtual buttons at once - making the whole thing useless.
Don't even get me started on pinch to zoom.
What you're now talking about is gesture recognition, not multi-touch. And the only 2 gestures that require more than one touch are pinch-zoom and pinch-rotate. Scrolling is not connected to multi-touch at all.
As to the patent claims, 2 are mostly about multi-touch, one partly about gestures, and 4 not related to touch screens or gestures at all.
I know what I'm talking about. You don't.
How is a Dell Streak with a five-inch 800 x 480 screen comparable to an iPad with a 9.7 inch 1024 x 768 screen?
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot