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Apple Counter-Sues Motorola Over Touchscreen Patents

Posted by Soulskill on from the round-and-round-we-go dept.

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.

17 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Begun, the clone war has by Kjella · · Score: 3, Funny

    (n/t)

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    1. Re:Begun, the clone war has by rtfa-troll · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's a lie, TekGoblin, if that's your real name. You are hereby summonsed to appear in a lawsuit before Judge T. John Ward. To be sued for your infringement of our patents on "a method and apparatus for limited truth delivery through use of over-extensive categories".

      --
      =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
  2. And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! by TheNarrator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      Er.... yeah.

      Unfortunately, you're likely to get sued because BadAnalogyGuy owns the patent on making very bad analogies on Slashdot. :-)

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
    2. Re:And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! by russotto · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      Fortunately they've learned they can stab each other with the forks, which doesn't make a smartphone but does provide entertainment value.

  3. Poor lawyers by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Poor lawyers by countertrolling · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The companies are doing fine. Now you know why iPads are 500 dollars. The only loser is the customer.

      --
      For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
    2. Re:Poor lawyers by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Apple's products are refined, but technologically innovative? No.

      Sounds like you care more for hardware, so check these examples out:

      Unibody laptop case. These are much stiffer for their weight than any other manufacturer's laptop.
      Magsafe power connector. Eliminates the number one cause of laptop damage/PSU damage. No one else has it.
      Mac Mini - When launched by far the smallest desktop computer on the market. Now copied by others, but most copies still aren't as small.

      There are many many more hardware innovations, and of course many software ones too.

      Clearly you don't like Apple, and that's your prerogative. But the claim that they aren't innovative is demonstrably pure bullshit.

    3. Re:Poor lawyers by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Those aren't particularly good examples if you're trying to wow us with technological innovation.

      I wasn't trying to wow anyone. They are not the greatest innovations of Apple, but they are certainly very concrete, specific and unquestionably the first to do each. And that is enough to prove the GP wrong.

      Yes, Apple did invent a new process to pull it off. In the days before Apple unveiled the unibody process, the secret was leaked. And virtually everybody said it was impossible to do mass production of laptop bodies that way. And they were wrong. They were wrong purely because no one else had ever done it before for a product anywhere close to a laptop. That's unquestionably innovation.

      Saying "Just a hollowed out piece of aluminum" is either being flippant, or not realising the significance of the innovation.

      Innovation *IS* a clever new idea made concrete in an actual product. That's exactly what Magsafe is.

      Mac Mini isn't a thin client. It's a full desktop PC in a tiny box. Again NO ONE had put a PC in a box that small till Apple did it. That's innovation.

      I agree thatApple have more important examples of innovation in their software , in integration of system and business practices. But for the GP who clearly values hardware innovation more, the ones I gave were better examples.

  4. Got it! by gmhowell · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  5. Progress by steveha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Progress by devent · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And do you know why we see now the multi-touch technology used everywhere and every company is so aggressive to push it? Because the multi-touch technology was developed in the 1980/1990 years and now all the patents on the basic technologies are expiring. What all the companies are now doing is to improve on the expired patents and get their own patents to sue the competition.

      It's like why the price for pills and medicine is dropping significant after the patents expired and you start to see only slightly different pills and medicine in the pharmacy to buy instead of the generics. That's also the reason why the pharmacy industry put so much money into advertising the new pills, so the people think that the slightly different pills are so much better instead of the now really cheap generics. For more information visit Wikipedia on Generic Drugs

      What patents basically did was to make the multi-touch technology so expensive that the devices were on hold for about 20 years.

      --
      http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
  6. Yawn by Macman408 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  7. Oooh! by Arancaytar · · Score: 3, Funny

    Will this add a Hamilton cycle to the who-sues-whom graph of smartphone makers?

  8. get rid of multitouch already by t2t10 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple by PastaLover · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apple doesn't overcharge for their hardware. They charge what the market can bear (i.e. what people are willing to pay). To do anything else would be ridiculous for any company.

  10. Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple by Moridineas · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honestly, why do people get their panties in such a bind over these arguments? Every time there is an Apple article on slashdot, the conversations quickly devolves into a flamewar over whether Apple is ripping you off or not, how good or bad their products are, and so on. I mean with your reply--who gives a crap? If you like the Acer--buy the Acer. If you like the MBA--buy the MBA. Think of this as an optimization spectrum with points such as price, weight and size, appearance, computing power, software, flexibility, build quality, and so on. Believe it or not, not everybody is going to optimize in the same directions!

    I just don't get why it seems to bother some people so very much that different people might like different products. If somebody likes Apple products, what's the big deal--why are they automatically a fanboy who you seem to hate?