Slashdot Mirror
HTC Infringed Apple Patents, Says ITC's Initial Determination
CWmike writes "A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has made an initial determination that HTC infringed two Apple patents, HTC said late Friday. If the judgment is made final, HTC could be banned from importing phones to the U.S. It's the latest blow to Google's Android operating system, which is being attacked by competitors including Apple, Microsoft and Oracle. The initial determination will now be reviewed by a larger panel of ITC judges, who can uphold or reject it. The two patents appear to be fundamental to Android, according to Florian Mueller, a patent expert. 'They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android,' he wrote in a blog post. The same patents are also at the heart of a dispute between Apple and Motorola, he said."
That is all.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And the patents (from http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/07/itc-judge-finds-htc-in-infringement-of.html) are:
U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data" (in its complaint, Apple provides examples such as the recognition of "phone numbers, post-office addresses and dates" and the ability to perform "related actions with that data"; one example is that "the system may receive data that includes a phone number, highlight it for a user, and then, in response to a user's interaction with the highlighted text, offer the user the choice of making a phone call to the number")
U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a "real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data" (while this sounds like a pure hardware patent, there are various references in it to logical connections, drivers, programs; in its complaint, Apple said that this patent "relates generally to providing programming abstraction layers for real-time processing applications")
I think I violated these patents just reading this article.
Insert self-referential sig here.
WTH?, Didn't we already established in about every single article written by him that he is a paid microsoft shill trying to create FUD around android? Most of what he writes is BS, as has been proven again and again. I am not saying that everything that we writes should be regarded as BS, although I would ignore it because he already lost all credibility to me, he may eventually write something of value, but to call him a patent expert is just, well, it is enough to get me into rant mode and come post in an article that I should be ignoring. /rant
And I am very sorry for the rant, as I will probably regret it tomorrow, I am off to sleep.
If this actually gets finalised (right now is just a PR thing) and HTC are forced to make changes does mean that the rest of the world will get a crippled android?
Will they distribute two versions of the software at added cost to them or keep is simpler. (I assume this is legal my internalization patent law knowledge is lacking.)
Could this be how software patents get overthrown when the general public and politicians realise that US sold phones are inferior to what you can get in the third world or china and everywhere else.
Seriously. All computer software patents should be voided on the grounds that they are merely expressions of existing mathematical formulae and logic structures and prior art applies as a result. When it comes down to it it's all loops, conditionals, and math placed in an organizational structure or if you go even further.. 0s and 1s.
"My 0s and 1s were first, pay me millions!"
"It's amazing what can be accomplished when we don't care who gets the credit." -(I forget who originally said this, ironically enough...) :)
The system has become so corrupt and so anathema to everything civilized, decent, and holy, that we make, on our own, in the darkness and safety of the night, purely to remind ourselves that somewhere, the human species has some hope for the future, and that the world is not completely controlled by the greedy and the ignorant.
lawyers. Seriously, can we please round these bottom-feeders up and put them at the bottom of Yucca Mountain? Radioactive waste and each other are the only company they're fit to spend eternity with.
Good God, are you insane? Imagine the devastation if ten thousand years from now the storage vessel should spring a leak and the area become flooded with a mass of radioactive mutant lawyers.
I think Apple's lapping Microsoft in the douche of the Universe Award. I mean, we still have the swimsuit competition... *shudder* Ballmer in a bikini...
Apple's been getting on my LAST nerve, well, since they went Intel. I'm seriously re-thinking my interest in anything Apple at all. Steve Jobs can sit and spin... The only reason Apple's doing this is because the real threat for their smartphone business is Android phones. I wonder how long it'll take before Apple and Microsoft go toe-to-toe in the smartphone arena...
This fiasco, folks, is why Software Patents are evil.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
They most likely didn't pay anyone. The problem is that Android DOES infringe on those patents. Now, are the patents legal and should they be is another question altogether. And is the patent system completely and utterly stupid is yet another question.
What puzzles me in this is that Google cannot do a thing to help their manufacturers because they have so few patents. Why they didn't buy Nortel's portfolio is well beyond me. This would have been over in a snap.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Exactly! It's worse in software patents. In hardware you can do something that a competitor does but do it with different hardware but in software if you do some function that a competitor does it doesn't matter that you did it with different code. It's the function that is patented in software patents not the code. The code is of course covered by copyright which renders the entire matter insane to start with. Lets just use copyright to protect software design! How simple! Not to mention fair. We can't have that though it would interfere with stifling innovation.
Copyright and patents are different things.
You can copyright a particular work (be it a story, poem, song, film, function, class, application or something else) even if the underlying concepts have been around for ages -- for stories, film, tv and manga, just look at things like tv tropes. So you can copyright a particular implementation of an algorithm.
Patents are for unique inventions (something that has not been done before, either in a different form (over the internet! on a mobile phone!) or in a research/math paper prior to filing for the patent) that are not obvious to a practitioner that are meant to give the patent holder a limited period of exclusivity for the invention in exchange for revealing the information about the invention.
If the software is a problem can't they just sell a blank phone without an OS and leave it up to the user to load an OS (which they can download from HTC's Russian website)?
I seem to remember reading that one of the very early 8 bit computers (might have even been the Apple) was having a problem getting it's PSU approved by the FCC or some authority so they sold it without a PSU and the user had to source one themselves.
OTOH... I believe the iPhone comes without iOS loaded and you have to load it via iTunes, so maybe Apple already has a patent on this concept too ;)
If you want to fix the broken patent system, you have to fight people who have a lot of wealth (power) and a lot of interest in the status quo.
Of course, these same people, wielding their pet corporations, are fighting to keep Government corruption in its current form (the backbone of which is the "campaign contribution" bribery system and it's offshoot, the system of lobbying jobs, speaking engagements, and book deals that serve as a front to pay off cronies at all levels of government), so you can write off using government power as a check against them.
The only way we'll see things change is if these rich, powerful people get too greedy and use their pet corporations against each other (like the story above), in which case our goal is simply to hunker down as much as possible and hope that in the aftermath we can sneak in a little bit of progress.
Things won't change as long as our civilization allows for the concentration of wealth at current levels. The hard part, of course, is deciding an allowable maximum threshold. Soviet or Mao style communism are obviously not the answer, and European style socialism is having some problems (though arguably a lot of those were caused by socialists dabbling in hyper-capitalist market manipulation as a result of meme-contamination from the US). The Canadian style hybrid seems to be doing pretty well, though they've got their own contamination problems making trouble, likely due to meddling by powerful interests afraid of a world run like Canada.
I know, I know, it's an article about patents, but the obvious flaws in the patent system are all simply emergent phenomena, part of a deeper underlying dysfunction that can ultimately be attributed to animals having more power than they can responsibly handle.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
"radioactive mutant lawyers"
Do you already have a director attached for this movie? If not, call my office on Monday.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Just to be clear, this guy is not really a judge. He's just a bureaucrat. HTC has the right to contest his decision before a real Federal judge. Unfortunately, their imports will be barred in the meantime, so they might decide to settle even if they think they would prevail in court.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This article describes ADD, including what its developers considered to be unique and different from other approaches.
My take on this is that ADD did come up with some clever ideas in implementation that solved the particular problems they were addressing (focusing on simple problems and fast detection). It's clear that what's unique is the particular implementation, not the idea of detecting phone numbers and such. They cite lots of other examples of the idea.
So, there are two possibilities. Either the patent covers the idea (and thus is inappropriately broad and will be ruled invalid) or the patent is about the particular implementation, in which case it should be simple to implement in a way that avoids violation. In either case, HTC and Android will be fine.
Sadly, you are correct.
The Sewing Machine Combination was probably the first example of the patent system going insane, resulting in the failure of anyone to innovate or produce the products the market was demanding, and eventually resulted in a small group of patent holders banding together in a licensing truce until the problematic patents expired.
Another example was the impact of patent battles in the fresh aeronautics industry in the United States that resulted in virtually no U.S. made airplanes being available for the United States military. The government had to step in and thump some heads to stop the stupidity and bring manufacturers together in a patent pool.
Since when does patent infringement result in a ban on import rather than a fine and order to pay royalties for the patented item? Is it because HTC isn't a US company?
A patent is a Government-granted monopoly. You have the right to license or restrict the use of your patented idea - it is the patent holder's choice, not the Courts or the infringer. You can choose to license company A and not license company B, effectively prohibiting company B from selling in your country.
If you're like Apple, and losing market share, then your best bet is to probably eliminate the competition than try to get a few bucks for each phone. The big problem for Apple isn't the loss of revenue from the infringement - it's from their shrinking marketshare worldwide. When the smartphone market starts reaching saturation and growth slows (probably in 2-3 years), then Apple's actual number of phones sold per month will start to slide as well (they are losing market share, but the market as a whole is growing faster so their total number of phones sold is increasing quarter over quarter).
Why is this a big, huge problem for Apple? Because 50% of their revenue - and close to 60% of their profit - comes from sales of iPhones. Their entire company is pretty much dependent on a single device. If sales of that device start to slip it will not only reduce revenue and profit but absolutely crush their stock price.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree but for other reasons:
Software is already protected by by copyrights, having patent protection on software is double-dipping.
Patents on software don't make sense. THE COMPUTER ITSELF IS THE INVENTION and it is by definition, a multi-purpose machine. Patenting techniques you do in a computer is like patenting specific ways of driving a car, or combinations of musical notes.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.