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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."
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.
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!"
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.