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Apple Sued Over OS X Quick Boot
An anonymous reader writes "With a patent originally owned by LG in tow, a Florida based company called Operating Systems Solutions LLC recently filed suit against Apple claiming that OS X's use of quick booting infringes the aforementioned patent."
The company in question is a bit suspicious — having formed very recently — and so others are speculating it was created for a proxy battle against Apple by LG.
They should try this case in Germany.
Cease and desist!
I have a patent on reporting on patent infringement stories about patents that are infringed upon by infringers that also have patents but not patents that relate to the patent infrgined upon.
Apple must get rid of autoexec.bat soon!!!
These patent lawsuits are getting out of hand.
Everyone is suing everyone else, minimal innovation is happening and when it does it's from some upstart who gets buried the moment it makes a press release.
Is LG being sued by Apple for patent infringement regarding their Android phones?
There have been many implementations of this any many variations since at least the early 90's. I don't know when the patent was lodged but I think Apple themselves may have prior art on this.
Patents and patent trolls should become illegal in our current economic environment.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Someone patent the act of filing patent lawsuits!
Er, what's that, you say? It's not patentable? If I pay you enough bitcoins, will you look the other way?
The more you know, the more you have to say and the more you should listen.
Begun the patent wars have.
On one hand, it's a patent lawsuit, and we know how much Slashdotters hate patents. On the other hand, it's against Apple.
How is something everyone who has ever used a computer for the past 30+ years thought of on their own patentable?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It is a defensive act when going up against large companies with large litigation budgets and large patent portfolios.
If you have a company with a product and doing business that sues Apple, then Apple will just file a bunch of patent claims against you whether or not they are valid. They have so much money, they think nothing of litigating an opponent into bankruptcy using bogus claims and junk patents. If Apple would have someone who finds a phone at a bar arrested, why wouldn't they try to litigate someone into bankruptcy?
Fight Spammers!
Someone to wave their hand and say ....
"these are not the patents you are looking for"
da da da dum indeed.
"They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind."
I'm sure before nearly every nation on earth was dragged into World War 1 that they thought it was a good idea to get into a 'little fight.' At least times will be interesting again...
Seriously, will someone please patent the process of patent trolling on behalf of something like the FSF?
There's got to be some way to phrase a patent to encapsulate it, or would it fail due to prior art?
I think that Apple, and others, have been using truncated boot processes for a decade or so. I can't see this one going anywhere.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Does that mean ASUS had to/has to licence this patent for Bootbooster too? Caching the results from the last boot seems a sensible idea when some modern BIOSes take an age to finish...
My MacBook Pro mid-2010, take AGES to boot.
Form a shell company with little to no assets and use them to fight the morons with little to no patent claim.
"...The company in question is a bit suspicious — having formed very recently..."
Formed recently you say? Gee, with a name like Operating Systems Solutions, what ever gave anyone that idea?
Probably takes the cake for the most unoriginal company name ever...makes you wonder if someone lost a bet in the marketing department, or perhaps that name was pulled out of someones ass after a late-night binger...
My 1981 Apple IIe and my 1985 512K Mac booth boot in about a second. The 512K Mac needs a bit longer to read the floppy drive. But the GUI is up before that.
If only modern systems could boot that fast.
What was LG (Lucky Goldstar) doing in the early 80's with fast boot? Nothing.
BTW, C64, TR-80, etc... all booted fast since the OS/BASIC was in ROM.
'nuf said?
Patents need to be much harder to get (substantial innovation beyond current state-of-the-art) and much easier/cheaper to challenge (by a panel of experts/peers rather than during a $1M trial staffed with high-school educated panel).
I used to work on mission critical embedded systems and we were doing exactly this (sans GUI) back in the 80's. This was important because, should a reset ever occur, being down for much longer than a few hundred ms could have potentially resulted in significant damage.
The BSS(data?- it's been a while) and a few other memory segments were linker mapped to batter backed up SRAM. If a RESET should occur, the worst that would happen is that we'd down for a few processing frames and back up and running from where we left off. I believe this as even an industry defined standard.
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Having read the patent (RE40,092 in case anyone is interested), it's claims are so broad and complete that any implementation of any kind of acceleration of the booting process would violate it. In fact, they're so complete, that any hibernate mode would also likely violate them, which suggests that it shouldn't be hard to find prior art since hibernate modes substantially predate this patent. I suspect that Apple will use prior art to get the patent invalidated, but it's tough to say for sure.
The real problem with this patent, though, is the standard one for software patents: it's just a set of general ideas about what you could do to make booting faster (store configuration data, check configuration data, write some or all pages of memory to disk, read some or all pages of memory from disk) with nothing that could actually be described as a specific invention or process. As such, the patent (as is almost always the case with software patents) is so broad that it's ridiculous. They've basically been granted a patent on any feasible idea for speeding up the boot process.
No, Nokia sued them because they really wanted to cross license Apple's multi-touch patents and had refused to give Apple the same licensing terms they give everyone else. Apple didn't want that arrangement and so lawsuits ensued. Apple would have been more than happy to pay the same licensing fees that everyone else pays.
"Quick boot" was a ridiculous piece of marketing in the first place.
Anyone who uses a computer regularly and has two brain cells to rub together, has been using sleep/resume for about 10 years now.
I've run systems for several months at a stretch without ever rebooting them. It takes ~3 seconds to wake one up. Problem solved, patent free.
The faster we hit rock bottom, the better.
They have been researching digital cameras since the 1970s and have like 1000 patents relating to digital cameras.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sasson
They literally the invented digital still camera and got a patent for it in 1978
Their patents have been tested in court. However Kodak seems to have no problems licensing its patents. Kodak
doesnt pursue frivolous or overly broad claims. Kodak actually invented most of the digital camera technology existing today
and licenses it to everybody.
Apple tried to claim a patent claim against kodak and got bitchslapped in May.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Courts/2011/05/16/Apple-loses-round-in-digital-camera-patent-dispute-with-Eastman-Kodak.html
It can't possibly be valid. OS X Lion does not boot up quickly on my computer.
There is actually nothing wrong with applying usual patent logic to software ideas, with three changes from the current system:
1. No more patents for the obvious.
2. No more patents for things with obvious prior art
3. A massively reduced length for software related patents
A proposition to stop this madness in 3 parts.
1) Huge fines to to appliers when prior art is present (to be set by a judge... there can be mitigating circumstances for non-obvious entries) or when trying to patent the obvious (Which is basically an enforcing of already present rules)
2) Patent tax. A tax on any running patents, scaling with the number of patents the entity owns. An owning entity is counted for fully owned subsidiaries. The scaling is upwards, so the first X patents are taxed with X dollars pr. year for the length of the patent, Next Y with X^2 or similar scaling.
3) Patent tax and fines for illegal patents are used to fund a reward system that rewards anyone who can invalidate an existing patent. Basically paying anyone to review the patents that are granted, making a counter-patent-lawyer-company a viable business (Lawyers working for the common good.. I know it is revolutionary and possibly impossible... but consider the implications!!)
Nokia sued them because they really wanted to cross license Apple's multi-touch patents and had refused to give Apple the same licensing terms they give everyone else
So invalidating software patents would have been great for Nokia. They'd have had free access to Apple's bullshit 'pinching means zooming in' patent (filed years after that gesture was publicly demoed), and Apple would still have had to pay or a license to the various technologies that the world's mobile phone network infrastructure is built on.
Apple would have been more than happy to pay the same licensing fees that everyone else pays
And then sue Nokia for violating patents on things that should never have been allowed to be patented.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now all of you technology giants must pay up and desist your manufacture of electronics and use ... i duno water or something to create your boolean logic.
For my next patent: Boolean logic.
can't we just do away with patents altogether?
I mean, patents were invented in an epoch were information traveled with pigeons. Nowadays information gets instantaneous world wide publicity. Patents where designed to be a protection mechanism for makers, not the industry. Today makers can just broadcast their new invention and monetize on it directly or with the way they wish what need is there for Patents in this space?
-- no sig today
Just to clarify, you mean years after the concept was publicly performed by others, whereby Apple stole it and then patented some else's concept (which long persisted in scifi and movies). Their pinch/zoom patent, in addition to being extremely obvious, was stolen from others. The fact Apple applied for such a stolen/obvious concept in addition to the fact it was granted, in of itself, shows how fucked in the head Apple is, not to mention how fucked up the patent system is.
Provide evidence that it was, in fact, "stolen" before you make shit up.
Have you never watched scifi? Its well documented fact these gestures existed before Apple stole them as their own. Period.
Hell, I even remember all the Apple fanboyz pretending it was something new and novel when Apple rolled it out and myself and several others looked at each other thinking WTF - we've seen this in movies for many years.
Seriously, are you so detached from reality and so tethered to Apple's nipple you honestly have no clue these gestures long existed before Apple stole them and claimed them as their own?
So a movie now counts as "prior art" now? Are you so idiotic as to think that you can just make the gestures, that you don't actually have to do any engineering to get them to work?
Yes, it was new and novel, because it was the first time it actually fucking worked in real life.
Have you never watched scifi? Its well documented fact these gestures existed before Apple stole them as their own. Period.
Damn! There goes my warp drive patent!
Moron.
comes around. I'm finding it hard to find sympathy for companies that do things like this, no matter who it is.