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Apple's New Patent Weapon — Location Services
DaveyJJ writes "Once again, it seems Apple is about to take intellectual property claims to a new level. Apple has been reissued a patent they acquired from Xerox that pretty much wraps up what we know as 'location services' as their own. In the overview, the patent says the system involved will display information specific to the location the device is in. The language used in the patent is broad and powerful. I guess now we wait and see whom Apple will use this against?"
Alas, no longer can roadside maps or sextants be used.
This is why we can't have nice things.
The patent office and laws are at best dysfunctional.
Hand in your eyeballs - they can be used to acquire information specific to the location the eyeballs are in.
You wouldn't steal a car -- violating someone else's laughable intellectual property is theft!
This patent is from 1998. I'm not saying Xerox shouldn't have gotten a patent for this (though it is awfully broad), but that patent should be long dead by now. 13 years is an eternity in the tech world and Apple is going to lord this over Google and everyone else for ... 17 years? Longer?
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
>> we wait and see whom Apple will use this against?
Not willing to kill the suspens but I think it will be a company whose name starts with the letter G.
How would a GPS not qualify as prior art?
It shows you a map and surrounding area based on where device is, or area entered. One could argue even the very early military models which had Long, Lat and a compass could qualify.
This is great news! Hopefully Apple will sue Android related companies, making it illegal to provide location services. Then we could use Android without worrying about our carriers, or other service providers logging and tracking our every move. Let Apple have the monopoly on spying on their customers.
Man, that company has really went downhill.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Damn. I guess I'll go and paint all my car windows black.
I would assume if Apple has a case against them, Xerox would have had a case. If Xerox didn't sue in all those years, then Apple might have lost the ability. Also who is to say Xerox didn't license the patent to them.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I'm really glad I live in Europe where software patents are invalid. The current setup in the US in relation to patents is a total joke. Patents were originally conceived to encourage innovation. In recent years, companies are almost afraid to innovate because some troll or monopoly hungry public company will immediately jump out of the wood work screaming "SORRY, WE OWN THAT IDEA. WE'RE GONNA SUE YOUR A$$"
The annoyance is that organisations seem to forever bow to the lowest common denominator - if something isn't allowed in the US then Europe tends not to get it either. It would be much nicer if manufacturers produced a version of their devices with lots of functionality for use everywhere except the US, and a "land of the free" version especially crippled for the US market, so the rest of the world doesn't have to deal with the US's crazy laws.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
You are in a maze of twisty little claims, all alike. It's pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a patent or copyright lawyer.
This doesn't cover GPS devices. This cover a device that uses GPS (or other service) location data to retrieve information tied to that location from the Web.
This invention provides a system and method that combines a positioning system, for example, the Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS), with a distributed network, such as the Internet, to provide real-time location specific information. That is, the positioning system provides a signal that is converted into a coordinate entry (e.g., specific latitude and longitude coordinates). The system and method of this invention then references the coordinate entry to a particular "web page" associated with the coordinate entry.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=RE42,927.PN.&OS=PN/RE42,927&RS=PN/RE42,927
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The GPS is actually clever.
Thinking that it is a novel idea to use a map as, shock horror, a map, is well, typical of the delightful US Patent System.
Once I was working on a protocol stack... We had to not implement part of it because at the time Motorola had a patent on essentially saying "Excuse me, I didn't get that; could you say that again?" Seriously. Who grants this shit? It is clearly ridiculous.
While it remains in the patent office's financial interest to grant fscked up patents, fscked up patents will continue to be granted.
If we all just ignore it it will go away?
Apple doesn't have a history of suing all patent violators. Just the ones that want to compete. Suing everyone is too costly. Picking battles and knowing who to pay off is what leads to success.
According to the patent, it's a reissue filed in 2010 of an earlier patent application which was was filed in 1998 and issued in 2000.
Why reissue it? Because it's under new ownership?
The reissued patent cites earlier patents going right up to 2009, and Apple didn't get into location-based services (i.e. iPhone) until 2007, after the LG Prada appeared. Meanwhile this happened:
Since Palm had a LBS product out before the original patent was issued, and Xerox never really turned their patent into a product, how the f**k is this new patent enforceable?
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
Those markings are there because the patent is a reissue. Reissued claims include markup to indicate what was changed from the original patent. In this case, the material in between .Iadd. and .Iaddend. was added to the claim, and material in between .[. and .]. was removed.
It looks better in the actual printed patent. The USPTO's website gives you the information but unfortunately doesn't make it pretty.
I think the patent offices should stop hiring geniuses. They are clearly not up to the task.
After reading multiple posts and comments about Apple's patents, there are a lot of people who feel this is counter productive...I don't know why.
IMHO, the patent system is broken when a company can file a patent without actually having a solid working product first, this sometimes happens. But clearly, in a lot of Apple's patents, such as this one, it isn't the case. If Apple, or another company, invests billions of dollars into R&D to make a product, they should be able to protect it. In fact, it would be counter productive if they couldn't protect it because it would discourage them from investing in R&D and then the nice things wouldn't even be invented in the first place.
Apple: All Your Base Are Belong To Us.
Google: All your map are belong to us.
Too many people are missing the point.
If Apple didn't take out a patent on a concept like this, you can guarantee that some patent troll would, and would sue both Apple and Google, along with everyone else in the marketplace. That's the way the system works nowadays.
Patents aren't just offensive weapons; they're defensive weapons as well. Apple and Google have huge patent portfolios, and both have too much leverage to win any major court battle against the other. At best, it would be mutually assured destruction, and do nothing but enrich a lot of lawyers.
What patents like this actually do is protect Apple (and Google, and everyone else) from the bottom-feeding trolls. You either file these "obvious" patents, or you can bet your bottom dollar some slimeball will instead, and take you to court.
They use GPS and the network. How bout 4 Square... The list is long.
Since when? Patents like copyrights must be defended and are subject to laches and estoppel. Like all IP, the holder of the rights cannot delay in enforcing their rights; however, the time that counts is when the holder is made aware that infringement has occurred. It is not as easy for the defendant (and sometimes plaintiff) to know that a patent is being violated compared to a trademark. Even in your example, laches came up as a defense.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Why are we blaming apple here? They bought an *existing* patent. It was not their invention ... If you want to blame anyone or shout prior art, shouldn't that be towards xerox instead?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Quit hating on the playa, hate the game.
It is the system that is broken, not the fact that organizations use the system for their commercial gain.
I've got a http://www.ultradatasystems.com/products/ultraroadwhiz.html>Road Whiz that dates to the 1990's if I'm not mistaken. It's cool, you enter your location manually - typically by state, highway, and mile marker - and then what you're looking for, and it displays what's coming up at which exits for the next 20 miles or so. OK, it *was* cool, but the only thing Apple has done is move the database onto the internet. BIG FUCKING DEAL APPLE. Why is everything "new" when it involves the internet?
A commercial in the near future.