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ITC Rules Apple Does Not Infringe S3 Graphics Patents
First time accepted submitter boley1 writes "According to Cnet — S3 Graphics's case collapsed in their ITC suit, with the ITC ruling that Apple does not infringe on any of S3's patents. A big blow to HTC according to the report."
So much for HTC buying a warchest; according to the ruling it looks like AMD/ATI actually owned the patents in question.
Right, because Apple didn't buy Fingerworks and use multitouch to sue everyone else.
Um
A) Apple sued HTC, HTC bought patents defensively
B) HTC has been making smart phones longer than Apple
C) It is widely regarded that Apple copied LG in its design of the iphone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada_(KE850)
D) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU (Steve Jobs on XEROX "Great Artists Steal")
This probably makes the texture compression patent (S3TC) invalid. Now it can be safely implemented in Mesa.
I wish people would shut the fuck up about this. It's been discussed to death that Apple didn't do those things. Deals were made, shares were given out, staff from Xerox were hired, ideas were improved on, GUI metaphors were thought out. Drag and Drop wasn't invented by Xerox for example, Apple created that. If you read even Job's biography, those at Xerox get the credit for the mouse and the GUI.
As for the smartphone, Apple never said they invented the smartphone, just they made a leapfrog product.
Jonathanjk.com
Who have Apple sued regarding multitouch?
http://mashable.com/2010/10/30/apple-motorola-lawsuit/
Motorola shot first.
Jonathanjk.com
Han shot first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_shot_first
Yes, because apple believes HTC is infringing on their patents. So because a company has been doing something longer, it's impossible that they could copy a new competitor's product(s) ? I just looked at images of that LG phone, and I think anyone who claims it's a copy is stretching things a bit. People complain that Apple's lawsuit over the Samsung tablet is crap, and those two devices are much closer in design than the iPhone and this clunker.
What is...?
If you read even Job's biography, those at Xerox get the credit for the mouse and the GUI.
Before everyone try to call somebody fanboy on Slashdot, you should think first! This is want a fanboy really means, You Linux fanboys, how many of you read Linus Torvalds biography? M$ fanboys, what about Gates and Ballmer?
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
I read it as AMD claimed to own the patents in question but the motion claiming such was denied when the case was found for Apple without needing it. I don't think there was a decision made regarding the ownership.
Well, they really should be dead before biographies are written... It's just not right to be able to read your own biography.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
When did that happen for the last time in known history? ITC has one purpose only -- to protect US companies from competition.
I never said they "stole" the idea like the OP did. I said they copied them and then patented implementations of it, and then act as if they are the greatest, most innovative company of all time. You can copy something *while* giving credit at the same time, *and* sue everybody else doing similar things (which is essentially what Apple did).
http://www.dailytech.com/Judge+Refuses+Apples+Request+for+Preliminary+Injunction+Against+Samsung/article23014.htm
Tell me how in any way these smartphone "features" deserve patent protection. The patent system has basically turned into a protection racket.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
When did that happen for the last time in known history? ITC has one purpose only -- to protect US companies from competition.
It will come back to bite them eventually. Other companies are doing the same like getting apple banned in Taiwan. By setting up this framework of protectionism now they will suffer when being banned in China becomes worse for multinationals than being banned in the USA
HTC did innovate, and they were innovating in smartphones long before Apple did. The problem was that they didn't have as powerful a patent portfolio. Really, the problem probably isn't with HTC itself. Rather, the difference is that they've largely gone from WinMo to Android. Switching from Apple's BFF to Google means that all that cross-licensing stuff between Apple and MS no longer applies to them.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So to be informed on a topic is to be a fanboy, even when supposed fanboy presents evidence that doesn't credit Apple? Yeah that makes a bunch of sense.
Clearly you should be doing some thinking first. That's such a lazy ill-thought out argument.
For God's sake, Sheldon, do I have to... hold up a sarcasm sign every time I open my mouth?
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
silo doors are opening... Steve Jobs's thermonuclear war is starting.
HTC thought it could buy some patents and defend itself? Afro-American please! It's a puny gnat compared to the mighty arsenal Apple will unleash on their asses. Those S3 patents, they are like McBain's safety goggles -- they do nothing!
The US-ITC rejects almost all such requests, so this is no surprise and doesn't necessarily mean the case has collapsed.
Some patent holders surely use these procedures just to smear product developers and scare investors - in the hope of a easy cash settlement.
More about the ITC:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/United_States_International_Trade_Commission
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I really wanted to buy a Fingerworks keyboard. Now I can't. :( the e-bay price is a bit too high.
Whats worse, is that for all of Apples blustering that Samsung copied the iphone, do a search for the Samsung f700. (Oblig wikipedia entry, no pictures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_SGH-F700) it was a phone by Samsung, sold by Vodafone in February 2007 (before the iPhone). And apart from the "sliding keypad", when closed looks REMARKABLY like an iphone in style yet predates the iPhone. More importantly, the Galaxy s, and the later S2 follow on from that design.
Have a nice day!
On Android, S3TC (= DXT) is the texture compression format of choice for Nvidia GPUs (= all Tegra-based devices). The default texture compression format (ETC) is not as nice-looking, and does not support alpha.
On iOS, you're right, S3TC/DXT is not used, because the GPUs in these devices are made by a company named Imagination Technologies (I elieve they bought powerVR some time ago), who does not own a S3TC license. Instead, they have their own proprietary format called PVRTC (two variants, 2bits per pixel and 4bpp), that their GPUs can read and process instead of DXT textures.
As for no one using them, this is completely wrong: 3D games on mobile devices (think Shadowgun, Rage, Dungeon Defenders, Inifinty Blade...) all use compressed textures because otherwise the size of the assets would be significantly larger than it already is (think much longer download times and much higher bandwidth cost), and the GPU performance would be significantly lower (uncompressed textures occupy more space in video memory and their processing consumes more GPU bandwidth).
Who needs a
If that was sarcasm, you should use the snark sign and type properly. The sarcasm got lost in such a poorly constructed sentence, I thought I was replying to a non-native English speaker.
Ups, I don't have the snark sign on my keyboard. Do you have it on your original Apple keyboard? It must be that snark sign is also patented by Apple (*snark sign*)
P.S. I'm not a native English speaker.
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
On (c), I never used a Prada myself but it was apparently a bit different. There was no multitouch, you scrolled with the volume buttons (??), there were physical buttons at the bottom of the screen etc. etc.
It did have a grid of icons that did different things, but that's rather common I think.
When did that happen for the last time in known history? ITC has one purpose only -- to protect US companies from competition.
It will come back to bite them eventually. Other companies are doing the same like getting apple banned in Taiwan. By setting up this framework of protectionism now they will suffer when being banned in China becomes worse for multinationals than being banned in the USA
The article you are linking to actually talks about banning APPLES (the fruit) imported from the US in Taiwan. You probably wanted to refer to the ban of selling some Apple products in South Korea, which is seeked by Samsung. This ban, however, did not happen so far it seems.
This is really a thought that's neither here nor there....
But, if USA were to take a loan with the World Bank, they might have to close shop.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
The ITC that is!
Sorry, khomunikations hard.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboy - I haven't even owned a Windows machine for almost a decade - but I've read Gates' autobiography. Jobs biography hasn't been out long, but I may read it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
surprised people don't often mention p700/p800/p900/r380(from _2000_) more often. sure, they had a jog dial, a flippable(removable!) keypad etc. but essentially the iphone experience but with _more_. grid of icons too. prada is just a dumbphone version of what uiq was years before(with nicer looking screen). or 7710.
and what about palmos, grid of icons right there.
there were others too, though, with orientation scrolling etc. not many of the models ended in production though.
and about multitouch- apple fudded people with it. no shit, many, many people in the smartphone business thought that no-one else could do pinch to zoom or multitouch(even though it was mostly just hw choice for most manufacturers and api-change delay for others).
some companies even tried to make other companies believe that drag-scrolling is intellectual property.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No it does not still stand. The evidence that supported the argument has been found to be untrue. The argument is no longer an argument it is a blindly asserted opinion, that even in the face of evidence to the contrary (samsung failing to do exactly what you predict) you still maintain to be the truth.
According to your own link, that phone wasn't sold in Feb 2007, it was only announced then. It wasn't sold until Nov 2007. For the iPhone, the equivalent dates are Jan 2007 and Jun 2007. So no, it certainly does not predate the iPhone, either for announcement or shipping. Though the closeness of the timing indicates they overlapped in development periods.
As to similarity, the phone is a black rounded rectangle, but that's where the similarity stops. The UI is nothing like the iPhone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c1fc8120hA
It's interesting to watch actually because this was designed to be a cutting edge UI, and would have been accepted as such, had the iPhone not come out. The iPhone UI was so much better - a generation ahead.
No. It doesn't have anything to do with this. But yeah, I own and still use an S3 ViRGE. It's not a bad card for regular 2D stuff.
The principle is the same though. If the U.S. International Trade Court consistently rules in favor of U.S. companies, then it is highly likely that the trade courts of other nations will rule for their domestic companies. Apple sue Samsung in U.S. and win, Samsung sue Apple in Korea and win. Apple sue HTC in U.S. and win, HTC sue Apple in Taiwan and win. It is probably no coincidence that the first company to stand up to Microsoft's Android tax has been a U.S. company, rather than the foreign device manufacturers.
As regards this particular case, this is just one ruling in response to an appeal of a previous ruling, and this ruling will in turn be appealed. And even if Apple win the appeal, it still leaves HTC with hundreds of patents from the rest of their patent portfolio, plus the 265 S3 patents they acquired, plus the new patents they got from Google. They only need to win once to be able to block sales of infringing hardware. And they can't not win some of the time - if the U.S. ITC find in favor of Apple over a foreign company hundreds of times, then the international patent system is going to tear itself apart, starting with Taiwan and Korea.
(Meanwhile, China has practically no intellectual property or patent enforcement, and is rewarded with the fastest growing economy in the world, despite a prolonged global recession. Ahh.....)
By innovate you mean, "making the same crappy Windows Mobile phones everyone else was making at the time?"
Or by innovate you mean, "putting a godawful skin on top of android?"
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
That is why Google just gave HTC 9 new patents that originated at Motorola, Openwave Systems and Palm. And if those don't work, Google has another 17,000 patents thanks to its Motorola acquisition. In the end, either the patent system will break down (imagine those 17,000 patents being invalidated), or Apple is going to have to deal with the fact that it can't block competing products from the marketplace using patents. With the patent system, you only need one win with a non-workaroundable patent to be able to block a competing product. And once you get that, you can negotiate on a more level playing field.
"A government that is powerful enough to block your competitor's products from the market is powerful enough to block your products from the market".
Apple sued HTC in March 2010 From that article:
"Of note are the patents Apple asserted in its Delaware filing: one, patent 7,657,849, covers multitouch gestures, but only in a limited use case - unlocking the phone. The second, number 7,479,949, covers multitouch heuristics to determine how a device should interpret multitouch input, and was patented by Steve Jobs himself as well as a number of other co-assignees. The other patents in question are number 7,362,331, covering moving objects within a GUI; 7,469,381, covering list scrolling; 5,920,726, covering the management and recovery of a power failure by a digital camera; 7,633,076, covering how a device senses what a user is doing via the use of multiple sensors; 5,848,105, a co-channel filtering patent; 7,383,453, covering the conservation of power by a voltage reduction to the instruction portion of the processor; 5,455,599, an object-oriented graphical system, and 6,424,354, an event notification system for propagating object-change information."
... if HTC, Apple and all the others spent their time and money making better products instead of on War Chests?
If they competed on the strength of their merit instead of on the size of their legal funds?
I'll crawl back into my little dreamworld now.
Tarald - The Lord of Smeg
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on
Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? "That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first." You're too late.
I wonder if this means that AMD Air might not be such a dead deal after all? I doubt AMD is gonna suddenly intervene in Sept just out of the goodness of their hearts, especially when Apple is using intel chips. If the ruling is true AMD could royally fuck Apple if they wanted to, S3 texture compression is the basis of a hell of a lot in graphics nowadays. After all those patents are why Linux doesn't have full OpenGL support by default, because while OpenGL is royalty free those patents aren't.
So why would AMD jump in to help Apple, whose never bought a single chip they make? The only reason i can think of is a possible future product using AMD chips. otherwise it would be in their best interests to let Apple get screwed, or at least hit them up for a big fat licensing fee.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If I remember correctly the S3 virge DX used proprietary 3d acceleration (think glide vs. openGL). The problem was no one wanted to support it. The only game I ever played that supported 3d acceleration on Virge DX was Descent and Decent was absolutely stunning on that card. Past that you are correct, it was completely unusable as a 3d card. However, at the time it was about the best 2d card on the market and if I remember correctly was among the first 2d acceleration supported cards under Linux - or at least was fairly reliable under Linux. Ahh memories.
Correct me if I'm wrong!
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
NO NO NO NO! the problem WAS NOT THAT NOBODY WANTED TO SUPPORT IT!
the problem was this: quite simply, your all-cpu trifillers were FASTER(and more beautiful).
(it wasn't even the fastest 2d card on the market or friggin anything like that. iirc it did support overlays though unlike millenium, perhaps the virge would have functioned as an accelerator in 486sx.. )
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I suspect you do need to hold such a sign.
Can you express the statement without using sarcasm?
All the things I come up with can still be met with the same rebuttal, so I'm clearly missing something.
The bits about AMDs motion is in the second to last paragraph.
The actual finding
Anyways, give it a read before discussing what it says.
but wait, this is slashdot, rtfa? nah
I am a lawyer, but not yours. Anything I tell you might be a total lie intended to benefit my clients at your expense.
The WIMP environment was the design revolution. A lot of what Macs offered over PARC was simply down to Apple's product being 2nd generation with Xerox having already done the hard stuff.
Apple didn't do anything outstanding, they just did it slightly faster. One of the things Apple gets praised about was its auto-updating windows (window updates were done through buttons in PARC). Are you telling me that wasn't an obvious step and that had it not been for Apple, we'd still click a button every time we wanted to update a window? Likewise drag and drop was a fairly obvious feature.
Apple's GUI 'innovations' were overblown, they simply used Xerox's work to give themselves a head start over the more sluggish PARC team, releasing their second generation product to compete with a first generation one.
If it was so friendly and Xerox were so happy to let Apple do what they did, Xerox wouldn't have sued Apple.
I have to say that I own a HTC Evo 4G.
Ran the stock sense software for a couple of months and did not hate it at all.
My wife has run it stock since she first got it and is only now asking me to root it and install Sinister ROM on it.
I have used Destroyer, Sinister, Fresh, and Cyanogenmod.
There are things I like about all of them.
I have to say though that the HTC Sense widgets are really good.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
More like, you have a rich neighbor. You ask to see his house. He's pretty proud of it, so he shows you around. Inside you notice a mint condition copy of Action Comics #1. You mention how cool it is and since he doesn't understand the value (and he's rich!), he lets you have it if you mow his lawn. (For those of you at Penn State, s/mow his lawn/suck his dick/).
On the AMD side, iMacs, Mac Pros, macbook pros, and higher end Mac Minis use AMD/ATI Radeons.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I remember one of my tech friends being envious of my 4 MB goodness and my "3d" walls in Dungeon Keeper.
Ah the good ole days!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Samsung isn't trying to block the iPhone in South Korea. Is because they don't want to look like assholes? Is it because they want to look like the better company? Is it because they are afraid of losing on their home turf? Who knows.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
My cock and balls shot sperm first.
[citation needed]
Hahaha, you biased anti-Apple moron. You freaks are like the bane of the human race. One company innovates while everyone else copies them and sells their products at half the price, and you scream bloody murder when someone tries to take away your cheap, ill-gotten toys.
The issue is the length of these patents.
Even in desktop games, S3TC is still common. Many games use it (in the form of the Direct3D DXTn texture format inside .dds files or other texture files)
Oh thanks Larry, I so rarely get to use this in a sentence...WHOOSH! Might want to look up one of the movies high in the geeker lexicon "Pirates of Silicon Valley" since that was a word for word quote from one of the most pivotal scenes.
Oh and for that not being true? Go to Youtube and look up "The History of Apple" and watch the gal in charge of PARC demos where she says, and I quote "I made a company head order me and sign off that he had ordered me before i would give Steve and his friends a demo. I KNEW we were giving away the store by letting Steve Jobs look at it, but they just wouldn't listen".
I mean sure he licensed some of the tech for chump change, but that was no different than gates giving the kid that wrote QDOS $50k for his OS knowing he had sold the thing for a mint to IBM. Jobs knew he could slaughter with it, acted like it wasn't a big deal, and helped himself. Even he admitted there was two other revolutionary techs he should have also snatched but in his words 'I was so blown away by the GUI I didn't even see it". Those were of course email and Ethernet networking, both of which PARC had running in 1972.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Bushels of these fanbois are known to make nearly every discussion they participate in unbearably annoying for people who don't give a fuck about what logo is on their hardware as long as it gets the job done.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Some of my friends are diehard Apple users, and we've just had to learn to agree not only to disagree, but to simply not discuss Apple products at all. Kinda like politics and religion, when you get right down to it.
A truly closed mind is a remarkable artifact.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There are techniques to help with your premature ejaculation.
There's never enough when you have too little