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Apple Wins Injunction Banning Import of HTC Devices
Newly accepted submitter squish18 writes "All Things D reports that Apple has won an injunction banning the import of some HTC phones starting in April 2012. The ruling by the ITC stems from two claims of the '647 patent concerning software used to enter personal data in mobile devices. It is interesting to note that the ITC has also reversed previous rulings regarding regarding infringement of two other '647 claims, as well as patent '263 claims."
It looks like Apple's victory is relatively minor. They lost claims on all patents except for one, and HTC/Google can work on implementing similar functionality in a non-infringing way.
Apple is becoming an evil empire!
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Just another reason why our patent system needs to be changed. And another reason I don't know who to vote for these days. It seems that all politicians (or most) support the current patent system or don't care to do anything about it. I mean, how can you patent touching a phone number on a screen? That isn't even close to an invention. Absurdity.
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So the non-frivolous claim on which Apple actually prevailed was essentially a regex to find things that look like phone numbers in unstructured text documents, which then link to a dialer app?
And even worse, there was a phone Zimlet available prior to the release of the iPhone that did exactly the same thing, minus the touchscreen equivalent of a click. This is a poor decision at best.
Isn't competition what drives innovation? Where's the innovation if everyone just does what everyone else is doing?
Who's going to be able to innovate if they're being forced to waste their time looking for ways to work around stupid patents instead?
Skype did that before apple every launched an iPhone (obviously, not on a phone, but using phone numbers).
Whoever allowed them to get a patent like that is an idiot. It's not just the system that is wrong, is the ones controlling it and that should be evaluating patents for things like prior art and actual invention that are failing.
No your wrong, there IS somebody who wins. The lawyers win, and the more something is tied up in court the more they win.
No matter what they do to try to force me to own an Apple product I never will. I was actually cheering Jobs on in the book until they got to the iPod and then I was cheering him to the grave.
I would hardly say that turning phone numbers into hyperlinks qualifies as novel and unobvoius.
A real problem is that fiendishly expensive lawsuits are required to overturn patents. we would be much better off if just anyone could point out prior art that would get the patent office to overturn patents that aren't really novelmor unobvious.
the patent examiner who decides the unobvious part really should be an expert in the given technology. had some examiner ever studied the most elementary graphics, they never would have granted a patent for the XOR cursor.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
If you filed a patent 15 years ago and there have been infringements of your patent for the last 10 or so years without you even blinking an eye about, it should be declared invalid.
I recall my pocket pc doing something like this. I bought it in 2002.
But some things are also obvious before their invention...like the thing Apple is suing over.
"New" should not mean the same thing as "Invention" as far as patent law is concerned.
It quite obviously doesn't promote innovation, and is tying up our legal system with stupid lawsuits that do nothing but harm the consumer.
No, it wasn't. Apple's terrified of Android--not necessarily what it is, but what it may become, which is another Windows against their MacOS. That's history they don't want to see repeated on the smartphone and tablet. Except, they're a little too late, so they're scrambling around desparately throwing out whatever they can against Android hardware manufacturers in hopes it'll be enough to cripple Android and Android's ecosystem for the near future.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is just stalling while they try to get their house in order and put out a decent smartphone and tablet OS. This is why they're compelling other companies to pay royalty instead of outright taking them to court over the supposed infringed patents. They want these same companies to make Windows Mobile phones, not to go out of business.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I don't understand this fixation many Slashdot readers have on prior art, especially when examples brought in are much more generic than patent in question (and hence can only do what the patent describes if explicitly set up / programmed that way). I guess it's an attempt to game the existing system, but I very much doubt a non-lawyer's prior art claims would be of much use here.
Instead, we should be focusing on the real problem, which is how ridiculously broad and over-reaching these patents are. I mean, seriously? a patent on highlighting phone numbers in the text? even if no-one implemented that by 1996, most certainly a lot of people have done it independently since then, when devices where this feature is actually useful have appeared - and that's because the idea is extremely obvious.