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Patent Suit Targets Every Touch-based Apple Product

Posted by Soulskill on from the trollin'-trollin'-trollin' dept.

suraj.sun writes with news that a new patent suit has been filed against Apple over all of the company's touch-based products. From the article: "According to the complaint (PDF), Professor Slavoljub Milekic conceived a system that used a touchscreen that allowed children to move virtual objects around the screen, which he used to build interactive displays for the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, in 1997, and filed for a patent on his design that same year. The patent in the suit, U.S. Patent #6,920,619 named 'User interface for removing an object from a display,' was issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2005. According to the lawsuit, Milekic formed FlatWorld Interactives in 2007 to 'promote and commercialize' his invention. Curiously, FlatWorld was incorporated on January 2007, just weeks after Apple announced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo. In July 2007, just after Apple shipped the original iPhone, FlatWorld filed a reissue request for the patent, which appears to have been done in order to modify some of the patent's dependent claims."

4 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Even though it's against Apple . . . by InvisibleClergy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...it's lawsuits like these which make me want to get out of programming as a profession.

  2. Re:Seems to me... by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But he shouldn't just be pounded hard. His lawyer should be disbarred. I'm thinking if you started tossing lawyers, you'd see a lot of less of this, from the big guys as well as the small.

    "Sure I'd love to defend your claim to have patented the lead or graphite filled stylus, but you see, I'll be disbarred for fraud and lose my livelihood, so take your pencil and shove it up your ass."

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  3. Re:Even More Curiously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, Apple had its most profitable quarter, a good indicator that a lot more people have been recently exposed to infringing apple products. Maybe one of them was Slavoljub?

    From the complaint:

    Slavoljub ("Slavko") Milekic, Ph.D. ("Professor Milekic"), is Professor of Cognitive Science & Digital Design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

    Are we meant to believe that somebody who is a professor at a school right in the middle of the fifth-largest city in the United States has never once heard of the iPhone or an iPad or an iPod Touch, or seen them in action, until this last quarter? Someone who has a patent on touch devices and would therefore be interested in such things?

    Bullshit.

  4. Re:Even More Curiously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, there isn't. We also don't know if he has been trying to get them to buy a license and being blown off for several years.