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Taiwan University Sues Apple Over Siri Patents
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University has filed a suit against Apple claiming patent infringement by the Siri voice-recognition software. At issue are two patents dating to 2007 and 2010. From the article: 'The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, on Friday, it said. "We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher," said Yama Chen, legal manager of National Cheng Kung, in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan.'"
....and in other news...
It is nice when ugly corporations get hoisted by their own sack.
And so it goes
Keep in mind that this is a US company being sued in a US court by a company from Taiwan. Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit; I'm sure they're not very worried about this.
"We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher..."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit
Nothing like half a story, eh? Or maybe you're genuinely not aware, but the accusation of 'borrowing' now seems well wide of the mark. Google "iPhone Purple prototype" if you haven't seen the designs that pre-date the Sony-inspired images.
Maybe Chinese patent trolls will eventually alert US patent supporters to how stupid the system is.
--
that people would invent their own stuff...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
(Pun intended.)
Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit
Nothing like half a story, eh? Or maybe you're genuinely not aware, but the accusation of 'borrowing' now seems well wide of the mark. Google "iPhone Purple prototype" if you haven't seen the designs that pre-date the Sony-inspired images.
Well, it's a good damn thing Sony doesn't prototype their products prior to releasing them then isn't it!
That wouldn't matter unless Apple got their hands on Sony's prototype pre-dating their own prototype. If Sony had a prototype, but Apple had no way to know what it looked like when they developed theres, then their point still stands.
Two sovereign states with the name "China" exist.
ROC = Republic of China = Democratic China = Taiwan
PRC = People's Republic of China = Communist China = Mainland China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas. Prior to 1971 "China" was the ROC in the UN, it is now the PRC...
I really wish everyone would get over the idea that East Texas is still the best place to file patent suits. It definitely was for about a year in the mid-2000s, but since then it's returned back to within a few percentage points of the national average.
The percentage of patent cases where the plaintiff succeeded at trial was, over the period from 1995-2009, in line with the national average (66.7% trial success in East Texas vs. 66% nationwide), and by all indications it hasn't changed from that in the last few years (as a point of comparison, Florida Middle District Court had an 80% trial success rate for plaintiffs over that same period). Aside from the one-year blip where plaintiffs won more frequently and the district deservedly earned its reputation, its rates have been at levels that are in line with other district courts. Unfortunately, most people seem to have not caught on to that fact yet (even Wikipedia's sources regarding much of this stuff is several years out of date).
Because of that one year blip being so noteworthy, there is still a mistaken perception that the East Texas courts are plaintiff friendly, but that's all it is now: a perception. In fact, for NPEs (i.e. non-practicing entities, a.k.a. patent trolls), the Florida Middle District and the Delaware District courts had overall success rates (i.e. including summary judgments) that were about 11% and 7% higher, respectively, than East Texas over the period from 1995-2009.
That said, the East Texas courts do make for an ideal venue for trying patent cases, even if they're not as one-sided as people seem to think. The district has faster turnaround times than many other federal districts (which was part of the motivating factor in this particular case), the judges are well-versed in patent cases and have indicated an interest in handling them expeditiously, and there are local laws permitting lawyers from any bar association, not just the Texas bar, from trying their cases there, making it easier to use than some of the other districts.
The fact that the judges are knowledgeable is especially important, because many of the corporations being sued prefer to have their cases tried there, rather than getting them transferred to their home district where an ignorant judge can add a major level of uncertainty to the equation (in fact, in one case involving 112 defendants less than a year ago, the East Texas judge was able to dismiss 99 of the defendants immediately because they weren't infringing and didn't request transfers to other districts). As a result, more cases that start in the district tend to stay in the district than you might otherwise see, creating a larger volume of cases that reach a conclusion. So, not only does it handle more cases, but it also concludes more cases than most of the other district courts.
It's just a shame that people are still perpetuating the idea that it's plaintiff-friendly when it's not, since it sets up East Texas as a distraction and as a scapegoat to vent our frustrations over the patent system whenever a ruling we disagree with comes out of there. The fault isn't theirs any more than it is any other court's. It's the fault of the corporations playing this billion dollar game with each other.
(Note: much of this was pulled from a previous comment of mine from February)
It all started with Apple settling name dispute over iPad with Chinese company. That set the precedence for other East Asian companies to follow the suit. There was already suit for Chinese "snow leopard" name, some other bogus one, and now this... I am not siding with any side, but that sounds like leaching on potentially easy settlement money...
"What goes around comes around"
"Karma's a bitch"
So now we've even outsourced our patent trolls? When will it end.
that said, this could get interesting, and lets go super conspiracy theory.
Patent troll sues Apple, Apple "settles" which gives legitimacy to said patent troll.
Patent troll uses that legitimacy to get injunctions against all other smart phones that use voice.
Apple wins.
Damn it.
I am 31337 or something.
No point based on design patents ever stands. The concept itself is broken, even if it didn't have the worldwide chiilling effect that it does.
Adoption of ever-better human interfaces should be encouraged, not dissuaded. Treating them as proprietary is the biggest conceptual idiocy in the history of Man.
Prior art work may here because of how it was disclosed, I don't see commercial in confidence written at the bottom of the design and divulging it to Apple can be seen as publicly disclosing information.
The only defense is if NDAs were imposed and how those NDAs were used. Lastly, it was a Sony employee designing the prototype and giving it too Apple, if Apple said f-off we don't need you, it can be construed as Apple screwing a supplier.
People suing Apple isn't exactly a *NEW* thing. It's actually been quite steady or so (one every week or so) the past decade or more.
Heck, Creative sued Apple about a decade ago over the use of categories to help find music (Artist/Album/Genre/etc) on the iPod way back when. (I believe Apple settled, in exchange for a pile of stuff Creative was to make to support the iPod or so). Ditto Sony and others.
It's actually unusual to have Apple NOT being sued by someone or other on a weekly basis.
No, they expect YOU to follow YOUR rules. Companies from China don't take US rules seriously when they're creating products for sale in China, since US laws don't apply in China. They follow US rules for products selling in the US, and expect the local companies to do the same. Just like they follow Chinese rules in China, and expect foreign companies to do the same.
Ask your iPhone to tell you.
Two sovereign states with the name "China" exist.
ROC = Republic of China = Democratic China = Taiwan
PRC = People's Republic of China = Communist China = Mainland China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas. Prior to 1971 "China" was the ROC in the UN, it is now the PRC...
I don't think Taiwan is sovereign. At least, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I don't think that you've understood the situation at all.
Try googling. Or read this article: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/07/30/purple-iphone-2005-prototype/
This is Taiwan, not PRC China. Situation is very different there.
Normally universities do research and don't develop a thechnology to production quality. For this they either do spin-offs or licensing. And apple didn't license the patents.
I am more interested if someone here checked the patents in question have any merits?
Another question is should a (presumely public funded) university patent its inventions at all?
I don't think you have ever been to China or Taiwan. On paper, to the "outside" world Taiwan may appear to be governed by the Chinese government but in reality they are independent.
The arrangement with China is pretty much you ignore us and we'll ignore you.
Thanks very much for helping to clarify this point! It still saddens me that there are still Slashdotters who confuse Taiwan with China. (Disclaimer: I'm a student at the university.)
I make hardware RNGs, which give 2.5849625 bits of entropy per use in theory (actual performance dependent on usage).
You don't and China (PRC) doesn't, but Taiwan considers itself sovereign, and says so to the extent it can without provoking PRC into a more military form of rebuttal.
US seems to be staying on the fence on the issue.
They're not my rules, I don't live in the US.
Taiwan is de facto sovereign. The only non-sovereign part about Taiwan is that due to pressures by the PRC govt, most of the International community do not recognize Taiwan/ROC's sovereignty (over the island generally known as "Taiwan").
It's a over-complicated issue though, and really depends on who you're talking to, and whether you're trying to be factually correct or politically correct....
Don't quote me on this.
Republic of China = the government that started in China in 1911, occupied Taiwan in 1945, and lost control of China in 1949.
The "Republic of China" is a "China" in the same way that the "Chinese Communist Party" is "Communist" and the same way that the "United States of America" consists of states. It started out that way, but it isn't anymore.
The USA no longer consists of independent states, the Chinese Communist Party is no longer communist, and the Republic of China" is no longer China.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
> "We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes
> faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and
> the compensations are usually higher,""
Holy bloviators, Dark Knight! A lawyer who told the undistorted truth!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Thanks to Dick Nixon. The U.S. still has a military treaty for defense of Taiwan in case the potentates in the PRC's Communist Party attempt to make themselves look like a bigger group of f-ckups by attacking Taiwan. Sooner or later, I think they will make the attempt but only after it is sufficiently clear the U.S. cannot stop them. Taiwan's democracy makes China look bad, so it will have to go.
It hardly matters whether Apple borrowed from anybody. What matters is that Apple's claim that the iPhone design is in any way unusual or unobvious is bogus.
Taiwan's democracy doesn't make China look bad any more than any other democracy makes China look bad. Taiwan's location is strategic for China. It sits between Japan and the South China Sea (which China has made clear it wants to dominate). Taiwan sits on a strategic supply route for South Korea and Japan. China views Taiwan as part of a potential buffer between the Pacific Ocean and China.
The other problem China has with Taiwan is that the hatred between the Chiang (whose forces occupied Taiwan) and Mao was strong enough that neither could accept the existence of the other. Prior to Chiang's occupation of Taiwan Mao made a statement supporting independence from Japan for Taiwan. But once Chiang moved to Taiwan, Taiwan suddenly became important to Mao. After 60 years of propaganda about how important it is to take Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party looks bad to their ultra-nationalists by their failure to do so, and even moderating their tone on the issue is difficult.
US law requires that we sell Taiwan such defensive weapons as it needs, based purely on need and not on consultation with China. Neither US law nor treaty requires the US to defend Taiwan. Instead the US has to consider it a "grave" concern. It is deliberately ambiguous so that the US can dissuade both sides from launching hostilities with a certain expectation of how the US will respond.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Patents are supposed to be for "non-obvious" inventions- things which you can be reasonably sure someone else in the field wouldn't come up with in the same circumstances.
If Apple and Sony (not to mention LG with the Prada Phone) all came up with identical designs independently at almost exactly the same time, that's a pretty strong statement that the patent is "obvious" and shouldn't be allowed.
Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted.
Disclaimer: I'm not a patent lawyer, but I do know a thing or two about speech recognition. I've only read the summaries of the patents, but they don't seem to cover anything that Siri or any other sensible speech recogniser system does.
Patent 7,266,496 (from 2007) is about a complete speech recogniser on a chip. This couldn't be further from Siri, which sends the audio data to the cloud to be recognised. The four "modules" that the patent covers are bog-standard. Patent 7,707,032 (from 2010) describes a silly way of doing speech recognition (by comparing with individual training samples) and is unrelated to any modern commercial speech recogniser.
This is just some Taiwanese university hoping for two minutes of fame and a settlement. They seem to be getting their fame, but they're not going to see any money.
Sorry, but this is pretty silly. The US does still consist of semi-independent states. No, they're not as independent as they were under the Articles of Confederation, or as independent as they were pre-Civil War. They're not as independent as the nations that comprise the EU either, from what I can tell. However, they are a lot more independent than, say, the states that form modern Germany.
There's a lot of legal things that differ drastically between different US states. Gun laws, for instance, are very different; in Arizona you can have just about anything, and you can carry it around (concealed or not) in public all you want, while next door in California there's tons of restrictions on things like magazine size, and in Hawaii it's very hard to own one and nearly impossible to carry it outside your house. Marriage laws are also extremely different; some states will recognize gay marriage, others refuse to. Some states have "community property" laws, so that spouses have a claim to half of anything they gained during their marriage, whereas other states don't. Some states are "right to work" states where either employer or employee can terminate employment at any time, with no notice, for any cause at all (except discrimination against protected classes and some other exceptions), whereas in other states it's not so easy to fire an employee.
I guess you never heard of convergent evolution. This is why a lot of patents patents are idiotic and this is one of them.
As I have come to believe it is actually THE SAME conceptual idiocy. Consider what "organised religion" is all about.
Before organised religion there were groups of people, who now and then came up with rules and stuff to make living easier. Then "organizers" came along that took that rules, made them more and more complex until nobody understood them any more and everybody needed "high priests" to explain them and "oracles" to divine the will of the gods, which they only gave if the people paid them tribute.
Until people thought "this is all crap, let's make new rules and laws apart from that religious nonsense.".
Not a *new* group of people hat taken those rules and made them more and more complex until nobody understood them any more and everybody needed "lawyers" to explain them and "consultants" to divine the likely outcome of court cases, which they only give if the people pay them fees.
And 99% of the normal people are screwed again.
How so? Apple's design for the iPhone circa half a decade ago came at a time when phones had slide-out keyboards and buttons. My Cliq has volume up/down, power, camera, and on the front at the bottom a menu/home/back set. Newer Android phones are all suddenly super thin, no physical keyboard, menu-home-back is pretty integral to the Andorid interface though. Some have eschewed camera, most use volume down to enter the bootloader and boot a recovery system.
Everyone's trying to eliminate physical buttons just like they eliminated the stylus after Samsung declared the stylus must die--eliminating the stylus crippled smartphones and PDAs (back in 1999, you could get a Compaq iPaq with Windows on it with Pocket Word and PocketPC 6, and the handwriting recognition could take my unreadable scribble and interpret it as text proper -- it seemed to be able to read topology, rather than just shape). I used the PDA as a pretty serious professional portable word processor and it was fantastic. Do you see AbiWord on Android with handwriting recognition and a stylus? Just as Samsung led the demise of the stylus, Apple is leading the demise of buttons... starting with physical keyboards.
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Taiwan has its own government, currency, army. They have 290K people in their armed forces (more than the UK or France). They develop their own weapons systems. How the heck do you think it isn't sovereign? Because the PRC says it isn't?
The key parts of the states not being sovereign are:
1. Any dispute as to what rights the state has are settled by the Federal Government. In other words, the states only have the rights the FG says they have.
2. If the states don't like the decision of the FG, they cannot leave (as you mentioned - 1861 to 1865).
3. Even on the question of limited sovereignty, the states lose. If you don't like the way your state treats you on any given issue, you can appeal to the FG. The FG may let the state have their way, or they may not - its entirely up to the FG and not at all up to the state.
For a long time it has been the case that the states only have as much leash as the FG gives them.
The states had three checks on the FG - the power to appoint senators, the state militias, the constitution. In modern politics the constitution means whatever the FG says it means, the states no longer appoint senators, and the state militias are subject to control by the FG. Contrary to the clear meaning of the Constitution and Judge Scalias writings, the states are not sovereign and have not been for a very long time.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
You're being pedantic. I never said they were sovereign; obviously they are not. But the ARE semi-independent. If you disagree, then you must be using a different definition of "semi-independent" than I am. To me, having a country where you're allowed to walk around with a gun on you hip in one place, but would cause a public panic and go to jail in a neighboring district, meets the definition of "semi-independent". I challenge you to find an "official" definition of "semi-independent".
The normal defence for companies being sued for patent infringement is to find a breach of their own patent portfolio by the suer's products, then settle out of court.
It kindof assumes that the entity bringing the case makes commercial products themselves. Entities that don't are basically untouchable, which is why patent trolls avoid selling actual products.
Its going to be very hard for apple to find a quid-pro-quo breach by a university.
You're right that you and I are using different definitions. I think that for a state the words "sovereign" and "independent" are pretty much synonymous ( I certainly don't agree with the definition of 'sovereign' that requires recognition from other countries - that's like claiming people with a certain skin color aren't human unless people of another skin color say they are). To me, "semi-independent" or "semi-sovereign" only makes sense when the power is not clear. For example, America refuses to let high ranking Taiwanese officials visit because we fear China's reaction. When American control of its borders is constrained by fear of China, does that not suggest our sovereignty, our independence, has been reduced? That is a small example. There are other examples where countries are even more constrained by fear of outside reaction and thus one might suggest they're only "semi-independent" or "semi-sovereign".
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Interesting, I didn't think there'd be a definition that related specifically to international affairs, as the term can be used for a lot of things, including auto suspensions.
Patents are supposed to be for "non-obvious" inventions- things which you can be reasonably sure someone else in the field wouldn't come up with in the same circumstances.
"Same circumstances" doesn't apply. Otherwise, simply being tasked with inventing something would generally make it non-patentable, as someone else in the same circumstances would likely end up inventing something quite similar. Or, the other extreme: everything is patentable on a narrow enough scale since no two people think identically.
Simplistically, it's supposed to be patentable when you get an "average" person (not everyone, especially not those at the brightest end, just a "reasonable skill level") skilled in the field, to say, "cool, I didn't think of that" when faced with the invention, rather than, "well, duh, of course."
The fact that it doesn't even work this well is completely separate. You said "supposed to be", and that's not what it's supposed to be at all. What we'd like it to be is, of course, a whole 'nother discussion.
I don't know what you mean by "pat ant in fringe meant." Would you like to search the web for 'picture of a stallion'?
There were plenty of touch screen phones and PDAs without physical keyboards long before iPhone came out. Many Windows Mobile phones and PDAs were designed that way, as were Palm devices. Getting rid of the stylus and keyboards wasn't some grand insight of Steve Jobs, it was just driven by cheaper and bigger LCD screens and better touch screens. Palm software was increasingly finger driven long before the iPhone.
I call Poe's Law
Except they didn't come up with identical designs. Apple and Sony is over the iPad and the Galaxy not the phone. And the Prada and the iPhone aren't similar. The only meaningful way they are similar is they both used full sized capacitive touchscreen and no one argues that either Apple nor LG invented that.
I guess the PRC will have to wait a bit more for their Anschluss with Taiwan.
No, Samsung had the internal memo that people hate the stylus and we need to get rid of the stylus. It's what destroyed the viability of PDAs and nerfed what became smartphones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuwrWHKraQ8 Microsoft's "Transcriber" handwriting recognition on Windows CE/Pocket PC 6 on Compaq iPaq was better than this, but this is good. I used to scribble a whole cellphone-sized 3 inch screen with chicken scratch, and it could tell what it was. The AI involved is sort of a voting system, a kind of computerized democracy... OCR works by looking at shape, which is great, but with handwriting recognition you can also look at vectors.
Consider a squashed down 'e' or horrifically deformed 'a', while similar (practically rotated), are totally different. The 'e' is one long stroke, right, then up and around counter clockwise--even if it's a mess, jagged, squashed, tilted some, etc. The 'a' is two strokes. The print 'a' that most people draw is almost an 'o' with a vertical stroke, often a counter-clockwise circle with a sudden inflection and clockwise stroke at the end (the clockwise stroke is usually straight--up along the right side, stop and come down). We can also guess orientation, distance between letters, etc if you write more than one letter at once, or just based on screen orientation.
Take all of this, measure how strongly it follows, then combine all that data--vote on it. The shape recognizer feels strongly that it's 'e' or 'a', and the orientation recognizer believes that it's oriented such that it's more likely 'e'. Given that, the shape recognizer feels more strongly that it's 'e' if the orientation recognizer's assumption about which way is up is correct. Meanwhile the vector analyzer thinks there's no way in hell this could be 'a', maybe the more normal stylized 'a', it could be 'o' but it circles too far around and misses overlapping (i.e. the indications that the center stroke in the 'e' isn't intended to be the bottom of the 'o'). 'e' or 'o' but definitely not 'a'. Definitely 'a' or 'e'. Definitely 'e' in the more likely orientation. I think we can discard 'a', and only the senator from Georgia thinks it may be 'o', so we're going to settle on 'e' here.
It's the one thing Microsoft did that I still hold respect for. This is what I want to see on Android phones and tablets: http://s1.subirimagenes.com/imagen/414980transcriber.gif http://images.zatz.com/websites/pocketpclife/issues/issue200009/transcriber-a.gif
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Yes, everybody hated the stylus. That's why it was obvious that people wanted to get rid of it, and as soon as screens became big enough, they did! Apple had nothing to do with it, they just jumped on the bandwagon, after other people had already started getting rid of the stylus.
You can get handwriting recognition for Android, but why would you want to? Swype or its clones are faster and more accurate.
A lot of software on Palm (and Windows Mobile) used finger touch on resistive displays because people (like me) were too lazy to pull out the pen.
They most certainly had lots of animations in their GUIs.
They had web browsers, chat, background updating, and tons more stuff. Heck, most phone platforms had multitasking long before iPhone.
So? Did I say the iPhone was a clone of Palms? Apple copied liberally from all major vendors: Nokia, Windows Mobile, and Palm. Recently, Apple has copied tons of stuff from Android. It's OK for Apple to copy other people, it's not OK to then turn around and sue. Apple has a long history of copying and then talking themselves into thinking they innovated, and it has got to stop.
Swype has never, ever worked anything close to well for me. I hate it. Similarly, fat-fingering a 5mm wide on-screen button with my 20mm wide digit as a stylus.
Transcriber I could scribble fast. Not as fast as I can type on a Dvorak keyboard, but I sure as hell can't screw with a touch screen keyboard like a real, physical keyboard of any layout. The physical keyboard on my Cliq was better, and Transcriber is faster than that.
Transcriber didn't have an error rate measured in percent. It had an error rate measured in errors per week. MY handwriting is unrecognizable to humans, and after writing 20 pages of text I got one error. The damn thing let me scribble page after page of crap for days on a 3 inch screen with a 400MHz ARM Xscale, and it could understand my handwriting more efficiently than I can three days after writing it. I used it when I was doing a lot of writing and didn't own a laptop.
You can claim Swype is faster and more accurate; I can claim Windows has a much lower TCO than Linux. Transcriber wrote what I wrote, even if it was names of Pokemon or names of Seareach Giants or Unix commands, because it could read letters and symbols; Swype uses a dictionary and has to spell check itself. Transcriber relies on a set of 52 phoenetic characters, 10 numerals, and about 32 symbols that I already have memorized and practiced, and can handle congruent (rotation, translation), similar (expanding, shrinking), and incongruent (deforming, smashing, etc) transformations; Swype relies on learning a new muscle movement pattern for each word I want to write, and they all have to be congruent based on the dimensions of the screen and on the same origin.
Draw this exact shape of this exact size in this exact orientation and at this exact spot, and if you're a little off it'll use simplification to remove subtleties, and a dictionary to guess what you mean? Versus scribble something vaguely like the correct shape, and it'll do multiple forms of analysis to determine if it's topologically similar to a particular glyph, even if horribly deformed? Try to make your faerie stories a little more realistic.
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Oh, I will concur that it's quite well known modern handwriting applications suck. That's why I respect Microsoft's defunct Transcriber product so much: it did something nobody else has ever bothered to do. Handwriting transcription is a thing that's done terribly; all modern examples are technologically inferior to one prior art. Dragon Naturally Speaking had the same thing going on: it was phenomenal (as much as speech recognition gets), and modern examples never picked it up--because nobody cares about speech recognition (I don't want people to hear my text message conversations, I don't want to sit in my apartment talking to myself, I can actually type faster...).
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yea... try calling a native Taiwanese person Chinese and see how well that goes for you
Transcriber was an early version of Calligrapher. You can get a new and improved version of Calligrapher for Android and use it with a pen on something like the Galaxy Note. Transcriber and Calligrapher both use dictionaries. Reviews for Calligrapher (which is already much improved over Transcriber) are generally poor http://tinyurl.com/bmblkxs
It's nice that it works for you, but for most people, Swiftkey or Swype seem to be the keyboards of choice. And your ideas of how it works are... imaginative.
Actually, CalliGrapher was acquired by Microsoft in 1999.
My ideas of how Swype works are not imaginative. It works by moving your finger from A, to P, to L, to E. Somehow it figures out PP instead of one P. Because A, P, L, and E are on fixed positions in the screen, the symbol you must draw must be of a specific shape, size, orientation, and position. Shift it down-right and you get ';sve' which is nonsense, yet it's the exact same shape traced across a QWERTY keymap.
In the end, you're learning to draw shapes on the screen. One shape per word. I am not Chinese.
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two words: prior art
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
So? Did I say the iPhone was a clone of Palms? Apple copied liberally from all major vendors: Nokia, Windows Mobile, and Palm
Let me just stop you here. If Apple produced a unique combination of existing technologies in a way that would work better, that's insight and... that's patentable. I don't have to have invented either the transistor or the radio to be able to patent the transistor radio. The only question would be whether everyone in the radio would have obviously seen the applicability of the transistor of if that applicability was a matter of unique insight.
You can't have it both ways here. Either they copied from Palm or they did something new.
Combinations of known features are not patentable unless the combination represent technical innovation.
Let's stick with that example. Building a radio out of transistors was not patentable; that was what transistor were invented for. Specific radio circuits, however, were patentable because they represented actual innovation. So, some combinations of features are patentable, while others aren't.
Apple keeps patenting the equivalent "a radio built out of transistors", a concept that was obvious and that was the whole point of developing transistors; and then Apple keeps screwing those inventors that actually do something technically novel, like develop novel transistor circuits.
Combinations of known features are not patentable unless the combination represent technical innovation.
The word "innovation" gets used here to mean something that almost never happens in human history. Unique insight is the criteria for the law.
Apple keeps patenting the equivalent "a radio built out of transistors", a concept that was obvious and that was the whole point of developing transistors
It was obvious then why didn't other people do it before Apple? I look at Android and I see far too many things that coming from Apple. The F700 which Samsung keeps trying to introduce IMHO does a great job in proving Apple's case. The UI for the F700, Croix, is really really different than the Android UI's
it does things Android / iPhone don't
it puts calendaring at the center of the interface (like outlook or a PIM) not web browsing nor email
music can be free floating and attached to anything
That is what an independent UI would look like. Some advantages, some disadvantages but different. Apple's patents are for things it did first and did different than anyone before them.