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Apple Files Patent For Digital Wallet and Virtual Currency
another random user writes "Apple has applied for a patent on a combined virtual currency and digital wallet technology that would allow you to store money in the cloud, make payments with your iPhone, and maybe communicate with point-of-sale terminals via NFC. The patent application, published [Thursday] by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Organization, details how iPhone users could walk into a store, pay for goods with their phone, and walk out with their merchandise. Though Apple is late to the virtual wallet game, that doesn't seem to stop them trying to patent the process. There does not appear to be anything in the patent application which describes something that can't already be done."
"Apple files patent for wheel"
It's a shame so many other companies have ripped off Apple's innovation in the mobile payment market. The audacity of them, to release stolen copies before Apple even finished thinking up the idea...
when is Apple going to sue the Banks ? ^_^
National Football Confederation?
'Erm', it's called a credit card. So the only change is no plastic card instead a plastic box full of electronic components, hmm, technically a step back, as more is required to identify the user, rather than less.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Caveat: This is the engineers understanding of the patent process as explained by the legal department. I won't bet even two cents on it being right.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
lk
"Sorry, I can't pay for the meal I just ate, I don't carry cash and the battery on my phone died while I was eating."
I don't know how Apple could have invented 'virtual currency' considering all of my currency virtually disappears virtually as soon as I get it.
The idea of patenting an idea, material or process in this day and age makes no sense to me. /rant
All these things are built on 10.000 generations of improving upon others inventions, and the changes are incremental. What hubris to claim an idea or process as your own? Marketing an idea et al. for profit needs no such protection (see the fashion industry). It is a cowing to profit beyond the interests of society as a whole. And this is even ignoring the fact that due to the principles of discovery many idea's, materials and processes can be discovered near-simultaneosly.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
More metadata for the NSA to harvest!
Whenever a patent story comes out, everyone's concerned about whether the patent will be used to lock up some obvious functionality. That's not why Apple gets patents. It works like this:
1 - Apple gets patent
2 - Apple sells patent to Irish subsidiary for small amount of money
3 - Apple comes out with iPhone that incorporates patented technology.
4 - Apple pays subsidiary royalty on patent for each iPhone sold
In this way, Apple moves profit on iPhone sales from Apple itself to the subsidiary. The subsidiary is incorporated in Ireland, so it is not taxable in the US. The subsidiary's major operations are in the US, so it is not taxable in Ireland.
Profit!! Tax-free!!
Patents are no longer an IP strategy. They're a tax avoidance strategy.
Most of this appears to already appears to happen on my android phone (NFC payment via Google Wallet). So apparently something you can already do is now novel if you do it "on an iPhone"?
Just imagine what Apple could have accomplished if they had had Kim Yong Il on their team as well. The guy who could do everything working with the company that invented everything - what a team
Bitcoin already exists. It already has a digital wallet and many other features.
i can't wait to pay for apple stuff with shiny apple money instead of boring old sterling
will apple get 30% of everything i pay for? i hope so!!
At least I think that was what it was called. Same thing done in the UK about 15 years ago. Trial was in Swindon IIRC. I guess this wasn't "in the cloud", though. So clearly Apple have invented an entirely new concept. Peter Gabriel also did something similar in the late 80s, it flopped.
I can't wait to get me some iMoney. It'll be better than your crappy $$$$ or gold.
Bitcoin exchanges sued in 3...2...
My bank card measures 85 x 54 x 0.5 mm, can be used to make payments in all of Europe with a very small fee when abroad, makes stealing it worthless by requiring a PIN, has a chip and a magnetic band so that it can be used in lots of kind of terminals and can also be used for drawing cash out of ATMs. It also gets accepted on amazon and lots of other websites. In addition, the liability and the burden of keeping the hardware and the software running and up-to-date lies with the bank and the merchants, and if it melts, breaks or gets stolen I can get a new one at no cost within days.
So, can somebody please tell me why I would like to replace that with a phone?
Apple files patent for digital wallet drivers license,receipts, business cards,proof of insurance and condoms.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
This is the kind of shit that drives us crazy, but if we were running a company like Apple, we would do the exact same thing. In this climate you have to patent taking a crap and the manner of wiping said turd residue of the user's ass - otherwise some fucktard patent holding nonmanufacturing entity will come along and sue you for inventing sharks with frigging lasers on their heads because they bought up an old patent which described something something something in the water something something.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
To apply for a patent before a given technology has been is widespread use for years?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
What about Isis? It's the same concept that the carriers in the US are already working on. Why didn't they patent the idea?
Apple thinks that they have power, they have none when it compares to that of say, big telecom and even the banks. The banks want this, so I figure that eventually the banks will come out with the same idea but with a bigger legal team behind it and kill Apple's idea.
" ... There does not appear to be anything in the patent application which describes something that can't already be done."
An honest patent system? Ask Inventors in any country. Not just the U.S.
It's not impossible. After all, they both hate South Koreans. An enemy of my enemy...
They have been talking about this for decades and you mean to tell me NOBODY ever patented this idea? darn, I missed my chance to become a millionaire with common knowledge invention....
How the hell did Apple file a patent on this. This concept has been around in Japan for 10 years. The patent system here makes no damn sense. Now there will likely be patent infringement suits that will drag on for another 10 years. Who foots the bill for all the courts and Justice's time, we the taxpayers of course. We got to change the system so that frivolous patents are not awarded.
Shit. Where's my patent application?
Ballmer gets credit for throwing a chair and nobody remembers Jobs invented that by throwing a monitor.
Gates never said 640K is enough that was Jobs and it was only 64K.
Apple invented everything!
I've never heard of it. I've heard of the U.S. Patent and Trademark OFFICE. Is that what you meant?
New opportunities for cyber criminals .... yaaaay
I wonder what the margin overhead for hacking insurance will be passed onto the customers (aint commin out of company profits ....)
For having rounded corners on their credit cards.
It's a rip off of bitcoins except completely centrally controlled and exactly the opposite in principal. You know how one thing wildly succeeds and then all the other versions that are cheap, fast rip-off are inferior and fail miserably? You know, ipod to zune for example. Well, bye bye Applecoins.
The odd thing about this filing are the inventors: Aaltonen; Janne; (Turku, FI) ; Saru; Sami; (Turku, FI)
Two Finns who have been in the mobile business for some time (including at Nokia), but both didn't seem to be working for Apple until very recently.
IOW nobody would even comment on this patent if Apple hadn't acquired it / the companies of the inventors.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
As usual /. is overrun with flame war comments. The patent world is full of things that seem identical, but it takes a fair amount of work to sort out the wherein's to sort out _exactly_ what's being patented. The devil is in the details, and I imagine encryption, security, handshaking are the kinds of thing make the difference.
FWIW here's sowething for Google Android fanbois, the point of the patent is that you can choose your 'sponsor', ie PayPal, MasterCard, Visa... That sounds like a pretty hard problem. AFAIK Google wants you to use their payment system.
I had been hoping to learn something from the comments like you can for non-Apple topics - silly me.
Whenever you see a phrase mentioning "in the cloud" mentally replace it with "on some stranger's computer", then re-evaluate.