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Florida Man Sues Apple For $10+ Billion, Says He Invented iPhone Before Apple (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via MacRumors: A Florida resident that goes by the name of Thomas S. Ross has filed a lawsuit against Apple this week, claiming that the iPhone, iPad, and iPod infringe upon his 1992 invention of a hand-drawn "Electronic Reading Device" (ERD). The court filing claims the plaintiff was "first to file a device so designed and aggregated," nearly 15 years before the first iPhone. MacRumors reports: "Between May 23, 1992 and September 10, 1992, Ross designed three hand-drawn technical drawings of the device, primarily consisting of flat rectangular panels with rounded corners that "embodied a fusion of design and function in a way that never existed prior to 1992." Ross applied for a utility patent to protect his invention in November 1992, but the application was declared abandoned in April 1995 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after he failed to pay the required application fees. He also filed to copyright his technical drawings with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2014. While the plaintiff claims that he continues to experience "great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money," he has demanded a jury trial and is seeking restitution no less than $10 billion and a royalty of up to 1.5% on Apple's worldwide sales of infringing devices." MacRumors commenter Sunday Ironfoot suggests this story may be "The mother of all 'Florida Man' stories." Apple has been awarded a patent today that prohibits smartphone users from taking photos and videos at concerts, movies theaters and other events where people tend to ignore such restrictions.
Hey, he's just following the American way. Come up with some half-baked idea, and when someone comes along with an actual successful creation which is even remotely similar, sue their asses off.
We see it in product design, programming, music... remember, only schmucks get rich by accomplishing something. Everybody else does it by inheriting or stealing it. Preferably both.
True, but it's annoying how much of a big deal the summary makes about "hand drawn" technical drawings and it's definitely not equivalent to a "napkin sketch". Not very long before 1992 I was using a pencil, paper and drawing board as well because of a shortage of CAD workstations where I was.
That this is going to court at all is still a sign of multiple fuckups with patents. I also had the idea of something like a smartphone back then but I'd picked it up from fiction like masses of others that thought about it - it's a trivial passing thought unless you do something serious about it to make the idea reality. Patents are supposed to be about implementations of ideas and not just a vague description of something that would be nice to have.
There is a certain karmic justice in Apple having to formally address an idiot who thinks a slab with rounded corners is worthy of intellectual property, given that apple has asserted the same.
While his application might have been abandoned, that doesn't negate it as prior art.
You and the moron with the mod-point should actually take some time to read up on it. The 'rounded-corners' bit was part of a long list of cosmetic, as opposed to utilitarian, details that Samsung copied very closely.
The funny thing is your ignorance and your silly hatred of anything Apple has been monetized by Slashdot. That's something that actually may be patent worthy.