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Appeals Court Reinstates Apple's $120 Million Slide-To-Unlock Patent Win Over Samsung (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Apple Inc. won an appeals court ruling that reinstates a patent-infringement verdict it won against Samsung Electronics Co., including for its slide-to-unlock feature for smartphones and tablets. In an 8-3 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a three-judge panel was wrong to throw out the $119.6 million verdict in February. Instead, it ordered the trial judge to consider whether the judgment should be increased based on any intentional infringement by Samsung. In this case, Apple claimed that Samsung infringed patents for the slide-to-unlock feature, autocorrect and a way to detect phone numbers so they can be tapped to make phone calls. The bulk of the award, $98.7 million, was for the detection patent that the earlier panel said wasn't infringed. The February decision also said the other two patents were invalid. That was a wrong decision, the court ruled Friday, because it relied on issues that were never raised on appeal or on information that was beyond the trial record. "The jury verdict on each issue is supported by substantial evidence in the record," Circuit Judge Kimberly Moore wrote for the majority.

3 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Stupid patents hinder competition by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Stupid patents. Sliding locks have been around since Roman days, and Apple didn't invent auto-correct nor Intellisense.

    1. Re:Stupid patents hinder competition by skam240 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Mod up please. The fact that Apple was able to patent these things is beyond absurd. Our patent office needs to learn to say "no" in a big way.

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    2. Re:Stupid patents hinder competition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Apple didn't even patent sliding to unlock, that was rejected dozens of times. But Jobs kept pressing and revising the application. The "innovation" that finally got granted was "continuously pressing your finger down while sliding to unlock". I'm not fucking kidding, the $120M innovation was "continuously" pressing your finger while sliding it across a screen.