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Apple and FutureTap Resolve Questions Over Travel Patent Application
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This is a fantastic point, and it's exactly what happened here.
APPLE LEGAL BRASS said:
Translation:
"We are investigating what the fkk our employees were thinking, and we will be paying the owner of the ideas because of this screwup."
Look closely at the pictures. We have been shown a screen shot and a drawing. Large parts of the screen shot were copyright by Apple anyway, like the iPhone itself, various parts of the standard UI, and the scroll wheel was based on an Apple design. Other parts of the screen shot that showed significant inventiveness were not copied. The rest is quite trivial and only a tiny part of the copyrighted work. And that drawing cannot take any customers away from the app maker. Looks very much like "fair use" to me.
Welcome to slashdot.
Even the comments here are people talking nonsensically about fair use and copyright infringement etc etc. I'm not trying to be an elitist, but if you (the macrumors collective, not writingdevil) aren't an IP attorney, just stop. You probably don't know what you're talking about.
This story last week both pissed me off (because I _am_ a patent attorney and there shouldn't have been a hubbub in the first place) and dismayed me (because this is the mentality that caused me to stop reading slashdot, and now it has spread to mainstream blogs).
About the only valid comment is "It would have been nice for Apple to give them attribution." There is no need for Apple to have done so, and there certainly is no requirement. But, yeah, maybe it would have been nice.
And here's your small piece of patent education for the day: if you write in your patent application that something is prior art, it becomes prior art, even if you were wrong in how you understood it. Admissions like that are held against the applicant (hence attorney's disincentive to provide attribution).
Congrads to FutureTap for cathing this. I guess if they get credit and are only used as a reference, their should be no problem. I think someone at Apple thought they could get away with it and when they got caught, Apple had to back-peddle and apologize. Apple is at fault, but they aren't going to admit to "borrowing heavily" from/stealing the interface from FutureTap.
Slightly off topic: Did anyone catch this?
Shouldn't it say "claim to have invented the pictures user interface"? Bad grammer or am I just misreading it.
Slightly off topic: Did anyone catch this?
From patent lawyer said:
Shouldn't it say "claim to have invented the pictures user interface"? Bad grammer or am I just misreading it.
No, I think what they mean is they are contemplating whether they want their IP group to file an amendment to the patent application attributing the source of screenshots. Nobody is getting paid for being the "owner of the ideas".
The way it was originally written is correct.