Ban on Galaxy Nexus U.S. Sales Upheld, Software Patch to Circumvent Forthcoming

[kdarling]

I can't think of anyone that had a universal search interface before Spotlight came out in OS X. i.e.: a single search box that searches not just files, but contacts, emails, etc - all without having to specify what type of thing your looking for (this last part is important! It's a key part of the patent).

From 1999, before the Apple patent was filed in 2000 and Spotlight announced in 2004:

"Copernic 99 is intelligent software that can search the Web, newsgroups, and email simultaneously, using more than 30 information sources."

I was using Copernic on my Windows machines at work back around 2000. It was pretty cool. At night (or any other programmed downtime) it would go through each new file, email, web history, etc and index all the keywords to be ready for your next search.

 

[Labeno]

Google has applied for a patent and Apple doesn't have licensed nothing

Can you show some web links to back up your statement? If not, are you just assuming? I'm just trying to get the facts.

 

[Frankied22]

This really sucks for anyone who wanted to get the unlocked Nexus through the Play store. I am really glad I ordered mine after I/O and got it the other day. JB on the Nexus is a huge difference. The phone is super fast. These lawsuits are ridiculous, and I'm losing a lot of respect for Apple and I own multiple Apple products. They just try to ban competitor products now. The One X, the Galaxy Tab, the SGIII, and now the Nexus. Pathetic.

 

[afs_nj]

i have an iPhone, 2 MacBooks, a cinema display, an iPad, an iPod Nano, and an iMac G4. I'm not in favor of this. This is bad for all consumers. Unless you are a huge shareholder or an executive at Apple, you shouldn't be in favor of this ban.

Apple has always taken very large risks to bring these products to market. Patents are, unfortunately, one of the few mechanisms of protection. You cannot same the same for Google's Android.

 

[retry4]

These legal battles are becoming so epic that some game developer should make an MMORPG featuring the Android Alliance vs the Apple Empire...or something.

That would be awesome! But then someone might get sued by apple.

 

[cotak]

Apple really should be doing cross licencing with their competitors. That is the norm in the industry before Apple became rich. Typically the law suits goes for a few years with a winner and everyone agrees to some amount of money being exchanged with an agreement to cross license and everyone goes on their marry way.

Now apple's taking this to a level that is at best illogical and at worse foolhardy.

While Apple's wasting it's time and money in the courts their competitors are busy making new stuff. Sure they can ban the nexus but then what? There's still dozens of different superior androids that people can buy. So will apple go after those? And by the time they get their injunction the next batch of androids are out. It's a never ending game and only the lawyers benefits from it.

All the while Microsoft's making some pretty neat moves with their mobile offerings. Apple's obsessed with Android while WM one of the oldest smartphone lineage is doing a lot of right things.

I am sure there are going to be tons of people here who will say Apple can afford the lawyers with all their billions and still innovate. I say the issue isn't how much money you have but how distracted your executives are and what direction the company is taking.

The recent new and exciting things are not coming out of apple but google and microsoft. For apple that's not a good sign especially if their competitor pulls the same litigation game.

 

[bushido]

Not directly related but a UK court has just handed a win to HTC against Apple - including slide to unlock.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/04/uk_htc_no_infringement/

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HTC was first to file in the UK, trying to invalidate patents that were already at issue in the firms' cases in Germany, but Apple quickly counter-sued over patents dealing with multi-touch, photo management, slide-to-unlock and changing alphabets on keyboards.


Judge Christopher Floyd said that the photo management patent was valid, but HTC wasn't infringing on it. The judge ruled that the three other patents were invalid – either because they were obvious, in the common knowledge or had been done before.

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lmao a patent on "changing alphabets on keyboards" glad to hear that judge is reasonable.

software patents suck period, at least in its current form. they are nothing more than nitpicking to find loopholes to sue one another and no longer serve their initial purpose

 

[MacCurry]

Can you show some web links to back up your statement? If not, are you just assuming? I'm just trying to get the facts.

Apple doesn't have a license. It is involved in extreme intellectual theft. Google may or may not file a lawsuit because everyone at Google knows there are work arounds to such patents.

As kdarling said, Google is getting ready to push out a patch for the GNex and should be out by next week to render this 'temporary' injunction invalid. In the mean time, Apple is out of $96 million. They may get it back in 2014, when this issue goes to trial, but by then iOS will have completely changed to look like Android.

Android is fast changing from where it was in 2008 to where it is today.

 

[OceanView]

This is crazy.
Apple, as much as I love your products, stop worrying about the other companies and focus on innovating.

 

[Luap]

i have an iPhone, 2 MacBooks, a cinema display, an iPad, an iPod Nano, and an iMac G4. I'm not in favor of this. This is bad for all consumers. Unless you are a huge shareholder or an executive at Apple, you shouldn't be in favor of this ban.

Proof that people post without having the faintest idea of what they are talking about.

 

[Sensation]

Not directly related but a UK court has just handed a win to HTC against Apple - including slide to unlock.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/04/uk_htc_no_infringement/

------------------
HTC was first to file in the UK, trying to invalidate patents that were already at issue in the firms' cases in Germany, but Apple quickly counter-sued over patents dealing with multi-touch, photo management, slide-to-unlock and changing alphabets on keyboards.


Judge Christopher Floyd said that the photo management patent was valid, but HTC wasn't infringing on it. The judge ruled that the three other patents were invalid – either because they were obvious, in the common knowledge or had been done before.

--------------------

Makes me glad to be British.

 

[KnightWRX]

Has it been issued yet? I thought it was still in prosecution phase (rewording claims ... etc).

No news on the patent being issued. It's still listed as an application :

http://www.google.com/patents/US20090249247?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[hobo.hopkins]

Apple has every right to go after people they feel are infringing upon their patents. If people are unhappy don't blame Apple, Google, etc. - blame the laws and the courts.

 

[Dbrown]

Who cares if apple supposedly did unified search back in 2000. The idea that searching multiple sources from a single box is patentable is ridiculous. How else are you supposed to do a unified search?

 

[Reason077]

From 1999, before the Apple patent was filed in 2000 and Spotlight announced in 2004:

"Copernic 99 is intelligent software that can search the Web, newsgroups, and email simultaneously, using more than 30 information sources."

Interesting. I'm not familiar with Copernic, but from looking at screenshots, it looks like recent versions do indeed appear to function a lot like Spotlight.

However, looking at screenshots from older versions (this one is from 2005), it does not appear to have "universal search" functionality. It's clear that you must still click on an icon to select what you want to search (web, emails, music, etc):

http://thejo.in/wp-content/desktopsearch/cds-ss1-email-search.jpg

If you can find a screenshot of an earlier version showing true Spotlight-like functionality, that would be very interesting indeed. And I'm sure Samsung's lawyers would thank you!

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Who cares if apple supposedly did unified search back in 2000. The idea that searching multiple sources from a single box is patentable is ridiculous. How else are you supposed to do a unified search?

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to make the assumption that simple things are obvious. Spotlight is very simple. However, it was far from obvious in 2004 that this is the way that search is supposed to work.

The real debate should be about what level of protection patents ought to provide. Clearly patents are desirable, to a point, because if your competitors could rip off inventions as soon as you created them, there would be no incentive to innovate. But is it right that patents are used as weapons to restrict competition, many years or even decades later?

 

[charlituna]

I think it is still a preliminary injunction. Google just want to put out a patch so they can continue to sell while the court case works itself out.

Basically yes.

But here's the rub. If they can write a patch to get around this injunction and are willing to do that then why didn't they just use that 'patch' as THE software in the first place and avoid all this fuss.

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I imagine the infringer has to petition the court to relax the injunction and if so, I would imagine that Apple gets their bond money back and then drops the case.

Apple won't drop the case. Why? Because patching something doesn't mean that they weren't violating before. Apple will want the final verdict handed down so that Samsung doesn't go back and remove the patch later because no one said that they couldn't.

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i have an iPhone, 2 MacBooks, a cinema display, an iPad, an iPod Nano, and an iMac G4. I'm not in favor of this. This is bad for all consumers.

So you think that it's bad for consumers to have a choice in tech because companies should be allowed to just copy each other's stuff whenever they want.

Rather than having to develop their own stuff which might actually be better than the status quo. Something we consumers will be denied because the companies aren't forced to develop their own stuff and why should they waste the money on R&D if they don't have to.

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Apple spent millions to make this happen. Google answers with a patch.

I'm sorry but I find this comical.

The comical part is that Apple will use that patch against Google and Samsung. Clearly if it was so easy to rewrite the software to create this non infringing patch shows that it wasn't really necessary to use Apple's tech to achieve the same end and thus there goes any arguments to that effect.

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Android has had unified search in android long before it was in iOS.

But was it in Android before it was in Mac OS. Because Apple can and likely will have a patent dating back to those days and it very likely doesn't restrict use to just computers in the desktop/notebook sense.

 

[Dbrown]

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to make the assumption that simple things are obvious. Spotlight is very simple. However, it was far from obvious in 2004 that this is the way that search is supposed to work.

Its a unified search. How much more obvious can that get?

And how the hell are you supposed to do a unified search if it doesnt come from one box? You can't, so therefore it won't be a unified search anymore. So basically apple owns the idea to unified search... does that seem right to you?

No one should have a patent on searching for information at all... wtf is the USPTO thinking?!?

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Who cares if apple supposedly did unified search back in 2000. The idea that searching multiple sources from a single box is patentable is ridiculous. How else are you supposed to do a unified search?

Welcome to the world of crapents and Patent trolls.

It is one thing to get crapents as it is safe to assume that company like MS and Apple have them. It is another to go law suit crazy with crapents which is a patent troll activity.
Apple has become the worlds largest patent troll.

 

[charlituna]

Am I reading this correctly? That this is all because of the search functionality? Does apple really think they'll lose sales because of that one feature?

For Apple its not really about losing sales so much as they spend a lot of time, money and effort in developing their systems and they are loathe to have someone come along and go cheap and just copy their stuff.

 

[kdarling]

However, looking at screenshots from older versions (this one is from 2005), it does not appear to have "universal search" functionality. It's clear that you must still click on an icon to select what you want to search (web, emails, music, etc):

That's a different look; probably it's settable. When I was using Copernic, if you asked for a total search, the results were shown in any arrangement you wanted.

For example, one of my first searches was for an old project that I had "lost" most of the files to, because I wasn't very well organized at the time. They were somewhere on the huge hard drive.

Copernic instantly listed every file, photo, PDF, web link, and email that had the project term I types in, first organizing the results by type headings in a list... very much like today's common notifications list on phones.

Or I could of course sort by date, size, or do subsearches. I'll look around for screenshots when I get a chance.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to make the assumption that simple things are obvious. Spotlight is very simple. However, it was far from obvious in 2004 that this is the way that search is supposed to work.

Google released Google Desktop Search in 2004 as well.

The funny thing in this case is that I don't think it takes someone versed in the search arts to come up with the idea. If we simply asked children or grandmothers what they thought a search box does, at least some would say that it searches "everything it can".

 

[charlituna]

Android open source project began in 2003. It is completely plausible that the functionality was already in place prior to that.

And according to reports Apple started working on their touchscreen project (which was in fact originally the iPad not the iPhone) somewhere between 2001-2003. Much of it based on patents they had filed way before that time period because the tech was derived from their traditional computer tech.

When it comes to things like patents, what you are doing in your own labs is less important than when you actually file the paperwork etc. Because that is the point when it becomes known and recorded that you were doing it. Just the way the laws currently work

 

[Oletros]

Basically yes.

But here's the rub. If they can write a patch to get around this injunction and are willing to do that then why didn't they just use that 'patch' as THE software in the first place and avoid all this fuss..

Perhaps because they don't think they infringe?

 

[SPUY767]

Supposedly Google did do it on their own. They just apparently didn't apply for, or search for, a patent about something that must've seemed so obvious to them.



What took months, was for the courts to decide to grant a preliminary injunction before trial even started.

Making a workaround probably took just hours, if even that long. There just wasn't any need for it until the injunction.



I've read (but not confirmed) that the search box will now only go to the web instead of also searching local files.

So there would be no effective change for the overwhelming majority of users who just wanted to search the web in the first place. Heck, maybe it'll even be faster.

Hmm. Come to think of it, many of us have our contacts and email stored in the cloud as well. No need to search locally.

The fact that time slows as you approach the speed of light seems obvious when explained, but I wouldn't think of it myself. Everything is obvious once you've seen it.

 

[charlituna]

Since when is a system wide search a feature that is only unique to iOS devices? So, Galaxy Nexus users should not be able to easily search for local files/apps on their device?

It's less about the existence of the feature and more how the feature is achieved.

So in the case of searching your whole phone/tablet/computer you have three main ways of achieving this end goal

1. Every time you run a search the system has to actually search the whole collection of data right at that moment

2. The system actually periodically searches all the data in the system in the background creating an index of key terms which are unique enough to be valid for searching for an item and when a user does a search that index is searched and the paired data entries are then presented to the user.

3. Rather than searching and re searching the system, the index is built and amended every time the user directly or indirectly adds data to the collection, or even removes data from the collection.

If Apple developed and patented one of these methods (specially the 2nd or 3rd) and someone else copied it then they have every right to file suit and have it heard. It benefits both sides because Apple could lose in the end and then said method is free for the taking.

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Google will NEVER sue Apple because they receive significant (more than search) revenue from Apple.

By that logic Samsung will never sue Apple because they make way more money making parts for almost everything Apple sells.

 

[Yvan256]

Coca-Cola = Nestea?

Wut.

But it's interesting to know that most of the foods you eat are monopolised by 4-5 companies.

Where in that chart are you seeing that Coca-Cola = Nestlé?