Controversy Over Apple Travel Patent Application

[MacKeeperFanMod]

Apple's application was filed in Jan 2009 (not recently). Moreover, it's the patent claims that matter, not the figures. Figures are often used for illustrative purposes and many applications use figures from other applications or on the web. It's a non event.

 

[lilo777]

Brownlee blows another one. This is a non-story the patent application has nothing to do with the app. Its just shown as an example of the kind of app that would use the service. The patent has nothing to do with finding local points of interest thats just something John made up in in effort to pretend to be a journalist.

This is no different the a iPod charger patent showing an iPod. Its just an example of its use and is not part of the patent. this story should have never been written

It would not be wrong if they gave proper credits to app creators. Being cheap (as they usually are) they saved on hiring an artist to do the patent application and instead just used someone else's art. And BTW if you read an article on Gizmodo it's not the only patent where they did it.

 

[MorphingDragon]

That's just scummy of Apple.

 

[dru`]

It's ridiculous to try to file a patent with the exact same interface.

*sigh* Except that's not what the patent is about. The illustration in question is used as an example of an app that may benefit from the services the patent itself is about. This sort of use of product UIs is not uncommon. The developers should be pleased Apple used their app as an example.

This only upsets people who don't know what they're talking about or have nothing better to offer than bash Apple for page hits.

This is another in an infinite number of instances of people feeding themselves LIES and screaming for action.

 

[dru`]

It would not be wrong if they gave proper credits to app creators. Being cheap (as they usually are) they saved on hiring an artist to do the patent application and instead just used someone else's art. And BTW if you read an article on Gizmodo it's not the only patent where they did it.

A patent application isn't wikipedia or your 4th grade research paper. This is a standard practice. The UI is called out only as an example of how the underlying patented technology may be used and not itself being claimed as Apple's in the patent.

 

[jeff33702]

You guys need to realize that they are not patenting anything that is shown here. They are not patenting Where To?'s app or anything like it. Read the patent, it isn't for anything UI related but rather a reactive application - one that, if it knows you have a plane flight (for example) can ready your boarding passes by checking you in or giving you maps of connecting airports.

This isn't "you are in coordinates x,y and here are stores/things-to-do nearby" (Where To?). Apple's idea is far more complex: "Based on your information, you will be in x,y and here are things you may need." I.e.: We see that you have a 10am flight that connects in Roanoke, here are your boarding passes and this is a restaurant in the Roanoke airport near your gate.

Read before Rage.

Respectfully, to me it does look like the same thing. Think about the usage here. In either case, a user is only going to use this technology when they are looking for something travel related in a place that they are going to be.

I'm a late adopter of apple products (original iphone) and I do love them...which puts me in a strage position because I've been getting a lot of bad vibes from Apple, Inc. I want their products but I'm starting to feel more controlled and limited than anything else. I got on this Applewagon because everything seemed to just work....but now it seems like everything works...as long as you live in this little box. This is just another move that, IMO, makes Apple look bad.

 

[mikerr]

Patents like these should be abolished.
No patents on software.
No patents on life.
No patents on architecture.
No patents on design.
No patent extension times.
Frankly, let's just ding the whole patent system and kill the trolls.

Move to china?

 

[davidcarswell]

The drawing could at least have been slightly different from the app in question, but using the screenshot when Apple has plenty of graphic designers that could create a mock-up easily enough is laughable.

Woa! Hold them horses. A graphic designer most likely uses Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop! I'd gamble they've all been given their walking papers. I mean it would mean Apple using Adobe. Right?

LOL

I LOVE APPLE and ADOBE most of the time. Just couldn't pass that up.

Hehe.

 

[PerfSeeker]

This is not a big pharma. This is someone at Apple spotting neat application at AppStore, sitting down with a colleague or two for a lunch and brainstorming to specify some trivial extensions. Then a patent engineer / lawyer writes the thing in a patent form in two days and submits it to USPTO. The said patent engineer / lawyer doesn't even bother to redraw the illustrations.

An application that's not even released by Apple. And Apple having the patent making sure it never will be released by someone else. This is not supporting innovation. This is not advancing technology. This is the opposite of that. This is rewarding laziness.

Sounds suspiciously like MSFT's "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. Come on Apple, you're BETTER then that.

 

[doctor-don]

Woa! Hold them horses. A graphic designer most likely uses Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop! I'd gamble they've all been given their walking papers. I mean it would mean Apple using Adobe. Right?

LOL

I LOVE APPLE and ADOBE most of the time. Just couldn't pass that up.

Hehe.

Still no one knows all the facts to be making these comments.

And I made mostly the same diagram / image using Graphic Converter in about 5 minutes. I quit when I realized it was a waste of time.

 

[appleguru1]

Pure speculation at this point, but perhaps Louie Mantia (former icon factory whiz that now works at apple) designed the "where to?'" Interface/icons? His fingerprint is certainly all over the rest of the iPhone and os x app design scene...

 

[Master Chief]

The one thing I am interested in is this quote from Ortwin Gentz of FutureTap:

This paragraph sounds like a claim that describes Where To?’s functionality pretty exactly.

As in; The patent application describes the functionality of the 'Where To' app [in part] and if that is true... Apple is not only using other peoples UI [as example] but also rips their [original] ideas.

Source: http://www.futuretap.com/blog/the-patent-case-we-havent-called/

 

[lewis82]

I can't even imagine they actually tought no one would notice it.

Or, they trust their lawyers a lot.

 

[gnasher729]

iOS application developers must read and sign a contract, where I found this clause:

"15.5 Independent Development. Nothing in this Agreement will impair Apple's right to develop, acquire, license, market, promote, or distribute products or technologies that perform the same or similar functions as, or otherwise compete with, Applications, Licensed Applications or any other products or technologies that You may develop, produce, market, or distribute."

Fantastic deal... for Apple.

Without that, some people would think very hard what software they would expect Apple to add to the iPhone or iPad, write a very primitive version of that software, and then sue Apple if Apple created the software these people expected Apple to create.

Like I might have expected that Apple will port Keynote to the iPad, and could have written some simple presentation software, and tried to extract money from Apple when Keynote is released. It also means the author of the first fart application cannot sue Apple for allowing more fart applications on the store.

Because fair use doesn't mean "some guy on the Internet thinks it's fair", but falling under Section 107. It is clear that Macrumors' use falls under one or more categories of the 1961 report, but it isn't so clear that Apple's does. The resident US patent lawyer will be able to chime in with a better informed opinion, of course. What's more likely is an argument based on the extent to which a UI can be copyrighted (which, as Apple found out in the early '90s, was not "as much as Apple would like", but the loss was on trying to copyright UI concepts rather than specific depictions).

I checked the criteria on Wikipedia, and according to those criteria Apple looks reasonably good. First, what Apple has copied is minimal. If you take the screenshot, remove the items that were originally created by Apple (iPhone itself, scroll wheel, some of the icons), and remove the items that Apple didn't copy (all the nicely designed bits), then there is very little left. The "copyrighted work" is the whole application, not a screen shot, so it is a very tiny part of the application that was copied.

Second, it seems that copying for the purpose of creating new IP indicates fair use, which would mean that copying an image for the creation of a patent application would tend to be fair use. I might got that wrong, I'll accept someone making a reasonable argument why this view is wrong.

Third, there is the question how the copy affects the copyright holder financially. If I made copies of a video game and sold them, that would obviously have a strong effect on the copyright holder; those who get a copy wouldn't by the video game. In this case, it seems absurd to think that anyone reading the patent application would be so pleased with Apple's drawing that they don't buy the app; would anyone say "no, I don't buy the app, I look at the drawing in Apple's patent instead"? If I wrote an application and copied that design, that would cost these developers sales and money; Apple using a drawing in a patent doesn't cost them sales and money.

 

[Analog Kid]

Wow, so few people really understand what patents are, how to read them, and how they're used.

First, no company, none, will email anyone outside their NDA circle and say "hey, we're filing a patent and we're including pictures of your stuff". That's just dumb. Inventors go to great length to hide their filings as long as possible because the invention is not protected until the patent issues. Patents are also, often, the earliest indication of future direction and therefore closely held secrets.

FutureTap retains full control of their technology. Apple did them a favor by using their interface because they have clearly indicated it as prior art.

You are required to disclose all relevant prior art in a patent-- so if what Apple is discussing is in any way similar to the Where To? app, they are required to disclose that or risk having their patent invalidated later.

If a patent is mistakenly issued to an inventor on technology that already exists, regardless of whether it has been patented, it is invalid. The patent office is not the final arbiter in these things, the courts are-- and that picture alone is a clear indication that Apple has no intention of claiming ownership if FutureTap's IP.

In fact, if a company is found to have "willfully infringed" on someone else's patented material, meaning they knew at the time that they were using patented technology, damages are tripled.

You don't draw inventions in a patent, you claim them. Everything else is context to the claims. The text and the figures are merely a way of helping the patent reviewer understand what it is you are trying to explain.

It is very common to patent enhancements to other inventors work. It is not sleazy to show a picture of Edison's light bulb and patent a better filament.

Finally, patents aside, is is common practice to adopt improvements in the state of the art. If the Where To? interface looks to be a useful one, we can expect to see it in other products, including Apple's in the same way that Where To? borrowed from Apple's click-wheel.

 

[Analog Kid]

iOS application developers must read and sign a contract, where I found this clause:

"15.5 Independent Development. Nothing in this Agreement will impair Apple's right to develop, acquire, license, market, promote, or distribute products or technologies that perform the same or similar functions as, or otherwise compete with, Applications, Licensed Applications or any other products or technologies that You may develop, produce, market, or distribute."

Fantastic deal... for Apple.

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/iphone-developer-agreement/

Key words: "Nothing in this agreement"

All that is saying is that the developer agreement isn't giving developers additional IP rights that they don't already have. There are plenty of other things that prevent Apple from producing products that already exist-- this agreement just isn't one of them.

 

[psxndc]

Wow, so few people really understand what patents are, how to read them, and how they're used.

Welcome to the Internet. As a patent attorney, I suggest you give up on trying to explain anything to the alarmists. It's easier for them to flip out than think for a few seconds, and you'll just be wasting your time. That's the main reason I stopped even going to /. four years ago.

Not directed at you - you seem to understand. But for everyone else: As others have said, it's the claims that matter, not the pictures. So they used a screenshot that looked like someone's app. Boo hoo. And even if they wrote a paragraph or two that resembled the functionality, it doesn't matter. It's the claims that count. Everything else is just filler for enablement.

Nothing to see here, move along.

 

[Master Chief]

Key words: "Nothing in this agreement"

All that is saying is that the developer agreement isn't giving developers additional IP rights that they don't already have. There are plenty of other things that prevent Apple from producing products that already exist-- this agreement just isn't one of them.

Please. Don't even try to lecture me [like I can't read]; Apple contacted me and asked if I filed a patent application for one of my inventions, if not they would. And thus that is how it works. Hell yes. I've been there, and that is why I wrote: "this rings a bell" [in post #16]. Thank you for ignoring it.

P.s. We had to 'remind' Apple about my Intellectual Property rights, without having a patent, but that wasn't easy. Took months. I eventually filed a patent and sold it.

@psxndc: It might not be about the used images or a paragraph resembling the functionality. Yet it gives people like me a bad taste. That's a fact of life... one that you won't change by simply waiving it off into your dust bin.

 

[D4F]

This is so... innovative and revolutionary.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Don't be absurd.

There's NOTHING "absurd" about it. Apple regularly modifies their user agreements to both thwart competition and benefit them when it suits them. If they feel they shoudl be able to steal other people's work, they only have to modify the developer agreement so that they not only pay them 30% of every sale, but forfeit all visible screenshots, titles and concepts of ideas. If the developer doesn't like the new agreement, just like with a credit card company, they have the option to go elsewhere. There is nothing to stop Apple from doing that if they want to. They control the platform and they control the application distribution for iOS. They can do ANYTHING they want to and there are apparently no laws (or at least enforcement of laws) to stop them.

 

[BaldiMac]

There's NOTHING "absurd" about it. Apple regularly modifies their user agreements to both thwart competition and benefit them when it suits them. If they feel they shoudl be able to steal other people's work, they only have to modify the developer agreement so that they not only pay them 30% of every sale, but forfeit all visible screenshots, titles and concepts of ideas. If the developer doesn't like the new agreement, just like with a credit card company, they have the option to go elsewhere. There is nothing to stop Apple from doing that if they want to. They control the platform and they control the application distribution for iOS. They can do ANYTHING they want to and there are apparently no laws (or at least enforcement of laws) to stop them.

No, he was right. Your suggestion is absurd. You miss the obvious market remedy. No significant developer would sign such a contract.

 

[TheSlush]

While Apple was probably not trying to directly steal and patent someone's else's user interface, it is unacceptable for the company to be so lazy and casual with its visual exhibits in patents!

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

No, he was right. Your suggestion is absurd. You miss the obvious market remedy. No significant developer would sign such a contract.

They've already signed contracts to hand over 1/3 of all profits to Apple for "hosting" their software (never mind there is NO OTHER CHOICE AVAILABLE so it's either pay their demanded fee or go develop somewhere else). I think you're dreaming if you think most of the app developers that are making any significant amount of money wouldn't take a heck of a lot of crap from Apple before jumping ship. Apple apparently already believes it's free to use their screenshots for their own uses without an additional agreement (i.e. the very topic of this thread), so it's ALREADY happened.

When you control 100% of a given market/distribution that is extremely popular, you can pretty much do ANYTHING you want. It's obvious the US Government won't step in and do anything about it (already a miracle that they ruled you can legally jailbreak your iPhone; I never thought they'd even go that far). Mark my word that if Apple gets successfully sued over this, they WILL change their developer agreement to make it painfully obvious they are allowed to use any screenshot for any purpose they want. They already changed their agreement to deny people like Adobe from using their existing tools to develop on the iPhone. Apple does whatever it feels like. They don't give a crap what developers want. They control the developers, not the other way around. If a developer doesn't like it, he/she's free to LEAVE. You fanboys out there know that one all too well. You guys are always telling the rest of us that if you don't love Apple, go buy a Windows machine! (even if it means throwing out thousands of dollars of software).