Well I'm asking questions to understand it better. I'm by no means a patent expert so just trying to understand.
That's fine and a very good idea. No need to assume the worst. Remember: internet headlines are often click bait
So as long as Apples haptic feedback doesn't do those things you listed they should be ok?
That's right. However, Immersion picked out certain iOS device models, so they must be seeing something they
believe infringes.
But if they do, even if the way it's coded is totally different, they are infringing?
It depends on the patented method and how specific it is. And how good the judge is at defining claim construction. And of course, how influential the lawyers, on each side, are with the jury.
I'll give you a past example. One of the patents Apple sued Samsung about a couple of years ago was the late 1990s so-called "universal search patent". That's where you type in a search phrase and it looks in memory, on storage, and on the internet. (Yes, obvious patent, but there you go.)
Now, Apple's patent method called for multiple search code modules to look each place. However, there was a comma missing in the claim description, so you could actually read it two ways: either the modules were exactly the same, or they were different. To most people, it was clearly the former definition. But Apple's lawyers claimed the latter definition in the trial.
The reason this was important, was because Apple knew that Samsung's search implementation used different modules. So if Apple's patent was ruled to be about using same modules, then Samsung would not infringe Apple's patent. Case over.
So for weeks pre-trial, there was a court debate about the claims construction and what it meant. Even old technical dictionaries dating back to the time of the patent were brought in, to try to determine what the inventor might've been thinking at the time. In the end, Judge Koh came down on the side of Apple's (lawyers') latest interpretation, which kind of doomed Samsung with the jury.
Now, mind you, Samsung had NOT COPIED A SINGLE LINE OF APPLE CODE. Nor had they even seen Apple's method. Nor did they have to, because they had simply came up with the same (rather obvious, even to high school programmers) way of doing it. Doesn't matter, because software infringement is rarely about actual copying. Instead, it's about who patents it first.
--> Likewise, Apple could easily have come up with the same methods Immersion did. But Immersions' claimed patent methods are even
less detailed than in the Apple example above. They also list a lot of minor variations, which makes their patent even harder to avoid.
So since Immersion's patents don't go into details about any particular method of coding, it'd be really tough for Apple to avoid infringement no matter how they did it. They're worse off than Samsung was.
Okay, this was longer than I wanted. Don't get me started on this stuff. These trials are not always about what's fair, but about whose lawyers are more clever
