Its not about finding the bad boy, or playing the game of tu quoque and/or blame. These types of patents are equally bad, and equally destroying regardless of the applicant.
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ITC Rules For Apple in HTC Patent Case
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Its not about finding the bad boy, or playing the game of tu quoque and/or blame. These types of patents are equally bad, and equally destroying regardless of the applicant.
I agree. Sorry about that. I myself have been voiding that word in this thread(or maybe not), but a more appropriate word would be 'infringed'.
Thanks for correcting me there.
Regards
Google to stand behind HTC in this dispute -
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20080620-94/googles-schmidt-vows-to-defend-htc/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20080620-94/googles-schmidt-vows-to-defend-htc/
And in other News....
http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/19/itc-patent-ruling-against-apple-will-stand-kodak-nods-approving/
With all of these patents - unless their IS licensing, very little technology would actually exist.
So I think companies have a right to sue if/when licensing hasn't been agreed upon to enforce their patents. But I don't think it's in the best interest of progress (for the consumer) for someone to monopolize a patent that is basically required/needed by others because of how general/vague it is. And by vague - I mean - so generic that it's not really original or that there's really no OTHER way it can be done.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/19/itc-patent-ruling-against-apple-will-stand-kodak-nods-approving/
With all of these patents - unless their IS licensing, very little technology would actually exist.
So I think companies have a right to sue if/when licensing hasn't been agreed upon to enforce their patents. But I don't think it's in the best interest of progress (for the consumer) for someone to monopolize a patent that is basically required/needed by others because of how general/vague it is. And by vague - I mean - so generic that it's not really original or that there's really no OTHER way it can be done.
The 'effective' life-span is completely different, typically 8-10 years after a drug is released for sale (since pharmaceutical patents are normally filed before clinical trials begin where the formula might leak out).
If most normal patents had effective lifespans of 8-10 years, the system would be far less screwed up as there would be more competition and less contentious BS for consumers and smaller companies alike (who cannot afford to fight or file as many patents, valid or not). So many patents are approved that are intentionally as vague and broad as possible, which is utterly ridiculous, IMO. The ones listed here sound like they could encompass any number of products. They are far too abstract and should never have been approved in that form. Patents should have to be far more specific. Drugs are typically specific formulas. There is no abstraction.
Originally, patents in general were not to exceed 14 years (a far more reasonable length of time), but of course they couldn't leave that figure alone. Just look at copyrights and Disney's push to make them infinite (tied to the living/breathing entity that is the modern corporation, works of car should never go to public domain, thwarting the entire spirit of the law and the benefit to society after the artist has passed on and treating art like a commodity to be bought and sold. Just look at the Beatles and the BS they had to put up with having someone else trade their songs and make money off their work. The law no longer protected the artist, but those taking advantage of the artist).
But just try and fix laws when the ultra-rich (like corporations) have all the funding and influence to ensure average citizens never get any power. For example, look how much money you have to have or someone else you're working for has to have to run for a major political office these days. You often need millions and millions to run for jobs that pay barely 6 figures. Who spends millions to get a relatively low-paying job unless they intend to use that office for further corruption or investments to change laws for the benefit of those spending the millions? Throughout history, the rich ultimately take over every form of government except those taken by force, wherein those people become rich and you have the same incentive and/or same result. The big guy always steps on the little guy.
As a society, we have evolved very little more than animals of prey. Things are not done to benefit society as a whole, only to benefit oneself. Until that changes, lawsuits will remain the norm and fighting and bickering (legal or otherwise) will never end. The consumer will always lose, forced to pay higher prices and have less choices. Smaller companies will usually be crushed by larger ones (by being outspent in court, if nothing else) and so the cycle of history continues, unabated.
If you're going to tell me I'm posting irrelevant tripe, at least start off being correct.
"This was just an example of how apple has simply purchased licensing for inventions that were not their own."
Apple bought Fingerworks. Not licensed. Not simply bought patents. They bought the whole company, IP and all. You do mention the acquisition, but it sounds like you don't understand what happened.
"The argument is not about the underlying UI software/hardware being infringed, its the basic idea about how the user interacts with the device."
Actually, wasn't this discussion thread about patents that may or may not be infringed that arn't related to multi-touch at all? The only reason why I responded to you is to tell you you're off topic and you're bringing up info doesn't help you make any useful point.
"Who cares whether capacitative, resistive or the internal data pipelines?"
Actually, when it comes to multitouch, don't you mean "internal reflection?" If not, then you really should stand down.
You are ignoring the fact that many pharma patents are re-freshed by patenting the same compound for different uses.
That's simply not true.
I can tell you haven't read or applied for many pharma patents.
Not quite. Patents used to be a term of years after ISSUE. Now they are a term of years after filing (in fact, after EFFECTIVE filing, which may be long before the actual filing date of the application). You aren't comparing apples to apples.
I agree. Copyrights last far too long, and perpetual extensions of term mean they are essentially infinite now.
The problem with the browser is there is a question of "who do you sue?" You cannot sue the browser maker + the collection of all known websites independently. It would be thrown out. In fact, this may be part of the plan from Motorola to get this patent invalidated -- if they can show equivalence of two disparate systems when working together doing this prior to 1996 they may have something.
I interpreted that as turning the text into a link and not as a literal physical button or an on-screen button. The exact terminology from claim 1 is "linking actions" and "a user interface enabling selection of a detected structure and linked action":
Keep in mind that all these terms are defined within the patent to some degree with example embodiments which may have described the "user interface enabling the selection of the detected structure and linked action" as a button or a link followed by a confirmation dialog or something like that.
Anyway, as somebody who has read many patents I think these claims are much better worded and much clearer than most. Certainly, Motorola and now HTC are in need of some solid prior art.
I think the Apple patent does not describe the means for analyzing the data structure since that is not part of the patent, but rather, part of the known prior art. That is to say "given a method to do X", we are patenting doing X, then Y, then Z. There are lots of ways to do X, some of which are very sophisticated. All this says, is that once you do X, we think it is innovative to follow up with Y and Z. Motorola and HTC won't focus on X having known art, they will focus on finding somebody who did some variant form of X followed by Y and Z prior to 1996. If they do, then they can get this patent invalidated. In fact, in the Lodsys patent invalidation case, the plaintiffs are crowd-sourcing to find prior art (offering a prize to the person who provides solid prior art). If I were Motorola or HTC, I might consider doing the same on this patent.
That's a very reasonable post. I'll try to respond in kind
First of all, you should try sending an email to yourself with the text "See Wendy on Tuesday 3pm" and read it on an iDevice. You'll notice that only "on Tuesday 3pm" is recognized. Wendy is not, regardless of whether she is in you address book or not.
If you'll read the patent you'll notice that it almost entirely describes the user interaction with the software so it's actually quite significant that a user might see the two processes as very similar.
What the patent describes is a button you can click within an application over a freeform textual message. When the button is clicked the program will mark interesting parts of the text. When a user clicks a marked portion of the text he will be presented with a number of options.
This mechanism is the same a right clicking a link in any browser today. A context-sensitive menu was not novel at the time. Marking text as links is called hyperlinking and was not novel at the time (or invented by Apple).
The non-trivial part of the program, the analyzing server, is not described in detail other than to say that it contains a parser, one or more grammars, a list of keywords and handlers that will be attached to parts of the text. This is standard procedure in any compiler and was not in any way novel at the time.
The part about the analyzer being a server is actually not a significant difference. If you think of the program in an object oriented way you would consider the analyzing part separate from the rest of the program. Whether you implement it as an object or as an object on a remote server is not significant. Any experienced programmer will end up with a design with several boxes containing some sort of encapsulated functionality. That's how most programmers work. Object oriented programming was not novel at the time.
The non-trivial part of the program, the analyzer, is not described in more than the most general terms. Any programmer will think of parsers and grammers and perhaps some sort of algorithmic learning mechanism. The patent mentions a neutral network which was not novel at the time or invented by Apple and it is extremely unlikely that Apples or HTC implementation actually use one.
Furthermore, I can guarantee you that neither Apple's nor HTC use an actual server to analyze the text. If that is the "invention" then HTC does not infringe.
IMHO most programmers with knowledge of compiler theory and object-oriented programming (any well educated programmer, really) will independently come up with a very similar solution to Apple's patent. I also believe that this would be the case in the 90s.
I believe that patents should be non-obvious and not just reiterate ideas from somewhere else in a slightly different setting. It think this patent is and was obvious and was based on original (unpatented) ideas from Lotus. I don't think many competent software developers would disagree.
So as you suggested, I sent an email as a test to both my iPhone and my Nexus S (sorry, I don't have an HTC Android phone.)
And you're right, it fails to highlight the name on the iPhone. The Nexus S apparently doesn't have this linkify feature in it's imap/pop email client, so no go there either.
A little bummed, I googled "Apple Data Detectors" wondering what makes this special.
First link I got was: http://macbiblioblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/apple-data-detectors-are-so-useful.html
The example was on OSX 10.5. So I retyped the email roughly as I saw it, and even inserted the link into the email as part of a "see more" sentence, and sent it to the iPhone again.
And I opened the email I sent in 10.6's Mail client.
Results:
The phone only highlighted the URL, the physical address, and NOT the date.
The desktop turned the URL into a blue underlined link, but added dotted gray mouseover boxes around "Saturday, July 30, 2009 8:00 am to 7:30 pm." (yes, I know the date was a typo, I wanted to make it next Saturday but forgot to change the year)
and also a single box around "Community Christian Church
4601 Main Street, Kansas City, Missouri" (yes, the newlines were there too).
I fully agree with you in that an experienced programmer would come up with an object oriented compiler design with reasonable grammar, and it would simulate our experiences emailing the test phrase to the iPhone.
But given the difference between the results on the the desktop and the iPhone with the more complex example, and given that I too have implemented an object oriented compiler (albeit it was a school project), I have to conclude:
1) iPhone users have an incomplete implementation of the patent in question
2) that the technology implemented in the patent exceeds what you can do with a standard compiler design because it'd be hard for me to believe that you'd be able to get a compiler to recognize all address formats (perhaps I'll test international addresses later), and still somehow infer that "Community Christian Church" 2 lines before is also part of the location.
3) given what I've read about Lotus Agenda, the idea of extracting information from freeform input is about the only thing similar between the two. The actual mechanics are very different. Use of a neural network in the 90s is not novel in and of itself. But use of a neural network or algorithmic learning mechanism in order to assist in categorizing data and assisting tasks would be a novel use. Even today, I have yet to see a product advertised as a compiler with learning mechanisms.
I just realized something else, in order to bring a lawsuit against HTC, the technology doesn't actually have to be implemented in the iPhone or at all. It just so happens that most of us assumed that the iPhone would have it in its complete form, and ignored the Mac.
I'd also be a bit impressed if HTC managed to duplicate the functionality I observed on the Mac, because I think it's pretty cool and unique.
Which then also brings up the thought that if HTC's functionality is more like the iPhone's version than the Mac (which is to say, it's functionality is primitive), I'm not sure they'd infringe.
OpenMoko can't have pinch-to-zoom even now since it was single touch 4-wire resistive screen. There is just no way without a completely new touch screen. And therefore there's no way pinch-to-zoom could have been on OpenMoko at iPhone's launch.
The interesting thing here is that Apple isn't going after Microsoft. This could lead to an anti trust investigation if it were revealed that Apple were colluding with Microsoft to not enforce patents against each other but go after strategic targets.
Why would Apple go afer MS over these patents?
MS didn't create Android.
What MS did do is license "their own" patents to manufacturers that make Android phones.
Apple and MS have no problem dragging each other to court.
Correct, it ended up not having the multitouch screen in production.
Neverthless, the concept of using multitouch and pinch was announced months before the iPhone debuted.
The point is that Jobs complains that everyone is taking those ideas solely from the iPhone, when clearly the concept of using multitouch and pinch on a phone was not unique to Apple.
In fact, there are people who believe that Apple stole the idea from the Linux open phone movement. I am not one of them. As I constantly point out, ideas often occur simultaneously to many people because of the simple convergence of experience and available technologies.
It's generally believed that Microsoft and Apple have a lot of cross-licensing, so they can concentrate on other things besides constant litigation.
The article states that the linux based smartphones are getting multitouch features that already exist on Macbooks at the time?
Yep, the article was trying to find something similar to help the reader to understand. So they compared it to the two fingers = trackwheel gesture on the laptop's trackpad.
So has anybody figured out when pinch-to-zoom was documented?
From a google search for "earliest pinch to zoom", I get December 2005.
Multitouch systems I have known and loved - pinch mentioned 1997
Pinch to Zoom was to be in 1993 user interface film - and was in 1996 book
Basically, 1992 is the furthest back I know of right now (it's when the Starfire movie was being planned).
(At that time, I was programming a capacitive touch screen based casino video gambling system that was widely used, but we didn't have multitouch on those. Would've helped. We had to train users not to rest their palms on the screens.)
Pierre Wellner did show a two-finger-area-select in 1991 (see section at about 3:18 in this video).
I would not be surprised if it didn't date back to the 1980s with the first multitouch systems, though. The moment you have the capability, I think the idea for many gestures come naturally. What kid has not pinched someone's head off with their fingers held up to their eye?
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Indeed. Microsoft and Apple have long running, deep cross-licensing deals. Since 2005, If memory serves correctly.
Bill's page you mentioned seems to have the best answer yet: Myron Krueger in 1983. Coming from VR angle it seems, he defined gestural interaction like in the Kinect. Interesting that it seems this is pre-multitouch input devices (in our current sense of the word).
As a side note, I've always thought that people give Sun Microsystems less credit then they deserved. The new generation of geeks who somehow think Linux is the best thing since sliced bread neglect so much history it's kinda sad. (Check out Tog)
You're missing the point of why people are so rabid about Linux. The long and short of it is (without getting into commoditization and the evolution of the software & hardware market) that with linux you are unencumbered with virtually any aspect of the computer and how you wish to operate it. Little in the way of hidden methods/processes artificial obstacles or security through obscurity.
For the most part, you can run advanced software without a business interest half-way across the continent making decisions on your behalf about how they feel your computer should operate (and charging you for the privilege).
Sound familiar? iOS vs android, anyone?
And what advanced software could I not run on Solaris because some "business interest" didn't want me too?
It would be much easier and faster to list the software that does run on Solaris, than to list the software that doesn't.
For a simple starter, how about VMware Server or VMware Workstation on a Solaris host. (x64 of course, SPARC is next to dead.)
I didn't ask what software wasn't available on Solaris. Perhaps re-read my question?