Too bad on this ruling. I was hoping that Apples sue happy arrogance would be taken down a few notches. Maybe next time.
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ITC Rules For Apple in HTC Patent Case
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An effective and just patent system ensures that those who are capable of innovating have an incentive to do so. When that incentive is removed, innovation will cease to occur. It is law that is based on the simple concept of private property rights.
Either you believe in an individual's right to property or you don't. There really is no middle ground. In the US, our constitution protects private property rights--intellectual property is included in that.
Another system was established less than 100 years ago that did not honor property rights, certainly not intellectual property rights. It collapsed before the turn of the century. Ask anyone who lived under the Communist system in Eastern Europe how much innovation occurred during those years.
Look at China, another country that has no respect for property rights. While it's moved away from Communism (not nearly as much as people like to claim) there is still no real protection for IP there. How much innovation comes from China? None. They put everything together there, but they don't really create anything because there is no incentive to do so, innovators aren't protected.
A company defending their innovations--regardless of their name--is well within their rights, and it is the acknowledgement and defense of those rights that ensures innovation will continue.
Either you believe in an individual's right to property or you don't. There really is no middle ground. In the US, our constitution protects private property rights--intellectual property is included in that.
Another system was established less than 100 years ago that did not honor property rights, certainly not intellectual property rights. It collapsed before the turn of the century. Ask anyone who lived under the Communist system in Eastern Europe how much innovation occurred during those years.
Look at China, another country that has no respect for property rights. While it's moved away from Communism (not nearly as much as people like to claim) there is still no real protection for IP there. How much innovation comes from China? None. They put everything together there, but they don't really create anything because there is no incentive to do so, innovators aren't protected.
A company defending their innovations--regardless of their name--is well within their rights, and it is the acknowledgement and defense of those rights that ensures innovation will continue.
No problem. They are fundamental to the mobile industry, i.e., 3G and international wireless standards. It's doubtful that at the time Apple had any intention or ability to come up with alternatives. So they paid the fee. Most smartphone makers do.
Talk to me after Apple has been judged a monopoly in a court of law. You'll have to forgive me for not having much trust in the court of public opinion.
Uhm, the first patent pretty much describes a compiler. WTF?
e.g. you parse the grammar and detect a function declaration, you add a function declaration to the list. you parse more grammar and detect function application, you add the function application to the list.
There is no user interface to display it; or is there? You can treat the generated machine code and any text editor as user interace.
This bloody patent describes a freaking compiler!
NOTE: gals and lads, one wise man once said that most of the software is in fact compilers; and this is true; video player is a compiler -- it reads the source code (i.e. encoded video), runs a parser on it (i.e. decodes it) and pretty-prints it (which in this case means output commands to the display.
read -> parse -> pretty print
That's what the ting described in the patent does. And so does every compiler for last 40 years. It should be easy for HTC to invalidate this patent.
e.g. you parse the grammar and detect a function declaration, you add a function declaration to the list. you parse more grammar and detect function application, you add the function application to the list.
There is no user interface to display it; or is there? You can treat the generated machine code and any text editor as user interace.
This bloody patent describes a freaking compiler!
NOTE: gals and lads, one wise man once said that most of the software is in fact compilers; and this is true; video player is a compiler -- it reads the source code (i.e. encoded video), runs a parser on it (i.e. decodes it) and pretty-prints it (which in this case means output commands to the display.
read -> parse -> pretty print
That's what the ting described in the patent does. And so does every compiler for last 40 years. It should be easy for HTC to invalidate this patent.
I do not think HTC has anything to worry about. The first patent of the two was called by many the most important. All it does is that it describes a generic system where a program analyses data and tries to recognize predefined patterns (like phone numbers) and when it does, application takes appropriate action. Well, this is what all software does. This patent will be thrown out (or else software design might as well be finished as an industry). Just another Apple patent that will not stand a court trial.
I really wouldn't call it a compiler more of a parser with afterthought. The example used the most is the phone number approach boiled down to a type of regular expression, find the phone number offer an action. Based upon the data type the dataset is deemed to be and allow the user to perform an action i.e. make a phone call.
Either way you are correct it is broad. Here is the actual art.
But, you're making too much sense to post here therefore you will be voted down.
Just let the lawyers and zealots deal with it. Apple invented it end of story and everyone else is in violation of it. Therefor they deserve to be crushed.I wonder why apple is not sueing Microsoft over Window Phone 7 ?
M$ has a strong patent library..................
apple would take a beating from MS in court!
I just read the whole patent and damn me, it almost precisely describes a compiler.
The ONLY difference is that compiler is written to stop on ambiguity while this gives the user an option. This is because ambiguity in the code is usually a mistake.
"Upon detection of a structure, the analyzer server links actions to the detected structure"
How is that different from a compiler (analyzer server) which detects a while loop with stop condition and a body (i.e. a structure) and applies code generator (links an action to the detected structure)?
First thing I did was click on both links (from the article on the MR homepage) and skim through each patent. As much as I like Apple, I tend to agree That first patent is unfortunate. I imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, and it was HTC or Google or Microsoft with the patent in question, LTD and others wouldn't be so happy about it.
I did only skim the document quickly, and it appears to be about more than just parsing the information (that's the 'detect' part), but about what the system does with that information (that's the 'perform actions' part). Even so, I hardly think there's anything particularly inventive about the idea. No doubt Apple's IP experts know their way around the system. But is it within the spirit of rewarding real innovation? Hmm
As for the second patent, trying to understand what that was all about, and how it relates to the iPhone, looked like it was going to hurt my brain, so I gave up on it.
Yes, and we had people on here debating the merits of what if I have a script running on my website that is parsing out the datasets like phone numbers and creating actionable links from them. Is that in violation of this patent? Wouldn't the Skype toolbar, which creates an actionable result based upon things it parses as phone numbers be infringing on this patent? If I create an expression that parses zip codes and then allows for the end user to get location data as an end result. That would be in violation of this patent.
In effect couldn't a lawyer make the case that any set of data I can parse and then create an actionable result off of be violating this patent?
We already have lawyers debating the validity of a simple buy button in applications and the resulting API calls that makes to validate a client's credentials on an Apple server and allow them to purchase a product. (Lodsys)
This is all goes to my argument which I have been repeatedly voted down on that they are just as much a troll in many ways as Lodsys. The first patent especially is a ridiculous patent and if you don't do this for a living you get confused by all the fancy big legal words.
Worry not my friends!
If you look at the economic situation of the US of A, it is on a verge of becoming a third-world country. No one will care about the American patents then and the rest of the world is somewhat (if only just slightly) more sensible.
Either they stop impeding all creativity and competition by means of the horrendous patent system or the Chinese will take over. Plain and simple.
All Americans do these days is sue each other for patent infringements.
If you look at the economic situation of the US of A, it is on a verge of becoming a third-world country. No one will care about the American patents then and the rest of the world is somewhat (if only just slightly) more sensible.
Either they stop impeding all creativity and competition by means of the horrendous patent system or the Chinese will take over. Plain and simple.
All Americans do these days is sue each other for patent infringements.
Actually it sort of is. I do not know when people decided the point of the patent system is for one person to design something then everyone else just force them to let them use it for an arbitrary price decided by someone other than the person who made it.
If the person who has the patent does not want to share it, that is their right. No other extension makes sense except when it goes to the heart of an anti-trust case or a monopoly case.
Saying that anyone who has a patent should be required to sell it for some market price is crazy.
Where would we be? We would have like three companies that would steal any decent idea and put it in their own products and push those small inventors out of business before they can reach a point where they can compete. That is where we would be.
At that point innovation would be totally stifled because there would be no incentive for anyone to invent anything because the large companies will just take it as soon as it hits the market and beat you over the head with it. Nobody will finance projects like that because they are guaranteed to lose money. It would be a disaster.
A true "free market" economy is 100% unsustainable.
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While this case is far from over, the court did rule just a week ago that Apple infringed on two patents belonged to company named S3 which HTC bought two weeks ago. What if HTC decides not to share those two patents with Apple? And those are real patents about graphics hardware.
The point of the patent system goes back to the founding of the United States. The intentions of it were to protect mechanical innovation. Rifles, mills, steam engines. Things that would be deemed relatively simple today based upon the world's technological prowess and capability. Furthermore it was meant to protect those mechanical devices from being point blank copied.
I gave this example before, but I will repeat it again: If this were 1820 and a judge had to look at a rifle and determine if it was a copy of another - he would be looking at two pages of art and watch the lawyers compare the mechanical innards of a relatively non complex device side by side. The judge even though he would not be a mechanical engineer at that time would astutely be able to tell if it was a replication or not.
Patents were never meant to protect software. There are many ways for a programmer to arrive at the end result another programmer would with different source code. At the same time there are few ways to do selective things on a code level to get some results. Everyone over time without copying source has copied the, "idea/concept" of another programmer without even thinking about it.
Hardware is trickier, but you cannot have the mindset of an 1820's judge to make the call today on whether a complex design is a carbon copy clone:
1.) Is the PCB an exact match down to the way the connections are routed
2.) Are the chips on the board, microcontroller or microprocessor, gps chip, cell chip, resistors etc. etc. all in the same position on the board.
3.) What about the design or housing of the unit if it's simply a shell like iPhone or a complex device with moveable parts like a robotic arc welder. How does the judge determine in the case of the robot that the same mechanical design down to the joint level in the arm was used vs. a previous arm.
If you are a Macrumors lawyer you throw out that patent lawyers need to have a bachelors degree in the field they are litigating. As four years studying math and physics even remotely makes them qualified to argue validity of a complex electromechanical device. It doesn't make them qualified to see past filing a patent for a purchase button or a text parser that would above all means testing be broad based, does it?
It's corruption and greed and a mafia style system that only allows those with big enough wallets to suck the air out of the entire innovative landscape of this country.
But, hey if Apple is doing it - then it's a beautiful thing, right???
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I don't think you get it. The thing with good patents is that the inventions become ubiquitous. One developer sees it say in Mac Mail back in 1998 and picks up on it and then others follow suit. What is lame here is that this is the first time I have seen Apple asserting this patent and they filed for it 1996, so it was probably issued around the year 2000. But still that is way before BlackBerry phones existed.
To me, a clear obviousness test would be if a website existed back in 1995 that automatically created "mailto" links out of text that looked like email addresses or created anchor/href links out of URL's by generating the markup through CGI. If somebody had already done that then one could argue that Apple's invention is an obvious next step pretty easily. But still that is much easier to argue during thr examination period, not a decade after the patent is granted. At this point the law assumes the patent is valid and you must show it is not with clear prior art. Now the problem would be proving that such a website existed before 1995 since server-side code for websites is not released to the public and as is typically not submitted for copyright registration. The only record somebody might have would be on a private server source code control system and SCM systems are hard to use in court to show prior art because the dates can be manufactured.
The patent application was filed in 1996 so unless you take your Samsung WinMo phone back in that time machine it won't constitute prior art.
A browser makes links out of things that are specifically designated as links with specific markup. There is no inference going on. What this patent says is that from the text you have to discern something is actionable. Like finding the text "Next Friday" in an email and giving the user the option of clicking that to create a new calendar event for the next Friday following the date of he email's receipt. The act of marking something up by preprocessing text on the server side does not infringe the patent because the patent requires the implementor to also provide the handler for the event. In that case the browser provides a handler for any link. However if the browser scanned a web page and made links out of anything that looked like URL's in free-form text then it would infringe.
I have not seen Skype's toolbar - I am not a Skype user. But it would only infringe if it parsed content and inferred actionable things from the content, made those parts actionable and provided the action handler for responding to the user input to initiate the action.
Again, this is a great patent that is out-of-the-blue if you ask me. Given the timeframe of filing (1996) it seems like it was very likely novel and forward-thinking. A valuable patent is the one that everybody is going to want to do once the see it - and they invariably think "why didn't I think of that?". After they see it they can't imagine doing things differently, that is why it is hard to argue obviousness in retrospect - the great inventions become ubiquitous. However, I still want to know why we have never heard of Apple enforcing this before. I have two guesses. Their attorneys did not know this gem was in their paent coffers OR they have been using this one in confidenial cross-licensing deals for years.
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I wonder why apple is not sueing Microsoft over Window Phone 7 ?
M$ has a strong patent library..................
apple would take a beating from MS in court!
I am sure they are cross-licensed with MS on this one. They each have patents that are esssential to the other. They are either cross-licensed or both sides have agreed not to open that can of worms by going after each other - kinda like how neither the USA or USSR wanted to fire thar first nuclear missile even though they spent large amounts of money building all those nukes. It is called mutually assured destrucFtion.
I agree with your entire argument, except for the last sentence. The post that you countered incorrectly described a free market as one without intellectual property protection. A true free market protects the rights that you mentioned, and prevents the stifled economy that you described later.
A true "free market" is 100% sustainable. When rights are taken away [non-free market], then it become unsustainable.
Wouldn't it be funny if Apple loses one of these cases and they put Steve in jail?
This isn't an invention it's a method to attain a result and then a superset of a result or perform a resulting action based off of the result. It's something these nice little boxes we call Macs or PC's have been doing since software as software existed. From the first days of software even outside of anything graphical there have been command line/shell applications that asked for input and gave a variety of options based upon that input.
You can come up with multiple ways how the claims based in the patent were already in use in the past outside of the examples you chose to give.
The answer to your last point is Apple is selectively pulling it out to attain a result. The result in this case would be to set legal precedent to HTC; which is a company that competes with them and have the net effect of that damaging as many other competitors as possible.
When you can show me point blank the replication of code used by Google and pilfered from Apple to create the mechanism in which to create these so called actionable results, you win your argument. Google and Android are then guilty of copying Apple and device makers are infringing upon Apple's patents by using their mobile operating system.
You know Google is no peanut company and what is going to come next is:
Google Patent 20110173601 OPERATING SYSTEM AUTO-UPDATE PROCEDURE
Apple wants to delta updates from here on out guess who has the patent on that?
Google Patent 20110173534 Notification system for increasing user engagement
Hmm doesn't Apple have notifications in iOS?
Google Patent 20110173066 METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR PERFORMING ENHANCED QUERIES FOR ITEMS SUCH AS MAPS AND GEOSPATIAL DATA
Wait doesn't Apple want to get in the maps game?
This is only the beginning of a long and destructive slide of the US from the top of tech to the bottom. The big boys are suing the big boys. The little boys get sued by the patent trolls. The little guys stop innovating and the cycle of innovation stops. Anyone left with a brain in their head and an idea decides to sell their wares outside of the United States. Whether that's in Brazil or Singapore doesn't matter it is what will wind up happening and only at an accelerated pace as the climate over here becomes more and more litigious.