All Articles Tagged lawsuit

Another week, another iPhone lawsuit or three. If it isn’t American’s complaining about AT&T’s 3G “network” (so bad, it’s made (Giga)Om Malik abandon his iPhone), it’s owners of white iPhones complaining about cracks in their plastic casings (which is effecting other, non-iPhones as well, making us suspect someone spike a plastic factory somewhere in China). This time, however, it’s a patent dispute, and it’s not Apple going after Palm, but Picsel Technologies taking it to Apple. According to Apple Insider:

By using particular techniques to speed up panning and zooming for images and other documents, Apple is effectively borrowing Picsel’s own acceleration to make the iPhone work as smoothly as it does, the complaint reads. [..]Unlike many of these suits, the plaintiff already has major customers for its software that primarily include Japanese firms like KDDI and Sharp but also include American phone manufacturers such as Motorola and Palm.

So even though Apple now owns multi-touch(ish), they may not be allowed to show it working on screen? Gotta love patent poker…

What’s the one thing worse than bloggers offering opinions about the likelihood of an Apple vs. Palm patent fight? That’s right! Analysts! (Where’s our magic 8 ball for a dissenting view when we need it?!)

PreCentral.net picks up just such a story on how one analyst thinks Apple’s IP claims against Palm just might be — wait for it! — fruitless:

Though the review of granted and filed patents shows that Apple has a “formidable arsenal of capacitive, multi-touch patents that constitute a nearly impenetrable barrier to entry for companies hoping to commercialize capacitive, multi-touch devices,” Perez-Fernandez also noted that Apple’s key patents may be “invalidated based on prior art considerations if subjected to a review by the USPTO.”

Prior art can trump all, unless Apple’s own early patents, or the ones it acquired from Fingerworks, are the most “prior” of relevant art in question.

Of course, Apple has $30 billion reasons more than Palm for just why it might press its case anyway, even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful…

Following up on Apple Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook’s comments during yesterday’s Q1 conference call, and the supposition that he was hinting that Apple may just take legal action against the Palm Pre for violating Apple’s intellectual property (i.e. patents), PC Mag quotes a reaction from Palm:

A spokeswoman at Palm said Thursday that the company has not been contacted by Apple’s legal team, to her knowledge. “Palm has a long history of innovation, obviously reflected in our own products and our own robust apps portfolio,” she said. “We have long been recognized for our fundamental patents in the mobile space. If we’re faced with legal action, we’re confident that we have the tools to defend ourselves.”

When asked whether gestures like “pinching” were universal, or belonged to Apple, the Palm spokeswoman said that “our position is that multitouch has been around a long, long, long time before Apple introduced it.”

We learned that Apple first began patenting multi-touch in 2004 and acquired additional patents when they bought Fingerworks in 2005, but is Palm hinting that — as PreCentral.net pointed out — they may have some patents of their own to fight back with?

Curiouser and curiouser…

Apple Insider is reporting (via CNet) that Apple has hired away Mark Papermaster, IBM’s VP of Microprocessor Technology Development.

When Apple bought Palo Alto Semiconductor (PA Semi), and reportedly signed licensing agreements with ARM and PowerVR, we kinda sorta suspected Steve Jobs was getting serious about spinning his own custom systems-on-a-chip for the iPhone and the greater iPod platform.

Hey, if they can switch from Intel integrated to Nvidia chipsets to support their Core 2 Duos on the Macbook line, they can certainly role their own mobile brains, right?

IBM is suing on the grounds of a no-compete clause, which has historically been worthless in California (which is likely why IBM is suing in New York!)

TiPb, of course, doesn’t really care about no frivolous lawsuit. We just want to see what kind of “screaming” fast new iPhones we can has next year!

Yet another iPhone related lawsuit only this time it does not involve Apple… shocking isn’t it?

Coors beer company is being sued by Hottrix, creators of the strangely popular iBeer app for a cool 12.5 million for copyright infringement. The lawsuit alleges that Coors copied its iPhone application iBeer. Both Hottrix’s App and Coors’ iPint simply create the illusion of beer being poured out when a user tilts the handset as if the user is drinking it. The only major difference between the two apps is that iBeer costs $3 and iPint was free - it has been pulled from the App Store by Apple.

More or less, the lawsuit claims that iBeer was a success until iPint quickly stole it’s thunder by being offered for free. Stop and think about this, both Apps were released on July 11th so how is one to determine who really came up with the idea? Hottrix answer, this youtube video that was released back in August of 2007.

Why someone would spend 3 bucks on such a App, I have no clue. But Coors… come on, talk about a blatant rip off. Hottrix, 12.5 million? Seriously?

(Via Gizmodo)

Apple (along with Palm, RIM, and the usual suspects) are all being sued by litigation happy patent-portfolio’er, WiAV Solutions, about whom Engadget Mobile says:

The company that doesn’t make anything or even have a web site, but files so many patent lawsuits that some companies have taken to pre-emptively filing suits for declaratory judgment against it.

Must be something super-non-obvious, remarkably novel, spankingly applicable, and about which there couldn’t possibly be any prior “art”, right? Turns out not so much:

Detecting the difference between silence and voices, mobile device power management, and altering music to accommodate voices.

Congratulations on officially joining my all-time favorite patent suits like “tabs in a GUI”, “display of a URL adjacent to window displaying contents of URL”, and “transfer of file over network”. But wait, could it get any more ludicrous? You betcha! Not only is WiAV suing, but it sounds like its forcibly asking the court to join its licensor, Mindspeed, into the suit as well.

Good luck with that.

Once RAZR-sharp, now Icahnicly troubled Motorola has filed suit in Illinois court against Apple. More specifically, Michael Fenger, who stepped down from managing Moto handsets in EMEA (Europe, Middle-East, and Africa) to become VP of Global iPhone Sales at Apple. Problem? Seems Moto had a do-not-compete clause, and they see Apple as… er… competitive:

Moto claims Fenger “was privy to the pricing, margins, customer initiatives, allocation of resources, product development, multiyear product, business and talent planning and strategies being used by Motorola”

While I’m sure some people have ditched their RAZRs for the iPhone, I’m going to take a wild guess that it wasn’t because of ill-obtained competitive knowledge, but because Moto mismanaged themselves out of innovation, and Apple produced a killer handset. But that’s just me…

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We already mentioned that Klausner is suing Apple over Visual Voicemail, to the tune of $360 million. Turns out there were plenty of other folks in on that suit - AT&T, Comcast, the list goes on. Well drop one off that list, SimulScribe. SimulScribe is basically the super-voicemail system for the non-iPhone set: offering both transcribed voicemails and something exactly like the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail (SimulSays). Well they’ve dropped out of the case and settled with Klausner.

That basically leaves Apple as the biggest name not to settle - but Apple is also the most litigiously bull-headed corporation around. So expect a fun fight, but don’t expect your Visual Voicemail to go away. Apple may not want to be forced into licensing agreement, but they definitely don’t want to take our features away more. After all, Apple gave in to the very same company over the Newton way back in the day.

SimulScribe, LLC., a co-defendant with Apple, Inc.(APPL:NASDAQ) in the patent infringement lawsuit recently filed by Klausner Technologies, has settled the litigation and has licensed the Klausner Technologies visual voicemail patents. - Press Release

Apple Legal has been busy in the past few days. Apple has officially begun protecting their iPhone Trademark. MY iTablet — once MYiPhone — changed their name on the advice of Jobs himself. And it appears that some of the other blog sites have now received contact letters from Apple lawyers.

In the U.S. system of intellectual property law, if you don’t actively protect your copyrights and trademarks, you lose them. Apple has to do this. I’m sure Apple isn’t excited about taking iPhone community sites to court, but they have to do what they have to do.

figure 1: AT&T has made some changes to benefit customers out of enlightened self-interest.

In news that should please anyone on AT&T, and if you have an iPhone, odds are good that this is you, AT&T is making consumer-friendly changes to how they do things. First, AT&T announced that they will begin pro-rating termination fees. The longer you stay on in your contract, the less of a fee you’ll have to pay. They also announced that they will not require a new contract for a simple change of service. Both are welcome changes.

Odds are good that this change of heart is due to the Senate commerce committee holding those hearings, and T-Mobile’s lawsuit problems — AT&T probably doesn’t want to get into the same legal hot water that T-Mobile is currently in.