All Articles Tagged patent

Engadget’s resident legal gadget eagle, Nilay Patel, has put together a great, depth analysis of Nokia’s recent lawsuit against Apple and the iPhone over patent infringement.

As usual, the race to hype this dispute as a bitter standoff between two tech giants desperate to destroy one another has all but ignored the reality of how patents — especially wireless patents — are licensed, what Nokia’s actually asking for, and how it might go about getting it. And as you know, we just don’t do things that way, so we’ve asked our old friend Mathew Gavronski, a patent attorney in the Chicago office of Michael Best & Friedrich, to help us sort things out and figure out what’s really going on here — read on for more.

In a nutshell, Nokia believes Apple is infringing on 10 patents that are core to GSM/UTMS/Wi-Fi. All the other major players have paid up. Apple hasn’t. Apple may believe the patent fees are already paid by the manufacturer of the components they bought for the iPhone, or they may just be using the legal system as way to negotiate a lower ultimate licensing fee from Nokia.

If the area interests you, check out the whole analysis and then let us know what you think!

Out sibling site NokiaExperts.com brings word that Nokia is suing Apple in Delaware court. Why-for?

ten patents related to GSM, UMTS, and WLAN standards that Nokia states they established after investing more than EUR 40 billion in R&D over the last 20 years. Nokia stated that they have successfully entered into license agreements including these patents with approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors, allowing the industry to benefit from Nokia’s innovation.

Seems other companies have coughed up the cash to use them, but Apple’s waiting for a court to force their hand. With $35 billion in the bank, they can obviously afford to give a fortune away to the lawyers, but why go to the effort? Do they really think a court will somehow dismiss the patents as invalid?

Pass the popcorn, get ready for some patent pugilism, and let us know what you think!

As we mentioned briefly during TiPb’s live coverage of Apple’s Q1 conference call yesterday, and our new sibling site, PreCentral.net elaborated on, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook, might have made a shot across Palm’s bow when it comes to the Pre and Apple’s multi-touch patents (text via Macworld):

We like competition, as long as they don’t rip off our [intellectual property], and if they do, we’re going to go after anyone who does. [...] Don’t want to talk about any specific company, just making a general statement. We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our IP ripped off and will use whatever weapons we have at our disposal.

Recent capacitive touch devices like the Google Android and the BlackBerry Storm have steered very clear of anything even remotely resembling the iPhone’s behaviors, but the Palm Pre duplicates many almost exactly (rubber banding, pinching, panel sliding, etc). Then again, Palm hired Rubinstein and many other Apple employees to round out the Pre team, didn’t they?

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld 2007, one of his big bullet points was “and boy have we patented it”, so I guess now we can all sit back and see if we’ve got a fight on our hands. Will Apple go after Palm, and does Palm have any patents in their own portfolio to fight back with? (Because they sure don’t have Apple’s multi-billion dollar war chest behind them).

And yes, we know Jeff Han showed off many “Minority Report” style multi-touch behaviors long before the iPhone.

UPDATED: Apple filed for their own patents starting back in 2004, before Han, and also acquired a large amount of patents when they bought Fingerworks in 2005 (via Engadget comments).

In similar fashion to the patent for a today screen, Apple Insider is reporting Apple’s new filing shows a way of displaying icon-like status indicators on the iPhone’s display even though the phone is locked with the backlight not turned on. Apple seems to be paying attention lately to alerts/notifications and that is great news!

Apple proposes the implementation of a dual backlight system, where a secondary, low-power backlight system would be positioned behind the primary backlight system. The always-on light provided by the secondary backlight system could then be projected through one or more transparent or semitransparent regions of the primary backlight system to reach the display even when the primary backlight is turned off.

The lack of a feature similar to this is one of the current iPhone’s biggest complaints. You leave your iPhone on a table and you walk out of the room for 5 minutes… during that time you get a email or missed call… you get sidetracked and don’t turn your phone on… you never know that a message is waiting for you. No blinking LED, no second audible alerts (unless it’s a SMS message), nothing. That is a major gripe that I hear over and over regarding the iPhone.

So as soon as this is actually a reality, it will give the haters one less reason to complain. It’s just too bad we will all have to wait until a future iPhone to see this feature.

[Via Apple Insider]

Ever-watchful Apple Insider brings word on yet another Apple patent drop. This one, published in March, sets the stage for the long anticipated — nay, demanded — Mobile iChat application.

Though the iPhone already includes a somewhat similar, though carrier-bound, SMS app, the need to move away from device-modal technologies (i.e. phone to phone) to more open protocols (i.e., phone to computer to console, etc.) like Instant Messenger is compelling. In answer, Apple has proposed an interface that builds on the SMS app in significant ways:

[T]he ability to start new messages by searching through the contact list or typing the first few letters of someone’s name. Users can also see a past chat history and remove individual conversations from the list. [...] [A] dedicated text field for entering new messages, another would have typed text appear directly in a new message bubble and would replace the text entry box with a list of suggested words.

While the patent could still, technically, be used for SMS or MMS, Apple Insider maintains the former is not mention, while IM is captioned on the image filings.

Personally, I’d love me some first party (multi-tasking?) IM. But how does this relate to the already demoed AOL app? The two work together on the desktop, does that portent a mobile relationship as well? Or is Apple planning on running over them here?

Of course, this could also join the enormous heap of Apple patents that have yet to find any real world application.

What do you think?