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Apple wins ban of HTC devices at US International Trade Commission
- ddlatham 15y agoHere's the patent in question, #5,946,647, filed Feb. 1, 1996: http://www.google.com/patents/US5946647 http://www.google.com/patents/US5946647 "A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data... uses a pattern analysis unit ... to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. .... Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions." And here's an older article with more description http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/16/apple-vs-google-inside-an-android-patent-violation/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/16/apple-vs-google-insid... "When an iPhone receives a message that contains a phone number or an address -- e-mail, Web or street -- those bits of data are automatically highlighted, underlined and turned into clickable links. Click on the phone number, and the iPhone asks if you want to dial it. Click on the Web address, and it opens in Safari. Click on the street address, and Maps will display it."
- libraryatnight 15y agoSometimes, I feel like we're characters in a book of satire, mocking what a world would look like if it acted like ours.
- caf 15y agoReally? My old featurephone did that!
- cbr 15y agoBefore 1996?
- viraptor 15y agoWasn't explorer in windows 95 (can't remember what 3.X did for context menus) a prior art for first fragment? Right-click "my computer" you get one context menu, right-click ".bat" (see - pattern analysis) you get another, right-click ".doc" ...
- chc 15y agoI don't think so. You aren't acting on the ".bat", you're acting on the file itself. The patented technology has more in common with face detection algorithms than right-click menus.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- caf 15y agoIt would seem to have more in common with the way that Microsoft Word autodetects URLs and email address and turns them into clickable links, or the way in which the Skype browser plugin autodetects phone numbers on a web page and makes those into click-to-call-with-Skype links.
- jacobolus 15y agoThe best example of prior art that I know is Simson Garfinkel’s SBook, originally developed in 1991. Any steps required to get from Simson’s idea to Apple’s version seem (conceptually) trivial and obvious. http://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ http://simson.net/ref/sbook5/ It’s remarkable to me how much better SBook is at dealing with info like address book entries than anything mainstream today, 20 years later.
- patrickgzill 15y agoyes, I distinctly remember being quite amazed at SBook, when I used it on a NeXT machine in 1995. A year before this patent.
- jamesgeck0 15y agoWikiWikiWeb may also be an example of prior art. It went online in 1994, with CamelCase words automatically being made into hyperlinks. URLs were also automatically transformed into hyperlinks as early as 1996. Unfortunately archive.org doesn't go any farther back than that, so I don't know if the feature was there from the very beginning.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Apple-Guy 15y agoPlease note the original patent filing date of Feb. 1, 1996
- einhverfr 15y agoThat sounds broad enough to cover syntax coloring in VIM and Visual Studio......
- untog 15y agoAnd it goes back, and forth, and back, and forth, and In other news, "Samsung adds four more complaints to its German patent offensive against Apple": http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/19/2646835/samsung-apple-germany-patent-lawsuit-four-claims http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/19/2646835/samsung-apple-ger... I would love for someone at one of these companies to explain how on earth this benefits the consumer.
- backprojection 15y agoWhy would it need to benefit the consumer? None of these companies operate to directly benefit the consumer. Note: I agree with your sentiment
- libraryatnight 15y agoMy knee-jerk, emotional, response is to agree with you because from my perspective: they aren't working to win consumers by building the best product, they either buy-out the technology they want or stomp competing technology with patents. The biggest players cost each other billions hoping to cripple each others ability to compete, or eradicate the competing product altogether. Yes, we get a phone out of it, but that phone is so we can buy apps, pay providers for service (fine, except we pay out the nose for things that aren't even really necessary like text message plans on smart phones that don't need them), they sell us the device, or the apps, and then track us, monitor us, and sell that information so that they can better target and sell us more stuff. We're not just the consumer, our habits are a product. But that's my knee jerk doom and gloom response, something I keep in the back of my mind when I work on more rational reactions.
- Apple-Guy 15y agoYou are confusing Google with Apple. Apple doesn't make money on its App Store. It has a great app store to sell devices. In contrast, Google gives away adware products to earn more money (by tracking and spying on Android users).
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- ChuckMcM 15y agoSigh, emotionally this sort of crap from Apple just really irritates me. Sure software patents are stupid, but does it strike anyone else that this Android Jihad by Apple is doing more damage to their corporate brand than help? I should have realized during the 'look and feel' wars that its part of their DNA.
- viraptor 15y agoDoes it do more damage than help? I don't know... How many Apple customers even know about the patent wars? How many care? How many are extreme Apple fanboys who will argue that Apple invented everything, starting with the phone itself? It's only people who actually care about news like that who will see this as a bad thing. The rest get a new, shiny toy every year or so and are happy...
- brendans 15y ago"jihad"... Apple has indeed an islamic mindset : they have a prophet you cannot criticise without violent reactions (like being permbanned from forums).
- stephend 15y ago"jihad"... Apple has indeed an islamic mindset : they have a prophet you cannot criticize without violent reactions (like being permbanned from forums).
- tjogin 15y agoThese kinds of arguments only weakens your position. If you had something thoughtful to say, something of value, you would have said it. Instead you serve this nonsense, the only logical conclusion of which is that you can't think of anything meaningful to say about the topic at all.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- stephend 15y ago
- algoshift 15y ago"Greetings, Professor Falken." "Hello, Joshua." "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
- algoshift 15y agoWell, it seems that this one went over a few heads. I won't spoil it by describing what happens in the movie. Watch it. It's a good one. The quote from the film, in the context of having watched it, describes, with great brevity that actions such as the one being discussed in this thread can actually have negative results. The permutations are many and complex. I'll go over a few: 1- Don't file patents. As someone said. Google tried this. Didn't work. 2- Don't sue. Lot's of companies take this approach. I can probably imagine that a company like IBM has so much covered that they could have a whole department doing nothing but suing other companies. They don't seem to be in that business. Then again, companies like Google have tried to remain outside the fray and, ultimately, had to invest in a $12 billion dollar arsenal to have some protection. Twelve billion dollars. So much wasted. 3- We all have patents and we all sue. Global Thermonuclear Patent War (GTPW): I sue you for everything I can and you counter-sue me with all you got. We go at it for years. I win sometimes and so do you. We burn through tons of cash that could have been used for far more productive pursuits. Progress slows. Nobody wins. Some loose in monumental ways. 4- Innovators with great ideas and drive become afraid of getting anywhere close to the GTPW and instead choose to focus their efforts elsewhere or simply abandon the field. 5- The GTPW is fueled by the failure of the patent system and ignorant politicians to do the right thing. Patents (the weapons of war) are granted to all participants at an ever-increasing rate. The wars escalate and, very soon, it is quite literally impossible to innovate. Attempting to innovate means to create an exposure to litigation and becoming embroiled in your own GTPW. 6- Investors begin to pull back because new ventures --and the money that went into them-- can evaporate in a microsecond if they even skirt the edges of the GTPW. 7- The Chinese don't give a crap about any of this so, while we are all engulfed in GTPW they continue to copy, learn, grow, experiment, build, invest, innovate and advance. Check mate. 8- Western political systems can't get out of its own way to save our own lives, so the situation continues to escalate until there's total meltdown --at which point it is too late. 9- Even in the face of having the gun to our own heads and the trigger partially pulled the western world refuses to act as the adults in the room and we continue, little by little, to pull the triggers that will ultimately destroy our way of life for decades, if not generations. Then comes the realization: "Strange game. The only winning move is not to play." So, you can see now that this short little quote from a geek movie actually is very relevant and excels at summarizing a wide range of scenarios that I've only glanced at. The failures of the patent system and what companies are doing to each other is but one of a myriad of problems created by incompetent governments around the world. AT&T just had to spend three billion dollars because the government did not want to let it buy T-Mobile. Three billion dollars. What you hear is the huge sucking sound of innovation, jobs and growth leaving the room. Someone, somewhere, somehow has to take a really good look at what is going on in the western world and start fixing problems right now. The path we are on leads to absolutely nothing that is good. In many ways it might already be too late.
- LVB 15y agoHey, Apple et al., here's an innovative idea: let's all agree to start the next thing from the most effective version of the last thing. We might all benefit. (I wonder how Wikipedia would be doing if we weren't allowed to modify others' entries?)
- wmf 15y agoApple's probably fine with that as long as the maker of the next thing pays the maker of the last thing.
- fpgeek 15y agoI'm not sure how you get that from this case. Apple isn't offering to license the patents to HTC (even though HTC has made it clear they'd love to do that). Instead, Apple is trying to get HTC's products banned from the US market.
- SODaniel 15y agoSeriously, this is the company that made the '1984' commercial and touted themselves as being 'anti monopoly' just a few years ago?
- jamesbritt 15y agoOh, absolutely. http://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/dp/0393316734 http://www.amazon.com/Commodify-Your-Dissent-Salvos-Baffler/... Very good book, BTW.
- jrockway 15y agoThis feature is largely useless, anyway. An example is, I receive text messages from Amazon when an order ships and is delivered. The "system and method to cause a computer to detect and perform actions" then highlights the tracking number and order number as though they are phone numbers, which it immediately dials when your finger comes nearby. This is very annoying because they are not phone numbers, they are tracking numbers. Lacking this feature will make me like my phone more.
- lambda 15y agoTracking numbers have a lot more digits than phone numbers; do they actually get detected as such? I've never seen it happen. I have, however, found it useful to tap on an address to bring it up in Google Maps or a phone number to open it in the dialer.
- technogeek00 15y agoActually a fair number of shipments by small companies and even Fedex have shipment numbers that total out to 10 or 11 digits which fits a fully dialed international number perfectly and will be highlighted by Android. So the feature is bad and good at the same time. Source: I made and maintain a shipment tracking progam on Android.
- Gigablah 15y agoSkype's browser extension does this to phone numbers on webpages; does this mean they're violating the Apple patent as well?
- lambda 15y agoPossibly, but pure software patents tend to be harder to go after than software coupled with hardware (like mobile devices).
- thewileyone 15y agoApple == US company HTC == Taiwan company Any surprise why the US International Trade Commission bans HTC?
- TechNewb 15y agoCheck Apple patents, check HTC patents. Apple is responsible for bringing the PC to mass market, and the touch interface. HTC has gone from clone PC maker to premium Android phone maker, and many companies think Android is a clone, as the name implies. Any notion of national preference is silly, HTC simply is the newest company, and thus has the fewest patents, making it the easiest android OEM to sue. Please support your wild implied claims before making a statement. Apple is just excercising their right, and it would be silly of them not to. Although patent reform should happen one way or another.
- thewileyone 15y agoCheck HTC history. They've been the OEM makers for many smartphones before Apple came out with the iPhone. They made Windows CE and Windows Mobile phones for years. Only when Android was available commercially, they switched to Android. Touch interface? Apple deployed capacitive touch commercially, but resistive touch has been out for a very long time.
- shellehs 15y agoAye。 HTC also under MS's patent sue. Jobs wants to wipe Android out of the world, and HTC maybe the easiest step.
- caf 15y agoThe Commission found that the HTC devices infringed these two claims of the '647 patent: 1. A computer-based system for detecting structures in data and performing actions on detected structures, comprising: an input device for receiving data; an output device for presenting data; a memory storing information including program routines including: an analyzer server for detecting structures in the data, and for linking actions to the detected structures; a user interface enabling the selection of a detected structure and a linked action; and an action processor for performing the selected action linked to the selected structure; and a processing unit coupled to the input device, the output device, and the memory for controlling the execution of the program routines. 8. The system recited in claim 1, wherein the user interface highlights detected structures.
- thezilch 15y agoAny device that has a browser that can detect [regex] structures and infer actions (ex. Chrome's omnibox)... or any device that detects header structures and infers actions of the following markup (ex. text/html links)... TIL Apple invented regex interfaces.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoAnd this gives you an example of what we can expect from the ITC, which the OPEN act (the proposed "compromise" in place of SOPA) claims we can trust to censor websites. Quality work here, really engendering trust.
- Mordor 15y agoApple may win the battle, but they lost the war... a long time ago.