Apple Goes Offensive On Patents: Sues HTC
from the no-smartphones-at-all dept
Well, well, well. We've discussed recently how it seemed effectively impossible for any smartphone maker to survive the patent gantlet, as there are so many patents held by so many different parties, and they all seem to have recently started suing each other. The latest, sent in by a whole bunch of you (though Phillip was first) is that Apple is suing HTC, again both in the courts and using the ITC loophole. What's interesting here is that, despite Apple playing up the fact that it had over 200 patents on the iPhone, for the most part, it hadn't gone on the offensive with them. The recent patent lawsuits that Apple has been involved in have all been on the defensive side -- which we thought was a smart move for Apple. The fact that it's now going on the offensive on patents is unfortunate. It's usually a sign that a company is worried that it can't keep up with the competition.
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Filed Under: defensive, itc, offensive, patents, smartphones
Companies: apple, htc
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My gloves are faster...
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Re: My gloves are faster...
Yup. Last time I wrote "gauntlet" and I was corrected. Turns out "gantlet" is the proper word, though these days gauntlet is commonly used.
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Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
Word History: The spelling gauntlet is acceptable for both gauntlet meaning "glove" or "challenge" and gauntlet meaning "a form of punishment in which lines of men beat a person forced to run between them"; but this has not always been the case. The story of the gauntlet used in to throw down the gauntlet is linguistically unexciting: it comes from the Old French word gantelet, a diminutive of gant, "glove." From the time of its appearance in Middle English (in a work composed in 1449), the word has been spelled with an au as well as an a, still a possible spelling. But the gauntlet used in to run the gauntlet is an alteration of the earlier English form gantlope, which came from the Swedish word gatlopp, a compound of gata, "lane," and lopp, "course." The earliest recorded form of the English word, found in 1646, is gantelope, showing that alteration of the Swedish word had already occurred. The English word was then influenced by the spelling of the word gauntlet, "glove," and in 1676 we find the first recorded instance of the spelling gauntlet for this word, although gantelope is found as late as 1836. From then on spellings with au and a are both found, but the au seems to have won out.
I don't see anything about gauntlet ever being "improper". Even so, anyone who would "correct" the spelling of gauntlet is just about the most anal individual I have ever heard of.
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Re: Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
Thanx though, I learned something new today.
; P
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Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
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Re: Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
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Re: Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
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Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
Gantlet is a variant of gauntlet, seen extremely occasionally, but gauntlet and gantlet finished duking it out more than a century ago. The battle began in 1676, but was all over by the early 1800's, when the spelling was pretty much gauntlet.
On the other hand, a gantlet is a parallel set of railroad tracks that travel the same path without connecting or a convergence of lines.
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Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
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Re: Re: My gloves are faster...
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and my support for apple is done
the iphone is going on ebay, goodbye at&t, hello nexus one. Seems like the only way to get the point across, even it is one user at a time.
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*sigh*
Let's just stymie competition more, shall we?
Bullshit.
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Re: *sigh*
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Re: Re: *sigh*
I am working on a ScummVM port to Android 2.0, but my spare time has been even more limited than usual recently...
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Re: Re: Re: *sigh*
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Re: Re: Re: *sigh*
If so, @$@#$ you, you don't know @#$@#.
Or do you mean "'They' is me" in a specific case, as in you develop ScummVM, in which case you should code on!?
Just checking.
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Apparently, employees, agents, shall I say, operatives of HTC broke into Apple's offices and stole ideas. Those dastardly bastards deserve to be sued!
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Re:
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Re:
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Heck, that's probably what happened to Microsoft!
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battle of the titans
Until then, all innovation continues to take a loss for being successful
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hey nexus one whats up
I doubt I'll even wait for my contract to be over...
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Re: hey nexus one whats up
PS: this bears mentioning. HTC controls a huge part of all electronics made worldwide. As much as panasonic, really.
HTC could shut out apple from being able to make anything apple if they felt like it, so this is a bad bad apple move.
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Re: Re: hey nexus one whats up
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Re: Re: hey nexus one whats up
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Re: Re: hey nexus one whats up
What? How? You don't think there are other hardware makers out there? Foxconnn comes to mind.
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To the point that I had never seen it spelled with only an "a" until this article
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Apple is for fascists
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I think you're missing the real story
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Apple fan boys
This sorta underscores the whole "the people need handlers" argument :(
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Apple refused to use its cash reserves to give shareholders a dividend, so I guess Jobs decided to piss it away on lawyers and lawsuits instead. Yes, the iPhone is innovative, a great product, but using the courts to insure that nobody else can compete with you is childish.
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Re:
Just to point out a difference (and not to assume you're unaware of it), the iPhone was innovative but not inventive. While Apple changed the way people use their phones, it didn't necessarily do anything to redefine what a phone is.
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Re: Re:
The inventive aspect of what they did was combining three seperate and unrelated devices into one device.
But even that could be argued because honestly the iPhones invention was destined to happen by someone. Combining the cell phone with the PDA and a music device, and a pager was destined to happen because every geek out there was running out of room on their belts and suspenders to dangle all these devices.
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Apple were the first to release a phone with a multitouch interface, nothing more or less. They didnt invent it but innovation is in the execution right? And now they want to execute HTC...
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The inventive aspect of what they did was combining three seperate and unrelated devices into one device.
Palm and ... Windows Mobile ... have been able to do what the iPhone does for far longer than the iPhone has been out. I'd hardly call apple inventive in this regard. What they did, and did well I will readily admit, was simplify the whole interface to the point that a MASSIVE number of users could pick one up and figure out how to use it. An evolution of an existing species to better adapt to the current climate.
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Re: Re: Re:
Taking three already invented technologies, and combining them into one is innovation.
The iPhone did nothing specifically new. It just did it in an easier to use way.
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It is just dealing with reality.
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------------------------------------------------
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nK7TQV FS
To quote Steve Jobs: "I've been shameless about stealing good ideas" and "They showed me really, three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't see the first two. One of the things they showed me was Object Oriented Programming".
So first he steals the idea, then he patents it.. thats innovation for ya!
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Re:
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How many lawyers does it take to invent something useful?
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Nuclear Patent War
Will it become Great Patent Wall of USA for Electronics/Software. So that non Apple production will be available only in black market ?
Or patents for software will be canceled in US ?
How does it influence Europe ?
Is it only civil war in US ?
Or 1st Patent World War ?
Any ideas ?
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Behind the lawsuit
And that's when things start going downhill. IMHO, Apple would have been better off using its $40B cash reserves to get out of its exclusivity deal with AT&T and introducing CDMA/EVDO iPhones.
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Re: Behind the lawsuit
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I can understand Apple's point
They also invented mach kernel's, unix, and a GUI over top of it.
Is there nothing people won't steal from Apple?
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Re: I can understand Apple's point
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Re: Re: I can understand Apple's point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
For the most part, we have hallucinogens to thank for much of the work in graphical user interfaces.
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Re: Re: Re: I can understand Apple's point
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There's a line, for sure, but most of these software patents make the plaintiff look petty, and I was actually beginning to thaw to the idea of purchasing a Mac or a new iPhone/iPad. I've actually been turned off to it, now.
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Abuse of patents - if they're that worried, why not go after Palm?
Examples of this include Chiron Corporation and the 100 patents that they own on the Hepatitis C Virus, as they were able to be the first to describe a novel method of isolating the virus. They've since been able to abuse this power in preventing other companies from researching into the virus, and at one time even prevented the UK National Health Service from buying a Hepatitis C testing kit from Murex Corporation, despite the fact that Chiron had not released their own testing kit. Essentially, they were preventing anyone getting tested for Hepatitis C. That's just abominable, and it's a corporation that kills people.
Amazon's 1-click is another great example of patents gone horribly wrong.
Now this - a look at Apple's patent filings include:
• The '453 Patent, entitled "Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor," was duly and legally issued on June 3, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '453 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit H.
• The '949 Patent, entitled "Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics," was duly and legally issued on January 20, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A copy of the '949 Patent is attached hereto as Exhibit B.
It's ridiculous. They're trying to own power management on mobile devices - and they're trying to prevent multitouch on other devices. Multitouch is functionality that's given to the HTC devices by Google/Open Handset Alliance and Android, not developed by HTC. Apple are trying to sue Google without suing Google - or try and scare others from joining the Open Handset Alliance.
I note that they haven't sued Palm at all. Might have something to do with all those patents Palm has that could cause the iPhone a lot of problems, right?
I'm finding this interesting, though. Something has Apple spooked about HTC and Android. They're feeling threatened.
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Re: Abuse of patents - if they're that worried, why not go after Palm?
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Re: Re: Abuse of patents - if they're that worried, why not go after Palm?
Jobs
Blow
Palm
I think there's a joke in there somewhere.
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Competitive Edge
So the only way to distinguish your product from the competition was to "delight your customers" with the supporting services. There was nothing covered about suing the competition over patents by a company that holds probably the largest patent portfolio in the world. They also donated a lot of patents to the open source community of which Linux/Android is a member.
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mudaki
debily, blya
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Is the iPhone losing market share or something? ;)
In the end, the lawyers win yet again.
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Apple - media hype innovator
Apple being rather arrogant takes those inventions and combines them in their products, bagging about being innovators.
I have tried and rejected a number of Apple products because they are crippled by design. Apple's greed and short term mindset makes their products inferior to others. HTC produces better phones than Apple.
This is why Apple is a member of the Coalition for Patent Piracy & Fairness. They innovate with unauthorized use of others inventions but cannot themselves produce the really important inventions.
What amazes me is how many people buy Apples innovative media propaganda.
Ronald J. Riley,
I am speaking only on my own behalf.
Affiliations:
President - www.PIAUSA.org - RJR at PIAUSA.org
Executive Director - www.InventorEd.org - RJR at InvEd.org
Senior Fellow - www.PatentPolicy.org
President - Alliance for American Innovation
Caretaker of Intellectual Property Creators on behalf of deceased founder Paul Heckel
Washington, DC
Direct (810) 597-0194 / (202) 318-1595 - 9 am to 8 pm EST.
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Re: Apple - media hype innovator
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Re: Apple - media hype innovator
President - Pompous douche bag club.
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