Apple scores limited victory in smartphone patent war

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/20/us-htc-apple-patent-idUSTRE7BI24620111220

by erinwatson • 15 years ago

22 13 15 years ago

Apple Inc scored a narrow victory against Taiwan's HTC Corp in a patent lawsuit over smartphone technology that will set the stage for further battles between rival makers in the fiercely competitive market.

allenap• 15 years ago

These victories all look rather like failures.

slowpoke• 15 years ago

Any victory for anybody in the patent mess is a loss for everybody, period.

jgw• 15 years ago

Except patent lawyers :(

ddlatham• 15 years ago

Earlier discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3371392

rheeseyb• 15 years ago

I love this quote - "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

Reminds me of that time when Apple invented the mouse-driven GUI.

talmand2• 15 years ago

You could say that about much of their products.

rayiner• 15 years ago

Apple licensed Xerox's tech. For a song because Xerox didn't know what it was worth.

saturdaysaint• 15 years ago

Pretty small potatoes. I wonder what the Apple executives, canny competitors by most accounts, really expect to accomplish from the legal campaign. Do they mostly intend to raise the stakes for their lower margin competition? Delay major Android phones at a crucial juncture in the race? This gets negative PR in tech circles, but you wonder if it plays well to the broader public - the more respected brand is making serious claims that lesser brands are copying/stealing from them.

It's easy to cast this as a Heart-of-Darkness style deathmarch, but unfortunately, I think Apple is finding value in the whole enterprise, even if there isn't a resounding victory.

talmand2• 15 years ago

"Limited victory" is right, starts with 10 patents and gets reduced to one patent covering automatically linking phone numbers to bring up the dialer on click? Seems to me the result is that Apple lost rather badly in this case. This is the second time I've seen a misleading headline suggesting a Apple victory in a patent case but turns out to be a loss once you've read the details. What's the deal with that?

But really? They have a patent for making telephone numbers in a document click-able to call that number? That seems so obvious a thing to do on a phone why grant the patent? Plus, if HTC can come up with a workaround so easily and quickly doesn't that also support the thought it's an overly obvious (i.e., useless) patent? Did I understand that part correctly?

Karunamon• 15 years ago

I'm pretty sure I saw that functionality in devices that existed long before the iPhone.. fucking patents.

But to be fair, an import blockade is a pretty solid victory. Unfortunately for Apple, HTC can release a software update to disable the "infringing" functionality and quite possibly reinvent it in a way that isn't infringing anything.

vidarh• 15 years ago

A blockade now would have been a solid victory. A blockade months into the future for a trivially disabled feature is pretty much a joke.

I worked on a touch pad in '99 that had this functionality, and I'm pretty sure we didn't come up with the idea.

Unfortunately we never got it into mass production, and I doubt sufficient details were released to use it as prior art. Nokia's Screen Phone might have had similar functionality.

(Search for FreePad if interested - still a few articles available)

st3fan• 15 years ago

Honestly, any win for any company in that area is a loss for the whole industry.

knobbysideup• 15 years ago

It'd be cool if HP would smack apple up a bit with the Palm patents.

Apple scores limited victory in smartphone patent war

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