Apple Wins Patent Dispute, HTC Phones Banned From Store Shelves

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/19/itc-sides-with-apple-in-patent-dispute-with-rival-htc/

Quote :

"A federal agency is siding with Apple and ordering an import ban on HTC phones that infringe on a patent belonging to the iPhone maker. The U.S. International Trade Commission said Monday that the ban will take effect April 19 so that wireless carriers will have time to adjust their plans. The ITC said in a final ruling that HTC Corp. may import some refurbished phones to offer customers as replacements under warranties and insurance plans. HTC, which is based in Taiwan, is a major maker of phones that use Google's Android operating software. Apple had initially complained about HTC violating several of its patents in April 2010, though the commission narrowed its decision down to just one patent. The patent in question deals with data detection, enabling smartphone functions such as the ability to tap on a phone number or address contained in an email to immediately call the number or find the address on a map. It's not immediately known which phones are covered by the ban. In an emailed statement, HTC general counsel Grace Lei said the patent in question affects a small part of the user experience and it will soon remove it from any affected phones. Apple spokeswoman Kristen Huguet reiterated an earlier statement, saying competitors should create their own technology. The case is part of a broader dispute involving Cupertino, California-based Apple, HTC and other phone makers. In federal courts and before the ITC, companies have been accusing one another of stealing ideas for popular phone features. While the courts can award damages, the commission has the power to block imports of products and parts made with contested technology. The U.S. International Trade Commission issued an initial ruling in October that Apple's iPhone does not violate four patents owned by HTC, a blow to the company."

12/20/2011 11:12:19 PM

Way to be a sensationalist moron. You bolded the part that says this can be fixed...

12/20/2011 11:24:43 PM

12/20/2011 11:42:59 PM

A bit dramatic? You don't think that by 19 April, HTC will have remedied the problem to get around the ban? They're not likely to sit idle and watch one of their biggest markets go away.

12/21/2011 11:35:44 AM

God I hate Apple so much.

12/21/2011 11:49:03 AM

Apple to a large extent pioneered the touchscreen interface present on the iPhone and practically all other (Android) phones. Google was concerned about this enough to purchase Motorola (for their trove of patents). I think going forward we'll see Microsoft phones will gain popularity in part because many manufacturers will choose to avoid producing products that infringe on Apple's (and other) patents thus avoiding the legal costs and court ordered payments to the patent holder(s).

12/21/2011 4:30:53 PM

you have got to be fucking kidding me. clicking on a phone number? jesus, I hate Apple. you can NOT say that bullshit like this isn't stifling innovation. a whole phone gets blocked because someone wrote their own code to do something similar to what someone else did?

[Edited on December 22, 2011 at 10:31 PM. Reason : ]

12/22/2011 10:30:51 PM

Whatever happened to patents having to be something non-trivial. This is like trying to patent an alphabetic sort.

Apple needs to be broken up by the government. Google too, actually.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szh4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Edited on December 22, 2011 at 11:00 PM. Reason : .]

12/22/2011 10:58:10 PM

changing the patent laws would do a lot more than breaking up apple.

12/23/2011 2:37:24 AM

Quote :

"Apple to a large extent pioneered the touchscreen interface present on the iPhone and practically all other (Android) phones."

[no]
palm did this in like 2001 with the treo

i will say they were the first to not make it feel keyboard and mouse driven by going capacitive and driving things swipe rather than precise scrolling and clicking

[Edited on December 23, 2011 at 8:21 AM. Reason : /]

12/23/2011 8:15:56 AM

Quote :

"changing the patent laws would do a lot more than breaking up apple."

*Infinity

Out broken patent system is retarding innovation and growth at the worst possible time. This is a pretty good read:

http://t.co/Gov147h

Quote :

"AMERICA is still in denial, but among economists and wonks I think the hard truth is settling in: we're not as rich as we thought we were and our prospects for future high growth rates aren't looking so great. America's last best hope for breaking free from what Tyler Cowen has called "the great stagnation" is the discovery of new "disruptive" technologies that would transform the possibilities of economic production in the way the fossil-fuel-powered engine did. As it stands, growth, such as it is, depends largely on many thousands of small innovations increasing efficiency incrementally along many thousands of margins. Innovation and invention is the key to continuing gains in prosperity. Zero-sum "win the future" rhetoric notwithstanding, it doesn't much matter whether the advances in new technology occur in China, India or America. Nevertheless, it remains that America is the world's leader in technical invention, and continues to attract many of the world's most inventive minds. That's why it is so important that America remain especially conducive to innovation. And that's why America's intellectual-property system is a travesty which threatens the wealth and welfare of the whole world. It may seem a recondite subject, but the stakes couldn't be higher. This recent episode of Planet Money, "When Patents Attack", is an informative and entertaining primer on the way America's patent system squelches competition, slows innovation, and enables egregious predation through the legal system. Please listen to this. And then tell me that Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures is not our age's authentic villainous robber baron, making a fortune gaming America's dysfunctional patent-law system to shake down would-be innovators. Planet Money's programme explains everything better than I can, but the thrust of it is that it is next to impossible to offer a new technology or software-driven service without getting sued for patent infringement. For example, Spotify, an innovative, highly-praised music streaming and subscription service, became available in America just a couple weeks ago. It took until last week for this to go down: PacketVideo, a software company that enables wireless streaming of music and videos on mobile devices, filed the suit against Spotify on Wednesday, claiming that the U.K.-based company violated a patent for "distribution of music in digital form." The plaintiff cited a violation of U.S. patent 5,636,276 and says "Spotify USA has offered for sale, sold, and imported products and/or services configured to infringe the '276 patent, and instructed and encouraged others to use the '276 patent in an infringing manner." "PacketVideo has a strong intellectual property portfolio, and will take any necessary action needed to protect its intellectual property and prevent the misuse of its patents," says Joel Espelien, general counsel and vice president of strategic relationships. This is apparently a patent on streaming music over the internet. Naturally, you are familiar with PacketVideo's popular music streaming service. Oh, you're not? I guess that's because they don't offer one. So, Spotify is trying to make money offering a service that will make consumers happy. (I'm using it right now. I think it's terrific.) PacketVideo is trying to make money doing what? Shaking down Spotify? Here's where Mr Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures comes in. Intellectual Ventures owns a huge portfolio of patents. Quite possibly they also have some sort of patent that covers streaming music over the internet. Intellectual Ventures makes money through a sort of protection racket that helps Spotify defend themselves against companies like PacketVideo. For a considerable fee, a company can access Intellectual Venture's storehouse of patents and use them defensively against companies claiming patent infringement. Julian Sanchez lucidly explains how the very existence of "defensive patents", and of companies in the business of selling them, is proof of a badly broken intellectual property system: [T]hink about how defensive patents work. Companies aren’t buying them—or buying into the services of companies like Intellectual Ventures—because they provide otherwise unavailable technical insights. The point, rather, is to acquire (or have access to) a bundle of patents that any potential litigant who sues you is likely to be “infringing” in their own products. ... This only works, however, if other companies are almost certain to have independently come up with the same idea. A patent that is truly so original that somebody else wouldn’t arrive at the same solution by applying normal engineering skill is useless as a defensive patent. ... [E]very patent granted for an idea that any number of suitably skilled engineers could have (and would have, and did) come up with is a patent that probably shouldn’t be granted—a pure deadweight loss that’s actually compounded by the squandering of resources on the “arms race,” with no compensating dynamic gain. Actually, there’s probably a dynamic loss: You end up creating a huge incentive for smart and skilled people to spend their time and energy not coming up with a brilliant idea that nobody else would have, but instead trying to be the first to put on paper ideas that are obvious (to a properly trained and up-to-date person) but haven’t been locked down yet—the solution, again, that almost any professional would have come up with once they were actually trying to implement the relevant technology. A sector where investment in defensive patents is so massive, then, is a sector where—even if some of them do genuinely add value—patents are probably doing more harm than good on net. A new paper on "The Myth of the Sole Inventor" by Mark Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford, reinforces Mr Sanchez's point. [S]urveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneously by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. Inventors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often "in the air," or result from changes in market demand or the availability of new or cheaper starting materials. ... The result is a real problem for classic theories of patent law. If we are supposed to be encouraging only inventions that others in the field couldn’t have made, we should be paying a lot more attention than we currently do to simultaneous invention. We should be issuing very few patents – surely not the 200,000 per year we do today. And we should be denying patents on the vast majority of the most important inventions, since most seem to involve near-simultaneous invention. At a time when our future affluence depends so heavily on innovation, we have drifted toward a patent regime that not only fails to fulfil its justifying function, to incentivise innovation, but actively impedes innovation. We rarely directly confront the effects of this immense waste of resources and brainpower and the attendant retardation of the pace of discovery, but it affect us all the same. It makes us all poorer and helps keep us stuck in the great stagnation."

12/23/2011 8:51:11 AM

didn't motorola make the first cell phone?

wonder if they have a patent on portable devices being able to make calls that they can sue apple for, that'd be pretty funny

12/23/2011 9:33:11 AM

^^^ Palm used a stylus. The stylus interface is much different than the finger interface. Furthermore, Apple created Newton. The Newton people created Palm. So, Palm and everyone else actually owes a lot to Apple in the portable computing device department. Apple was developing PDAs in the 80s.

Good thing Apple killed Newton because it would have died anyway as Palm did. The stylus interface is garbage.

[Edited on December 23, 2011 at 9:37 AM. Reason : .]

12/23/2011 9:37:15 AM

Quote :

"didn't motorola make the first cell phone? wonder if they have a patent on portable devices being able to make calls that they can sue apple for, that'd be pretty funny 12/23/2011 9:33:11 AM "

companies have had to pay moto for years on cell tech pats. Apple has had to pay up to others for patents and this time HTC is going to have to pay up to apple.

12/23/2011 12:41:07 PM

wow... now that's pretty fucking stupid. who knew that a small bit of code that detects xxx-xxx-xxxx would be so hard and complicated that it would warrant a patent. I kinda want to see how they wrote out the patent and what the diagrams had... probably something really stupid.

12/23/2011 1:37:31 PM

^^ What if Moto decided they weren't going to take Apple's money and instead wanted any Apple phones banned?

[Edited on December 23, 2011 at 1:51 PM. Reason : Considering Google owns Moto now (or soon will) this seems like it might happen]

12/23/2011 1:50:38 PM

next thing we know... all smart phones will be banned and all we are left with is simple cell phones with no cameras...

12/23/2011 2:05:34 PM

Quote :

"Apple to a large extent pioneered the touchscreen interface present on the iPhone and practically all other (Android) phones. "

Much like everything technology related, all roads lead to IBM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

12/23/2011 2:27:07 PM

tww is going to get sued for autolinking urls

12/23/2011 2:27:08 PM

Quote :

"didn't motorola make the first cell phone? wonder if they have a patent on portable devices being able to make calls that they can sue apple for, that'd be pretty funny"

I don't have a link, but Motorola did some pretty humorous (to me at least) patent suit in like germany to get the sale of iphones banned there. Pretty much exclusively because Apple pulls these bullshit kind of lawsuits to various phone manufacturers all over the world (especially to Samsung)

12/23/2011 3:23:25 PM

Apple was just awarded another patent last week regarding how to switch apps during a call. I see no end to this utter BS!!

12/23/2011 4:39:21 PM

My Samsung phone allows me to click phone numbers in emails and make a call...is Apple coming after them next? As if I didnt have enough reasons to hate Apple...

12/23/2011 7:54:50 PM

yeah my Moto Q with Windows Mobile 5 had the ability too. Guess everyone is going to have to retroactively bend over for Apple. The courts are just idiotic on this one.

12/23/2011 8:06:24 PM