Apple Sued Over OS X Quick Boot 196
An anonymous reader writes "With a patent originally owned by LG in tow, a Florida based company called Operating Systems Solutions LLC recently filed suit against Apple claiming that OS X's use of quick booting infringes the aforementioned patent."
The company in question is a bit suspicious — having formed very recently — and so others are speculating it was created for a proxy battle against Apple by LG.
The usual overly broad software patent (Score:4, Interesting)
Having read the patent (RE40,092 [uspto.gov] in case anyone is interested), it's claims are so broad and complete that any implementation of any kind of acceleration of the booting process would violate it. In fact, they're so complete, that any hibernate mode would also likely violate them, which suggests that it shouldn't be hard to find prior art since hibernate modes substantially predate this patent. I suspect that Apple will use prior art to get the patent invalidated, but it's tough to say for sure.
The real problem with this patent, though, is the standard one for software patents: it's just a set of general ideas about what you could do to make booting faster (store configuration data, check configuration data, write some or all pages of memory to disk, read some or all pages of memory from disk) with nothing that could actually be described as a specific invention or process. As such, the patent (as is almost always the case with software patents) is so broad that it's ridiculous. They've basically been granted a patent on any feasible idea for speeding up the boot process.
Re:These patent lawsuits are getting out of hand. (Score:5, Interesting)
The LG Prada was announced December 12, 2006 and came out May 2007. Apple showed the iPhone January 9th 2007 and released it June 29th 2007.
To go from seeing the Prada in December to a workable prototype iPhone in less than a month would be very difficult. Apparently the Prada did win an award in Sept. 2006, but even if someone from Apple saw it then, that's still a huge leap to think Apple could design the iPhone and write iOS up enough to show it in Jan 2007.
The point isn't to show that Apple copied LG. The point is to show that a company other than Apple had the same idea before the iPhone was released. As for tablets, those have been around for 20+ years, Apple simply recognized that the hardware was finally good enough to make a marketable tablet.