ITC Rules Apple Does Not Infringe S3 Graphics Patents 81
First time accepted submitter boley1 writes "According to Cnet — S3 Graphics's case collapsed in their ITC suit, with the ITC ruling that Apple does not infringe on any of S3's patents. A big blow to HTC according to the report."
So much for HTC buying a warchest; according to the ruling it looks like AMD/ATI actually owned the patents in question.
Re:ho snap htc bought the wrong warchest (Score:5, Informative)
I wish people would shut the fuck up about this. It's been discussed to death that Apple didn't do those things. Deals were made, shares were given out, staff from Xerox were hired, ideas were improved on, GUI metaphors were thought out. Drag and Drop wasn't invented by Xerox for example, Apple created that. If you read even Job's biography, those at Xerox get the credit for the mouse and the GUI.
As for the smartphone, Apple never said they invented the smartphone, just they made a leapfrog product.
Re:ho snap htc bought the wrong warchest (Score:3, Informative)
Who have Apple sued regarding multitouch?
http://mashable.com/2010/10/30/apple-motorola-lawsuit/ [mashable.com]
Motorola shot first.
Re:Anyone actually use this ? (Score:5, Informative)
On Android, S3TC (= DXT) is the texture compression format of choice for Nvidia GPUs (= all Tegra-based devices). The default texture compression format (ETC) is not as nice-looking, and does not support alpha.
On iOS, you're right, S3TC/DXT is not used, because the GPUs in these devices are made by a company named Imagination Technologies (I elieve they bought powerVR some time ago), who does not own a S3TC license. Instead, they have their own proprietary format called PVRTC (two variants, 2bits per pixel and 4bpp), that their GPUs can read and process instead of DXT textures.
As for no one using them, this is completely wrong: 3D games on mobile devices (think Shadowgun, Rage, Dungeon Defenders, Inifinty Blade...) all use compressed textures because otherwise the size of the assets would be significantly larger than it already is (think much longer download times and much higher bandwidth cost), and the GPU performance would be significantly lower (uncompressed textures occupy more space in video memory and their processing consumes more GPU bandwidth).
Re:Like ITC will find in favor of a Taiwanese comp (Score:5, Informative)
When did that happen for the last time in known history? ITC has one purpose only -- to protect US companies from competition.
It will come back to bite them eventually. Other companies are doing the same like getting apple banned in Taiwan [google.com]. By setting up this framework of protectionism now they will suffer when being banned in China becomes worse for multinationals than being banned in the USA
The article you are linking to actually talks about banning APPLES (the fruit) imported from the US in Taiwan. You probably wanted to refer to the ban of selling some Apple products in South Korea, which is seeked by Samsung. This ban, however, did not happen so far it seems.
Re:ho snap htc bought the wrong warchest (Score:5, Informative)
According to your own link, that phone wasn't sold in Feb 2007, it was only announced then. It wasn't sold until Nov 2007. For the iPhone, the equivalent dates are Jan 2007 and Jun 2007. So no, it certainly does not predate the iPhone, either for announcement or shipping. Though the closeness of the timing indicates they overlapped in development periods.
As to similarity, the phone is a black rounded rectangle, but that's where the similarity stops. The UI is nothing like the iPhone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c1fc8120hA [youtube.com]
It's interesting to watch actually because this was designed to be a cutting edge UI, and would have been accepted as such, had the iPhone not come out. The iPhone UI was so much better - a generation ahead.
Re:ho snap htc bought the wrong warchest (Score:5, Informative)
That is why Google just gave HTC 9 new patents [pcmag.com] that originated at Motorola, Openwave Systems and Palm. And if those don't work, Google has another 17,000 patents thanks to its Motorola acquisition. In the end, either the patent system will break down (imagine those 17,000 patents being invalidated), or Apple is going to have to deal with the fact that it can't block competing products from the marketplace using patents. With the patent system, you only need one win with a non-workaroundable patent to be able to block a competing product. And once you get that, you can negotiate on a more level playing field.
"A government that is powerful enough to block your competitor's products from the market is powerful enough to block your products from the market".
Re:ho snap htc bought the wrong warchest (Score:5, Informative)
Apple sued HTC in March 2010 [pcmag.com] From that article:
"Of note are the patents Apple asserted in its Delaware filing: one, patent 7,657,849, covers multitouch gestures, but only in a limited use case - unlocking the phone. The second, number 7,479,949, covers multitouch heuristics to determine how a device should interpret multitouch input, and was patented by Steve Jobs himself as well as a number of other co-assignees. The other patents in question are number 7,362,331, covering moving objects within a GUI; 7,469,381, covering list scrolling; 5,920,726, covering the management and recovery of a power failure by a digital camera; 7,633,076, covering how a device senses what a user is doing via the use of multiple sensors; 5,848,105, a co-channel filtering patent; 7,383,453, covering the conservation of power by a voltage reduction to the instruction portion of the processor; 5,455,599, an object-oriented graphical system, and 6,424,354, an event notification system for propagating object-change information."