Samsung Beats Apple In Tokyo, Itching To Sue Over LTE Patents 221
AmiMoJo writes "A court in Tokyo has ruled that Samsung Electronics did not infringe on a patent relating to transferring media content between devices. Tokyo District Judge Tamotsu Shoji dismissed the case filed by Apple in August, finding that Samsung was not in violation of Apple patents related to synchronizing music and video data between devices and servers."
This particular battle is just one front in a patent war that spans ten countries and dozens of cases. Samsung also confirmed it was ready and willing to sue Apple if an LTE iPhone ever hits the market. Meanwhile, Apple was granted a number of new patents on Tuesday, including one for changing settings on a wireless device depending on its location (#8,254,902). For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
Apple patents useful Android apps (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like an interesting strategy for Apple to protect the reputation of their restricted development platform by patenting technologies that are already used in Android applications which demonstrate clearly the benefit of a more open approach. Sadly the patent will probably hold up, as the first public release of Locale seems to have been in October 2008, 3 - 4 months after the Apple patent was filed. The patent application would have still been non-public at that point, so rather than the Locale developers copying Apple, I suspect both were inspired by the same presentation from somewhere; Apple's approach was to patent the ideas they'd got from elsewhere and sit on it, the Android approach was to make an app and get it out there.
Re:People Should Read, then Post (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see here.
Base station could be a PC, right?
Settings could be any setting in the "Settings" menu, right?
Then I have already implemented Apple's patent with Tasker and a computer with a Bluetooth radio. When my Android phone is in range of my desktop PC (which can be detected with Bluetooth), I toggle developer mode on. What exactly is different with Apple's implementation, other than Apple probably using proprietary devices and protocols?
Re:Is this over the same patents? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is incorrect. The fact that there was pinch-to-zoom 20 years ago, means that the Apple implementation is not a new, novel, non-obvious idea. If it was new, novel and non-obvious, the concept wouldn't have existed before. You're making the same mistake that the jury foreman made, thinking that each part has to be interchangeable in order to qualify as prior art. As this [groklaw.net] Groklaw article clearly points out, that's simply not the case.
The fact that the exact methodology used by the touch screens is different, doesn't mean that the idea didn't exist 20 years ago. Not only that, but pinch to zoom is about as obvious a method to zoom in when you have a tiny touch screen as there is.
Re:People Should Read, then Post (Score:5, Interesting)
hell, my old phone used to connect to a device in my car that used a wireless setting to automatically change the device so that voice would come out the car speakers, and provide a settings control on the dash that I could use to accept or break calls.
But that was only on a featurephone, so I guess the Apple patent still applies as it uses the magic words "on a smartphone" :)
Prior art (my prior art) (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, Apple was granted a number of new patents on Tuesday, including one for changing settings on a wireless device depending on its location (#8,254,902). For example, sound and light from the device could be disabled when entering a movie theater, or communications with other devices could be disabled in a science laboratory.
Sorry Apple, I got there first (ad this is just one paper, I began disseminating the work 2003).
Dodd, R., Green, S., and Pearson, E. 2009. User capability in an adaptive world. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGMM international Workshop on Media Studies and Implementations that Help Improving Access To Disabled Users. Beijing, China, October 23 - 23, 2009 pp. 79-88. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1631097.1631110 [acm.org] New York, NY: ACM Press.
Abstract
General computing devices are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, personal, and mobile; and bring expectations of multimedia delivery with them that are traditionally the domain of desktop computing. Given their small form factors with restricted interaction modalities, optimizing interaction between user and device becomes critical to the usability and accessibility of the device. To this end, we present simple but powerful models of user capability, capacity, and preference that allow for a wholly adaptive and optimized user experience, with the models driving selection and configuration of appropriate interaction modalities, and themselves adapting their settings in order to reflect both changes in the environment, and the history of user behaviour . In order to achieve this, user profiles are no longer collections of purely static values, but may also contain functionally dependent properties that are changeable in response to external events. The models themselves do not perform any adaptation, but aim to drive the adaptation process.