Typo Keyboard For iPhone Faces Sales Ban 205
time_lords_almanac (3527081) writes "BlackBerry is trying to put the kibosh on the Typo, a physical keyboard attachment for iPhone. And they've won the first round, in the form of a sales ban on the attachment. From the article: '"BlackBerry is pleased that its motion for a preliminary injunction against Typo Products LLC was granted. This ruling will help prevent further injury to BlackBerry from Typo's blatant theft of our patented keyboard technology," a spokeswoman for BlackBerry told the news agency in an email.'"
patented keyboard technology? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because, you know, physical keyboards are such an advancing field.... I can't imagine how awful keyboards would be with out BlackBerry's patented technology.
Fuck BlackBerry (Score:0, Interesting)
BlackBerry failed to keep up with the rest of the world... I wish they would just die with a little grace and accept that they world will be better off without them bitching and whining as they slowing fade into a painful memory.
Re:So what's the problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Beveled Keys have been in use since the HP 35 calculator. The HP35 was HP's very first calculator and the first iterations only had printing on a few of the keys -- the rest of the key designations were printed on the board the keys protruded through. The HP41 (early to mid 1980's) had a full alphabet keyboard as well as punctuation and all the keys were beveled. As I understand the patent, it should be thrown out due to prior art or at least obviousness since all the HP keys were beveled."
There exists a thing called a "design patent" which prevents others from copying your style. I could be wrong, but I suspect that is what is at issue here.
Re:Quick, Slashdotters! (Score:4, Interesting)
After playing the role of plaintiff in multiple patent lawsuits concerning relatively miniscule design innovations, the double-edged sword that is the US patent system is now seemingly also willing to slice the apple.
Perhaps the only hope for reform of the patent system relies on it becoming inconvenient even for it's former proponents?
Re:How dare they make the user experience better (Score:2, Interesting)
A spectacular example of backward thinking. If the government took its grimy hands off, it wouldn't be PROMOTING anything; it would remove an artificial suppression of free trade.
Re:patented keyboard technology? (Score:4, Interesting)
BB did have a patent on the angled keys that they sued Palm over back in the late 90's. It actually is a fairly innovative design that optimizes the direction of the bevel on each key based on the kinematics of your thumbs so that the keys act much larger than they are (if they actually cloned it correctly). It has also become sort of a mark of BB (both because of the exclusivity and the general unpopularity of portrait QWERTY layouts), so I guess that might even be grounds after the patent expires (which has to be coming up soon ...).
Re:How dare they make the user experience better (Score:2, Interesting)
The result is that by elimination of dominated strategies, the best strategy in a world without patents is to not actually come up with anything new, but instead to just copy what everyone else is doing, as it gets you the same result with much lower cost.
It's not an unreasonable first guess, but that turns out to actually not be how people behave [ted.com] when the constraints are lifted.