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Patents Apple

Apple Counter-Sues Nokia Over Patents 137

adeelarshad82 writes "About two months ago Nokia sued Apple for infringing Nokia patents in its iPhone. The 10 patents in the lawsuit, filed in the US state of Delaware, relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (LAN) standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. In the latest development to the case, Apple said Friday that it had filed its own suit against Nokia, countering Nokia's claims of patent infringement with its own."
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Apple Counter-Sues Nokia Over Patents

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11, 2009 @05:59PM (#30407536)

    Digital Daily has posted a list of the patents at issue here and the full text of Apple's counterclaims [allthingsd.com] -- which are pretty brutal. "Excerpt: In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. The iPhone is a converged device that allows users to access and ever expanding set of software features to take and send pictures, play music, play games do research, serve as a GPS device and much more.The iPhone platform has caused a revolutionary change in the mobile phone category.

    In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces. As a result, Nokia has rapidly lost share in the market for high-end mobile phones. Nokia has admitted that, as a result of the iPhone launch, “the market changed suddenly and [Nokia was] not fast enough changing with it.

    In response, Nokia chose to copy the iPhone, especially its enormously popular and patented design and user interface."

  • Re:Just a small part (Score:5, Informative)

    by jpmorgan ( 517966 ) on Friday December 11, 2009 @06:11PM (#30407658) Homepage

    Not really. Apple has only been in the cell phone business for a few years... Nokia is a granddaddy. If you look at the patents Apple is saying that Nokia is infringing, they're comparatively minor. Let's look at the patents...

    No. 5,555,369: Method of creating packages for a pointer-based computer system
    No. 6,239,795 B1: Pattern and color abstraction in a graphical user interface
    No. 5,315,703: Object-oriented notification framework system
    No. 6,189,034 B1: Method and apparatus for dynamic launching of a teleconferencing application upon receipt of a call
    No. 7,469,381, B2: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display
    No. RE 39, 486 E: Extensible, replaceable network component system
    No. 5,455,854: Object-oriented telephony system
    No. 5, 379,431: Boot framework architecture for dynamic staged initial program load
    No. 5,634,074 : Serial I/O device identifies itself to a computer through a serial interface during power on reset then it is being configured by the computer
    No. 5,915,131 : Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services
    No. 7,383,453 B2: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor
    No. 5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality
    No. 6,343,263 B1 : Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data

    Mostly we're talking fluffy software patents. The last few are potentially meaty, but given how little time Apple has been in this business, and how recent these were filed and granted, they're probably pretty specific (although I don't have the time to pick through the actual claims). Worst case scenario for Nokia is probably, they pull their smartphones from the US market for 6 months while they work around them. And the US smartphone market is a minor part of Nokia's business.

    But Nokia... Nokia has patents on just about every wireless technology known to man. Worst case scenario for Apple is they can cancel the iPhone and put an ethernet jack in the next MacBook Air.

  • by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Friday December 11, 2009 @06:14PM (#30407696) Journal
    Meh. ATD is historically very fanboyish on Apple.

    I don't trust that site for unbiased analysis of anything Apple, though to be fair -- at times his product reviews have been honest.
  • Re:Resolution (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ma8thew ( 861741 ) on Friday December 11, 2009 @06:20PM (#30407762)
    Not likely. The reason Nokia is suing Apple is that Apple refused to mutual licensing. Apple presumably wanted to pay the same licensing fee all other mobile manufacturers do, but Nokia wanted to swap their patents for Apple's.
  • Re:Resolution (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11, 2009 @06:34PM (#30407912)

    For the bazillionth time... Apple didn't patent multi-touch. The patented certain multitouch gestures

  • by r_jensen11 ( 598210 ) on Friday December 11, 2009 @07:59PM (#30408786)

    That quote is not surprising, considering that military service is compulsory in Finland. It's tantamount to being surprised that there is a strong correlation of people who do well in business performed well in school.

  • by jipn4 ( 1367823 ) on Friday December 11, 2009 @09:03PM (#30409328)

    Apple introduced the iPhone a ground-breaking device that allowed users access to the functionality of the already popular iPod on a revolutionary mobile phone and Internet device. [...] In contrast, Nokia made a different business decision and remained focused on traditional mobile wireless handsets with conventional user interfaces.

    Nokia had smartphones and touch screen devices long before the iPhone even existed. Much of the iPhone is basically derived from the Palm Treo, the Danger Hiptop, Symbian, and the ideas of countless small developers and academics. Instead of acknowledging their enormous intellectual debt to all these other companies and developers, Apple is claiming to have done it all themselves.

    The iPhone has been engineered with the usual Apple gimmicks and flair, but technically, it is not a ground-breaking device in any area. But, as is typical for Apple, first the rip everybody off, and then they claim that they are the aggrieved party. They tried the same thing with the GUI and window systems and lost badly. Apple is truly evil.

  • by DurendalMac ( 736637 ) on Friday December 11, 2009 @09:41PM (#30409672)
    Apparently some people get the opposite effect from Jobs' reality distortion field. Let's see here...

    Mach: It's open source. So long as Apple abides by the license (which they do), there is no possible way they can "steal" it.
    Objective-C: Apple is far from the only ones to have an Obj-C language. And the funny thing is that NeXT was the first company to license it, which Apple later purchased. Yep, obtaining a license certainly equates to theft!
    MP3 Players: Are you fucking serious? Apple was far from the first to make an MP3 player. They were simply the most successful. Holy crap, Sony ripped off the inventor of the wax cylinder by making the Walkman!
    Multitouch: Apple purchased Fingerworks, who had developed a number of multitouch technologies and interfaces. Again, buying is stealing?
    The App Store: You can't possibly be fucking serious.
    Song recommendations: See above. You mean they can recommend something based on something else you bought? WOW, they stole that...from the rest of the ENTIRE FUCKING INDUSTRY.
    Phone cameras: Holy. Fucking. Shit. I'm not even going to address this.

    Words cannot describe just how incredibly stupid you really are.
  • by Atypical Geek ( 1466627 ) on Saturday December 12, 2009 @03:10AM (#30411776)
    You do realize that those are Apple's patents, right? Nokia actually holds patents on nearly every wireless technology known to man.
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 12, 2009 @06:11AM (#30412334)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by rochrist ( 844809 ) on Saturday December 12, 2009 @02:18PM (#30415708)

    You mean the lawsuit that Microsoft won, by proving that their product was built differently from Apple's and did not duplicate or resemble any Apple code? It is widely known that Apple and Microsoft both borrowed their windowing OS concepts from Xerox.

    Uh, no. Apple /purchased/ what they got from Xerox with stock. It's kind of time this urban myth died.

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