Taiwan University Sues Apple Over Siri Patents 138
Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters is reporting that Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University has filed a suit against Apple claiming patent infringement by the Siri voice-recognition software. At issue are two patents dating to 2007 and 2010. From the article: 'The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, on Friday, it said. "We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher," said Yama Chen, legal manager of National Cheng Kung, in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan.'"
This just in, US patent system is broken and abuse (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, good for them! (Score:5, Insightful)
It is nice when ugly corporations get hoisted by their own sack.
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Sure, but the 'little guy' i.e. smaller businesses still get screwed by an unjust system.
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I don't think I have ever owned anything by Apple. I disliked their whole apporach to music and stayed away from iTunes. Never touched a piece of iCrap.
Live by the patent, die by the patent (Score:1)
And so it goes
At least they are honest about it. (Score:5, Funny)
"We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher..."
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I just said the same thing aloud. There is something worth noting here about full disclosure of intent that the rest of the 'civilized' world should have learned a long time ago.
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It's not actually true, though. The Eastern District of Texas is not the fastest district for patent cases. Virginia Eastern and Wisconsin Western are both significantly faster (29 months to jury trial versus 12 and 13 months, respectively). Nor are its rulings "usually" (i.e. more often than not) in favor of patent owners. These days it's about average, relative to other popular patent litigation districts.
And given the change in the law of venue I'd be surprised if the case stayed in Texas Eastern. N
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Faster, not fastest. At least as I understood it he was talking about a reason why they chose Texas over - for example - California, where Apple is based. (disclosure: I haven't RTFA'd yet, or know how often California judges in favour of patent holders)
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"That section" includes more than just the xenophobic parts, since the district extends all the way down to the outskirts of Houston and far enough west to a few other large cities in Texas. Plus, most of these cases are decided by Presidentially-appointed judges, not by local juries, which would render the concern moot.
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Does that hold true when the patent owner is not American?
That section of Texas tends to be a little xenophobic.
Assuming that to be true, which I'm not willing to grant, I'm expecting the lawyers to be middle-aged white men from Texas. I doubt that even the most racist jury would even notice.
Can two wrongs make a right? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Chinese patent trolls will eventually alert US patent supporters to how stupid the system is.
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As long as the Chinese patent trolls are hiring US lawyers to do their suing in the US courts they're contributing to the US (legal) economy and all's good, yes?
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Re:taiwan != china (Score:5, Informative)
ROC = Republic of China = Democratic China = Taiwan
PRC = People's Republic of China = Communist China = Mainland China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas [wikipedia.org]. Prior to 1971 "China" was the ROC in the UN, it is now the PRC...
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Two sovereign states with the name "China" exist.
ROC = Republic of China = Democratic China = Taiwan
PRC = People's Republic of China = Communist China = Mainland China
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Chinas [wikipedia.org]. Prior to 1971 "China" was the ROC in the UN, it is now the PRC...
I don't think Taiwan is sovereign. At least, I don't think that word means what you think it means.
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The arrangement with China is pretty much you ignore us and we'll ignore you.
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You don't and China (PRC) doesn't, but Taiwan considers itself sovereign, and says so to the extent it can without provoking PRC into a more military form of rebuttal.
US seems to be staying on the fence on the issue.
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Thanks to Dick Nixon. The U.S. still has a military treaty for defense of Taiwan in case the potentates in the PRC's Communist Party attempt to make themselves look like a bigger group of f-ckups by attacking Taiwan. Sooner or later, I think they will make the attempt but only after it is sufficiently clear the U.S. cannot stop them. Taiwan's democracy makes China look bad, so it will have to go.
Re:taiwan != china (Score:5, Informative)
The other problem China has with Taiwan is that the hatred between the Chiang (whose forces occupied Taiwan) and Mao was strong enough that neither could accept the existence of the other. Prior to Chiang's occupation of Taiwan Mao made a statement supporting independence from Japan for Taiwan. But once Chiang moved to Taiwan, Taiwan suddenly became important to Mao. After 60 years of propaganda about how important it is to take Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party looks bad to their ultra-nationalists by their failure to do so, and even moderating their tone on the issue is difficult.
US law requires that we sell Taiwan such defensive weapons as it needs, based purely on need and not on consultation with China. Neither US law nor treaty requires the US to defend Taiwan. Instead the US has to consider it a "grave" concern. It is deliberately ambiguous so that the US can dissuade both sides from launching hostilities with a certain expectation of how the US will respond.
Re:taiwan != china (Score:4, Interesting)
Taiwan is de facto sovereign. The only non-sovereign part about Taiwan is that due to pressures by the PRC govt, most of the International community do not recognize Taiwan/ROC's sovereignty (over the island generally known as "Taiwan").
It's a over-complicated issue though, and really depends on who you're talking to, and whether you're trying to be factually correct or politically correct....
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The "Republic of China" is a "China" in the same way that the "Chinese Communist Party" is "Communist" and the same way that the "United States of America" consists of states. It started out that way, but it isn't anymore.
The USA no longer consists of independent states, the Chinese Communist Party is no longer communist, and the Republic of China" is no longer China.
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Sorry, but this is pretty silly. The US does still consist of semi-independent states. No, they're not as independent as they were under the Articles of Confederation, or as independent as they were pre-Civil War. They're not as independent as the nations that comprise the EU either, from what I can tell. However, they are a lot more independent than, say, the states that form modern Germany.
There's a lot of legal things that differ drastically between different US states. Gun laws, for instance, are v
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1. Any dispute as to what rights the state has are settled by the Federal Government. In other words, the states only have the rights the FG says they have.
2. If the states don't like the decision of the FG, they cannot leave (as you mentioned - 1861 to 1865).
3. Even on the question of limited sovereignty, the states lose. If you don't like the way your state treats you on any given issue, you can appeal to the FG. The FG may let the state have th
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You're being pedantic. I never said they were sovereign; obviously they are not. But the ARE semi-independent. If you disagree, then you must be using a different definition of "semi-independent" than I am. To me, having a country where you're allowed to walk around with a gun on you hip in one place, but would cause a public panic and go to jail in a neighboring district, meets the definition of "semi-independent". I challenge you to find an "official" definition of "semi-independent".
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Interesting, I didn't think there'd be a definition that related specifically to international affairs, as the term can be used for a lot of things, including auto suspensions.
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I'm sure the university just wishes... (Score:2)
that people would invent their own stuff...
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that people would pay them to invent stuff...
Fixed that for you.
How do ya like them Apples? (Score:1)
(Pun intended.)
This trope is getting old (Score:5, Informative)
I really wish everyone would get over the idea that East Texas is still the best place to file patent suits. It definitely was for about a year in the mid-2000s, but since then it's returned back to within a few percentage points of the national average.
The percentage of patent cases where the plaintiff succeeded at trial was, over the period from 1995-2009, in line with the national average [pwc.com] (66.7% trial success in East Texas vs. 66% nationwide), and by all indications it hasn't changed from that in the last few years (as a point of comparison, Florida Middle District Court had an 80% trial success rate for plaintiffs over that same period). Aside from the one-year blip where plaintiffs won more frequently and the district deservedly earned its reputation, its rates have been at levels that are in line with other district courts. Unfortunately, most people seem to have not caught on to that fact yet (even Wikipedia's sources regarding much of this stuff is several years out of date).
Because of that one year blip being so noteworthy, there is still a mistaken perception that the East Texas courts are plaintiff friendly, but that's all it is now: a perception. In fact, for NPEs (i.e. non-practicing entities, a.k.a. patent trolls), the Florida Middle District and the Delaware District courts had overall success rates (i.e. including summary judgments) that were about 11% and 7% higher, respectively, than East Texas over the period from 1995-2009.
That said, the East Texas courts do make for an ideal venue for trying patent cases, even if they're not as one-sided as people seem to think. The district has faster turnaround times than many other federal districts (which was part of the motivating factor in this particular case), the judges are well-versed in patent cases and have indicated an interest in handling them expeditiously, and there are local laws permitting lawyers from any bar association, not just the Texas bar, from trying their cases there, making it easier to use than some of the other districts.
The fact that the judges are knowledgeable is especially important, because many of the corporations being sued prefer to have their cases tried there, rather than getting them transferred to their home district where an ignorant judge can add a major level of uncertainty to the equation (in fact, in one case involving 112 defendants less than a year ago, the East Texas judge was able to dismiss 99 of the defendants immediately because they weren't infringing and didn't request transfers to other districts). As a result, more cases that start in the district tend to stay in the district than you might otherwise see, creating a larger volume of cases that reach a conclusion. So, not only does it handle more cases, but it also concludes more cases than most of the other district courts.
It's just a shame that people are still perpetuating the idea that it's plaintiff-friendly when it's not, since it sets up East Texas as a distraction and as a scapegoat to vent our frustrations over the patent system whenever a ruling we disagree with comes out of there. The fault isn't theirs any more than it is any other court's. It's the fault of the corporations playing this billion dollar game with each other.
(Note: much of this was pulled from a previous comment of mine [slashdot.org] from February)
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They said it's because : It's faster, and they will be paid an amount of compensation more in line with their loss because the court understands the real value
So according to what you said above their reasons are valid?
They already assume that winning the case if a given...filing in a US court against a US company means they think they have a strong case ...
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They made a third claim that you've conveniently neglected to mention, that "its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners", and that's the one I take issue with. Regarding the other two, that it's faster and that compensation tends to be higher, I have no issues.
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While what you've said is true, the implication in their citing it is that it's somehow noteworthy or different from other district courts, since it was a reason why they chose this court over another one. So even though what they said may have been factual, its implication is anything but.
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I already made this point elsewhere, but the fact that they've chosen to point out the rulings usually being in favor of patent owners suggests that this stands in contrast to other districts, which it does not. So while it is indeed factually true, the implication that it is somehow noteworthy and worth mentioning as a reason for selecting the district is untrue.
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If, due to its notoriety, East Texas attracts more iffy cases, than the win rate being the same as the national average would be a big win for the plaintiff. Now that's an unsubstantiated "if", but the point is that the win rate by itself is insufficient to show that it is not plaintiff friendly due to potential selection bias.
Re:This trope is getting old (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, and essentially in support of your conclusion although contrary to your opening, the Eastern District of Texas - while the margin is narrowing - is still much friendlier to patent plaintiffs than a strong majority of other districts. Or, specifically, it would be more fair to say the E.D.Tex. is not horrendously biased to favor the defendant, like several other districts. Most of it boils down to the Local Patent Rules. For example, E.D.Tex. allows for very liberal amendments of initial infringement contentions. In layman's terms this means that a patent-holder can sue an alleged infringer with "well-formed" suspicion that the defendant's product is allegedly infringing, go into discovery, and then determine the details as to whether or not the product is actually infringing based on evidence. In districts like the Northern District of California, the local patent rules expressly prohibit this behavior, requiring that the plaintiff have essentially absolute proof that the defendant's product is infringing before being able to move to the discovery phase.
While N.D.Cal's strict rules cut down on troll litigation, it does become a problem for plaintiffs when the details of how a defendant's product works is only available to the defendant: for example, closed-source software or secret formulas or recipes not available to the public. While software patents aren't treated well here on Slashdot, what this would allow someone to do is to copy line for line someone else's code, resell it, and then have total immunity in the Northern District of California from patent infringement (and good luck proving copyright infringement when you don't have access to the source code...). The Eastern District of Texas (specifically Judge Ward of said district) realized the potential problem for abuse and thus created a standing order to modify the Local Patent Rules and allow for more liberal discovery. Good for plaintiffs (troll and honest) who are attempting to prove infringement, bad for defendants (honest and infringing) who now lose shelter and have to deal with costly discovery.
The problem is two-fold. First, the dichotomy between local patent rules across federal districts completely destroys the concept of "one body of federal law." It encourages forum shopping, which is exactly what we're seeing here where a plaintiff chooses where to file suit in a place most favorable to him (thus theoretically unbalancing the concept of a fair and impartial trial). Second, it encourages patent trolls to flock to a district and abuse the system. In a perfect world, discovery would be allowed and initial infringement contentions could be modified, but anyone found to be patent trolling would be liable for attorney's fees and damages if discovery proved senseless litigation or the patent was invalidated (or hell, I'd just make a rule where you have to actually manufacture the patented product to have a claim for damages... none of this treating IP like physical property where you have an arbitrary right to exclude). In reality, it causes people to see the ratking of patent trolls form in E.D.Tex, and everyone blames the system there for supporting patent trolls and praises draconian districts like N.D.Cal for arbitrarily (and contrary to federal mandate) favoring defendants.
As more patent trolls flood in, the win-margin is narrowing, because even the Eastern District of Texas tires of senseless lawsuits. But the rules are still much more favorable to plaintiffs in those districts, and any patent lawyer worth his salt is going to find a way to establish personal jurisdiction in that district.
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I just wanted to say thanks, even if you are contradicting something I said. Yours is just a great response, and it's one of my small pleasures in life to have people respond as thoughtfully and carefully to something I've said as you did, since I love having my misconceptions corrected or having additional information provided for something I've said. Comments like yours are why I come to Slashdot. :)
Thanks again.
(Just in case: this is not sarcastic. I'm being sincere.)
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Federal cases should be assigned to courts via lottery; more fair, equally inconvenient for both parties.
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If you follow the link to the source I cited, I believe it covers settlements as well if you would like to conduct your own research on the matter.
if you settle one, others will come... (Score:1)
It all started with Apple settling name dispute over iPad with Chinese company. That set the precedence for other East Asian companies to follow the suit. There was already suit for Chinese "snow leopard" name, some other bogus one, and now this... I am not siding with any side, but that sounds like leaching on potentially easy settlement money...
Applicable sayings (Score:2, Insightful)
"What goes around comes around"
"Karma's a bitch"
can't even keep patent troll jobs local? (Score:3)
So now we've even outsourced our patent trolls? When will it end.
that said, this could get interesting, and lets go super conspiracy theory.
Patent troll sues Apple, Apple "settles" which gives legitimacy to said patent troll.
Patent troll uses that legitimacy to get injunctions against all other smart phones that use voice.
Apple wins.
Damn it.
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If you consider Apple a patent troll (some on slashdot do), then yes a university can be considered a patent troll too. But only if you consider Apple a patent troll.
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Since I couldn't find the actual patents in my 45 seconds of looking, (yes I'm lazy) I'm not sure if they are what I would consider "valid" patents or more of the blatant "on a phone" type patents.
I also did zero research to see what NCKU was, and whether it was a "proper uni" or if it was a "for profit" type uni.
BUT to me, a patent troll is someone that has a patent for 5 years, does nothing with it, then sues someone that made a successful device. Once more information is available, maybe the joke won't
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"And we will buy our mansions with it." (Score:1)
> "We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes
> faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and
> the compensations are usually higher,""
Holy bloviators, Dark Knight! A lawyer who told the undistorted truth!
That was silly (Score:2)
Oh, well, it was fun while it lasted.
Easy win for Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer: I'm not a patent lawyer, but I do know a thing or two about speech recognition. I've only read the summaries of the patents, but they don't seem to cover anything that Siri or any other sensible speech recogniser system does.
Patent 7,266,496 (from 2007) is about a complete speech recogniser on a chip. This couldn't be further from Siri, which sends the audio data to the cloud to be recognised. The four "modules" that the patent covers are bog-standard. Patent 7,707,032 (from 2010) describes a silly way of doing speech recognition (by comparing with individual training samples) and is unrelated to any modern commercial speech recogniser.
This is just some Taiwanese university hoping for two minutes of fame and a settlement. They seem to be getting their fame, but they're not going to see any money.
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[Do over with my real user name - I hate being anonymous]
You are correct. And, not only is the '496 patent about an ASIC implementation of ASR, but it also uses the same ancient dynamic time warping approach to matching as does the '032. What is more, there is no chance at all that the plaintiff could have the slightest reason to believe that Apple (really, Nuance/Dragon) is using this approach. This case should be tossed out immediately.
The problem with our patent system is not the idea of "intellectual pr
This should be interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
The normal defence for companies being sued for patent infringement is to find a breach of their own patent portfolio by the suer's products, then settle out of court.
It kindof assumes that the entity bringing the case makes commercial products themselves. Entities that don't are basically untouchable, which is why patent trolls avoid selling actual products.
Its going to be very hard for apple to find a quid-pro-quo breach by a university.
In response, Apple said: (Score:2)
I don't know what you mean by "pat ant in fringe meant." Would you like to search the web for 'picture of a stallion'? [youtube.com]
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Keep in mind that this is a US company being sued in a US court by a company from Taiwan. Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit; I'm sure they're not very worried about this.
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit
Nothing like half a story, eh? Or maybe you're genuinely not aware, but the accusation of 'borrowing' now seems well wide of the mark. Google "iPhone Purple prototype" if you haven't seen the designs that pre-date the Sony-inspired images.
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple recently had the fact that their iPhone design was 'borrowed' from Sony suppressed in their Samsung lawsuit
Nothing like half a story, eh? Or maybe you're genuinely not aware, but the accusation of 'borrowing' now seems well wide of the mark. Google "iPhone Purple prototype" if you haven't seen the designs that pre-date the Sony-inspired images.
Well, it's a good damn thing Sony doesn't prototype their products prior to releasing them then isn't it!
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That wouldn't matter unless Apple got their hands on Sony's prototype pre-dating their own prototype. If Sony had a prototype, but Apple had no way to know what it looked like when they developed theres, then their point still stands.
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:5, Insightful)
No point based on design patents ever stands. The concept itself is broken, even if it didn't have the worldwide chiilling effect that it does.
Adoption of ever-better human interfaces should be encouraged, not dissuaded. Treating them as proprietary is the biggest conceptual idiocy in the history of Man.
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As I have come to believe it is actually THE SAME conceptual idiocy. Consider what "organised religion" is all about.
Before organised religion there were groups of people, who now and then came up with rules and stuff to make living easier. Then "organizers" came along that took that rules, made them more and more complex until nobody understood them any more and everybody needed "high priests" to explain them and "oracles" to divine the will of the gods, which they only gave if the people paid them tribute
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Prior art work may here because of how it was disclosed, I don't see commercial in confidence written at the bottom of the design and divulging it to Apple can be seen as publicly disclosing information.
The only defense is if NDAs were imposed and how those NDAs were used. Lastly, it was a Sony employee designing the prototype and giving it too Apple, if Apple said f-off we don't need you, it can be construed as Apple screwing a supplier.
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I don't think that you've understood the situation at all.
Try googling. Or read this article: http://www.idownloadblog.com/2012/07/30/purple-iphone-2005-prototype/
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Patents are supposed to be for "non-obvious" inventions- things which you can be reasonably sure someone else in the field wouldn't come up with in the same circumstances.
If Apple and Sony (not to mention LG with the Prada Phone) all came up with identical designs independently at almost exactly the same time, that's a pretty strong statement that the patent is "obvious" and shouldn't be allowed.
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Patents are supposed to be for "non-obvious" inventions- things which you can be reasonably sure someone else in the field wouldn't come up with in the same circumstances.
"Same circumstances" doesn't apply. Otherwise, simply being tasked with inventing something would generally make it non-patentable, as someone else in the same circumstances would likely end up inventing something quite similar. Or, the other extreme: everything is patentable on a narrow enough scale since no two people think identically.
Simplistically, it's supposed to be patentable when you get an "average" person (not everyone, especially not those at the brightest end, just a "reasonable skill level")
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Except they didn't come up with identical designs. Apple and Sony is over the iPad and the Galaxy not the phone. And the Prada and the iPhone aren't similar. The only meaningful way they are similar is they both used full sized capacitive touchscreen and no one argues that either Apple nor LG invented that.
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two words: prior art
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It hardly matters whether Apple borrowed from anybody. What matters is that Apple's claim that the iPhone design is in any way unusual or unobvious is bogus.
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How so? Apple's design for the iPhone circa half a decade ago came at a time when phones had slide-out keyboards and buttons. My Cliq has volume up/down, power, camera, and on the front at the bottom a menu/home/back set. Newer Android phones are all suddenly super thin, no physical keyboard, menu-home-back is pretty integral to the Andorid interface though. Some have eschewed camera, most use volume down to enter the bootloader and boot a recovery system.
Everyone's trying to eliminate physical buttons
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There were plenty of touch screen phones and PDAs without physical keyboards long before iPhone came out. Many Windows Mobile phones and PDAs were designed that way, as were Palm devices. Getting rid of the stylus and keyboards wasn't some grand insight of Steve Jobs, it was just driven by cheaper and bigger LCD screens and better touch screens. Palm software was increasingly finger driven long before the iPhone.
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Palm devices were not designed that way at all. Not remotely. They didn't even have capacitive touchscreens. They most certainly did not have a GUI based on animations. And they generally didn't use real time web interactions. In all 3 major regards that the iPhone was unique the Palm did the opposite.
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A lot of software on Palm (and Windows Mobile) used finger touch on resistive displays because people (like me) were too lazy to pull out the pen.
They most certainly had lots of animations in their GUIs.
They had web browsers, chat, background updating, and tons more stuff. Heck, most p
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So? Did I say the iPhone was a clone of Palms? Apple copied liberally from all major vendors: Nokia, Windows Mobile, and Palm
Let me just stop you here. If Apple produced a unique combination of existing technologies in a way that would work better, that's insight and... that's patentable. I don't have to have invented either the transistor or the radio to be able to patent the transistor radio. The only question would be whether everyone in the radio would have obviously seen the applicability of the t
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Combinations of known features are not patentable unless the combination represent technical innovation.
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Combinations of known features are not patentable unless the combination represent technical innovation.
The word "innovation" gets used here to mean something that almost never happens in human history. Unique insight is the criteria for the law.
Apple keeps patenting the equivalent "a radio built out of transistors", a concept that was obvious and that was the whole point of developing transistors
It was obvious then why didn't other people do it before Apple? I look at Android and I see far too many t
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No, Samsung had the internal memo that people hate the stylus and we need to get rid of the stylus. It's what destroyed the viability of PDAs and nerfed what became smartphones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuwrWHKraQ8 [youtube.com] Microsoft's "Transcriber" handwriting recognition on Windows CE/Pocket PC 6 on Compaq iPaq was better than this, but this is good. I used to scribble a whole cellphone-sized 3 inch screen with chicken scratch, and it could tell what it was. The AI involved is sort of a voting system, a k
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Yes, everybody hated the stylus. That's why it was obvious that people wanted to get rid of it, and as soon as screens became big enough, they did! Apple had nothing to do with it, they just jumped on the bandwagon, after other people had already started getting rid of the stylus.
You can get handwriting recognition for Android, but why would you want to? Swype or its clones are faster and more accurate.
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Swype has never, ever worked anything close to well for me. I hate it. Similarly, fat-fingering a 5mm wide on-screen button with my 20mm wide digit as a stylus.
Transcriber I could scribble fast. Not as fast as I can type on a Dvorak keyboard, but I sure as hell can't screw with a touch screen keyboard like a real, physical keyboard of any layout. The physical keyboard on my Cliq was better, and Transcriber is faster than that.
Transcriber didn't have an error rate measured in percent. It had an error
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Transcriber was an early version of Calligrapher. You can get a new and improved version of Calligrapher for Android and use it with a pen on something like the Galaxy Note. Transcriber and Calligrapher both use dictionaries. Reviews for Calligrapher (which is already much improved over Transcriber) are generally poor http://tinyurl.com/bmblkxs [tinyurl.com]
It's nice that it works for you, but for most people, Swiftkey or Swype seem to be the keyboards of choice. And your ideas of how it works are... imaginative.
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Actually, CalliGrapher was acquired by Microsoft in 1999.
My ideas of how Swype works are not imaginative. It works by moving your finger from A, to P, to L, to E. Somehow it figures out PP instead of one P. Because A, P, L, and E are on fixed positions in the screen, the symbol you must draw must be of a specific shape, size, orientation, and position. Shift it down-right and you get ';sve' which is nonsense, yet it's the exact same shape traced across a QWERTY keymap.
In the end, you're learning to d
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:5, Interesting)
People suing Apple isn't exactly a *NEW* thing. It's actually been quite steady or so (one every week or so) the past decade or more.
Heck, Creative sued Apple about a decade ago over the use of categories to help find music (Artist/Album/Genre/etc) on the iPod way back when. (I believe Apple settled, in exchange for a pile of stuff Creative was to make to support the iPod or so). Ditto Sony and others.
It's actually unusual to have Apple NOT being sued by someone or other on a weekly basis.
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No, they expect YOU to follow YOUR rules. Companies from China don't take US rules seriously when they're creating products for sale in China, since US laws don't apply in China. They follow US rules for products selling in the US, and expect the local companies to do the same. Just like they follow Chinese rules in China, and expect foreign companies to do the same.
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They're not my rules, I don't live in the US.
Re:Goose, Meet Gander (Score:5, Informative)
This is Taiwan, not PRC China. Situation is very different there.
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1, Infinite Loop indeed.
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I want to know !!
It's Tom Cruse and Katie Holmes daughter, right?
Re: (Score:1)
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I call Poe's Law
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Normally universities do research and don't develop a thechnology to production quality. For this they either do spin-offs or licensing. And apple didn't license the patents.
I am more interested if someone here checked the patents in question have any merits?
Another question is should a (presumely public funded) university patent its inventions at all?