The ITC has ruled in the Apple vs. HTC software patent case, and it’s pretty damning for the Cupertino software patent and gadget company. Out of the four asserted software patents, HTC was only found to infringe one (some nonsense about formatting phone numbers in emails or whatever) – and HTC has already stated an update to circumvent the software patent is ready. Update: A remarkable case of prior art was found – but probably too late.
Showing your bias again. Apple made it clear that they have patented the technologies in the iPhone and were going to protect it.
Apple doesn’t seem to be doing all that well. For all their patents they are unable to keep the competition at bay. They just lost a crap load of money to Samsung in Australia for banning the Tab. Most other cases Apple is either losing or winning hollow victories.
Exactly, which makes the 900+ articles Thom has posted on this subject totally meaningless. In the end, three got thrown out, and the other is being worked around… the exact same thing that would’ve happened had he posted 0 articles about it.
Until software patents are made illegal they are the biggest threat to technical progress and therefore the biggest news item.
Where’s the bias? What’s factually wrong about this short blurb?
Come, now. As big of a supporter as I am of your work, surely you can see that you’ve interpreted a court verdict in a way here that’s particularly unflattering to Apple. Someone else might point out that that patent has now been tested and that Apple can credibly threaten to enforce it against others, which would be a genuine victory. The reinforcement of small UI differentiations like this add up to an overall reinforcement of Apple’s position.
Not that I disagree with your interpretation 😉 It’s not the slam dunk that Apple was probably hoping for against HTC. Nor do I particularly think that you are “biased” against Apple, and I think it’s silly to claim that someone’s being biased if time and again he approaches the subject very critically and time and again he finds the subject being investigated guilty of being idiotic.
But the tone of your blurb was nevertheless a little vindictive. I personally wouldn’t call the verdict “damning” or “meaningless”.
You can’t patent obvious ideas. It must be non-obvious. I probably have a TSR I wrote way back when that did something very similar. It’s easy to parse a phone number for God’s sake.