“A Floridian Company by the name Operating Systems Solutions, LCC, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple for OS X’s fast booting operation,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple. “The interesting twist to this lawsuit is that the patent was originally owned by LG Electronics.”
“The court’s document on Count 1 states that ‘Apple sells or offers to sell within this district, computer systems, including but not limited to the MacBook Pro, that utilize the Mac OSX operating system that infringes at least claim 1 of the OSS [Operating System Solutions] Patent,'” Purcher reports.
Purcher reports, “The lawsuit specifically states that Apple’s OS X violates ‘at least Claim 1’ of the OSS patent.”
Much more in the full article here.
Don Reisinger reports for CNET, “According to the court filing, Operating Systems Solutions wants injunctive relief. The company is also seeking damages and the immediate ‘destruction [of] all remaining advertisements, circulars, brochures, or other promotional or advertising items, Web site, or other materials for the infringing method.'”
Read more in the full article here.
This crap is getting ridiculous.
“This American Life” had a great broadcast about patent trolls.
just my $0.02
No they didn’t. They had a smug piece of bullshit propaganda pretending to be authoritative and fair for the intellectually stunted leftist crowd that listens to nazi public radio, written by people who don’t understand or know the first thing about patents for people who don’t care to or want to… but who would, rather than consider the issues, just refer to this broadcast as if it was relevant or meaningful.
Funny how Nazis are always calling other people Nazis for not buying into their smug limited world view.
Engineer, you are obviously over on the right, and that makes YOU a Nazi. The left leaning NPR crowd are SOCIALISTS! Get your insults right. 😛
On the subject of patents: while necessary, the structure of our patent system does need reform. Its getting to the point where only massive corporations have the ability to release new products because only they can afford the lawyers necessary to defend themselves in court from the trolls who exist solely to prey on them.
Er, the Nazis were the National SOCIALIST workers party.
Lots of people attach inaccurate labels to things to make them seem more appealing to this or that group. But I guess you are willing to take Hitler’s word on the socialism aspect, huh Mac Daddy? And so you quick to reiterate that label to use as evidence that Nazism is equal to Socialism.
My advice? Go look up the definitions of those terms. If you care about being accurate, then you will make the effort. If you don’t care, then it is not worth my time to make up for the omissions in your education.
@Spiff
+∞
@MacDaddy: that remark alone makes you & your teabaggers complete idiotic fruitcakes!
Moroon.
What makes your comment more meaningful than that of NPR? You haven’t cited any sources, supported your argument, you’ve poisoned the well, used red herring arguments, and even then, called the leftist crowd Nazi when, in fact, by definition, Nazism is invariable far right.
Why is the story linked to CNET instead of Patently Apple which is who broke the story? Weird.
MDN just boldened the link to Patently Apple.
Look, they’re the 2nd biggest company on the exchange now… they’re just going to start getting sued ALL THE TIME now–like Microsoft used to (not trying to equivocate the two, of course).
That 80 billion dollar warchest is handy~
This is not gonna stick because the mac doesn’t have a BIOS:
“The patent reads, “a method for fast booting a computer system, comprising the steps of: A. performing a power on self test (POST) of basic input output system (BIOS) when the system is powered on or reset is requested; B. checking whether a boot configuration information including a system booting state which was created while executing a previous normal booting process exists or not; C. storing the boot configuration information from execution of the POST operation before loading a graphic interface (GUI) program, based on the checking result; and D. loading the graphic user interface (GUI) program.”
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20089381-17/apple-sued-over-speedy-mac-os-x-startup/#ixzz1URYnhuFG
Well, the Mac OS does load a graphic user interface so part D is valid.
On the other hand, Apple does have previous art. The 1984 Mac or the earlier Lisa.
Whether the booting rom code is called a BIOS or not is irrelevant. For the purposes of this patent, the Mac does have a “BIOS”, that’s what the EFI is.
However, this patent is not going to stick because there is prior art: Going back to at least the 1980s, Macs have stored information about previous boots during boot to make booting faster, in fact, the choice of a boot disk in system preferences under OS 7, etc, predate this patent and are prior art for, at least, this claim of the patent.
The thing is, patents aren’t really a problem… this patent wouldn’t last a day in court against Apple.
The story here is that the lawyers trying to sue apple are so clueless that they thought this would stand up.
The patent system is fine because bogus patents like this don’t stand up in court.
Engineer? As screwed up as the patent law is, EFI vs. BIOS does actually matter. If this patent holds (no way this it should), the actual “violator” would be Windows; where a BIOS and registry are actually used. Troll is humping the wrong pant leg. Apple isn’t using this “patent”, Microsoft is.
I remember a story of how ab automobile industry knew of faulty mechanism and yet still sold it cars.
When later they paid off what ever amount was required.
Later on the company stopped selling that model when a whistleblower informed that the company had calculated the profit and loss when sued.
Obviously in their calculation the profit was justifiable .
Perhaps that’s why Apple hoard nearly 40 billion kbowig of the lawsuits to come .
another ihater troll.
What’s next – someone claiming they own the patent for “slow booting”?
That war chest may be handy, but it’s also a magnet for a certain kind of people….
Well, if those pussies are suing Apple for OS X fast booting, then I’m suing because my Macbook doesn’t boot fast! Okay, I installed a SSD and now it boots fast. BTW, did they define “fast”?
Apple should sue them for using the term GUI .
Also, note the company name, Operating Systems Solutions. Yep, OSS. Ominous, yes.
Folks, this is just the beginning. I’ve been saying to expect this and it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Apple doesn’t have clean hands and opened the litigation door by suing Samsung and HTC. It’s one thing if your hands are clean, it’s another if not. Hypocrites always end up paying a heavier price.
Except Apple’s hands are clean– they’re the ones who invented the method in claim 1 of this patent, and had it in Mac OS going back to the 1980s.
The thing is, Apple innovates, the others just copy… Apple’s the definition of “clean hands”.
WTF? Sounds like you think there were no patent law suits before Apple sued HTC.
This attack on patents as if they are unfair is an assault on what has made the US one of the leading countries in the world.
If people who want to make a better product have no chance of claiming ownership of an “invention” then why do it. Why spend the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars developing, patenting and producing a new item, if you can’t protect it?
Which, by the way, is exactly what Apple does.
Patents help drive innovation by giving ownership to ideas that are properly documented through the patent system.
If you get sued for infringement, either win the suit, buy or license the patent or buy the company or innovate and even better way to do the “invention”.
Comments that attack patents as bad are simply out of touch with the vibrant inventive world economy and virtually every country in the world is a member of the WIPO covering patenting standards.
Patents DO protect companies who innovate! We NEED patents! What we also need reform of the patent system. Companies that exist for the sole purpose of suing other companies for their innovation will cripple our growth. Constantly answering these bogus claims in court is too expensive for smaller companies.
Correction: Just ONE lawsuit is enough.
Imagine if some random legal firm decides to punish you by dragging you down with court fees. You make say, $60K/year. They spend $600K easily if you do something they want to just… stop. Legal or not, you’re forced to comply with their ‘request’ to not do such behavior. Even if they lose, you lose. After a couple years of effectively not being able to make a living, most people give up. If they win, they’ll probably never see the money. In the meantime, their life is a living hell because they don’t have the deep pockets to just stop having a life with the exception of fighting constant legal tricks. This is exactly why so many people hate a certain seed company… I think everyone reading this knows who I mean. (Hint: Patented life)
As in many other situations, it’s not “patent” that’s bad, it’s the implementation, i.e., it’s the US patent system (and especially the courts in east TX) that is irredeemably flawed. And given the oligarchists, er Tea Partiers, currently in congress, there’ll be no meaningful changes any time soon.
Choosing the startup disk in the system prefs, which has been a mac feature since at least 1989 when I got my first mac plus, makes this patent laughable. The mac has always used this method for booting way prior to the patent. I’m not even sure this patent could be applied to the Mac because of the PC specific language. Had they wanted to apply this broadly, they should not have been specific with config file names, like auto exec.bat, config.sys and BIOS not used outside the Windows PC operating system.
More technology patent parasitism. Lawyers love it. The computer community suffers.
The patent might have been validly novel… 40 years ago! Hmm, when _was_ the first computer made that had multiple OSes or ‘configurations’ (more generic term)? In a manner of speaking, since the OS is just another program, that 40 years just maybe is a little bit conservative. Think about it this way – Game systems had to run different bootable mediums early on. So any system that had a way to specify a specific boot medium (say, Apple IIgs for microcomputers) and save it (again, the Apple IIgs), would count. Now the problem is that the patent might be claimed to be specific to hard drive partitions. The annoying thing is that it’s a bit like patenting a just slightly-differently-angled cross-headed screw because instead of 90 degrees, it runs 89 degrees. Then suing people who just happen to fall outside 90 +/- 1 degrees. I recently read about a guy that used a computer to generate 3500 VARIATIONS on a patent just to make sure that he covered all possible ‘angles’ of ‘algorithm’ patent. Yes, I know that by definition it’s pretty much impossible to implement something in software without using an algorithm. I mean, why else do we have compilers and assemblers? Not to mention all the obviously copyright (nonpatent) producing stuff like graphics editors, sound editors, hex editors, and so on. An interesting idea is that if the program requires user interaction (all do), then you can in theory patent the interaction. I believe this was the crack that let all out patent wars to become our fate. Pretty soon, something will have to give because it’s now feasible to have a computer come up with random patents that essentially cover the same invention. There should be some kind of punishment (that hurts) for spamming the patent office or consistently patenting stuff that already exists. Imagine if I were to keep calling the police with complaints that turned out to be nothing… There is actually a precedence here but good luck getting them to apply it. There’s a term called “malicious use of process” but it’s very hard to get to stick unless you annoy a (lot of?) judges.