“On December twentieth, The Washington Post reported that ‘Apple Inc. won a patent-infringement ruling that bans some HTC Corp. smartphones from the U.S. starting next year, bolstering efforts to prove that devices running Google Inc.’s Android operating system copy the iPhone,'” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“And today, the US Patent and Trademark Office officially published yet another core iPhone multitouch victory for Apple that will bolster their legal arsenal,” Purcher reports. “This particular multitouch related patent focuses on the oscillator signal and circuit, which are central to sensing a touch event on a touch display.”
Purcher reports, “This is the type of patent that could help Apple in legal battles with copycat designers. It’s one of the 200 patents that Steve Jobs pointed to when launching the iPhone.”
Much more, along with a classic photo collage of Steve Jobs introducing the revolutionary iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, in the full article here.
Most of Apple’s patents are defensive to protect a future product. But the iPhone and iOS are different and Steve Jobs made it clear that they would defend their IP on this front aggressively. The whiners are many, but who cares? It’s the IP game that all the big boys play. Apple lost to Kodak and they win here and there. And so it’s just the course of business. I just like the fact that Apple worked so hard to secure their IP. They got screwed with Msft and they learned by their mistakes.
Patents are nifty, but, apparently, what’s more important is lobbyists, shills and sharp lawyers worldwide. Oh, it’s also prudent to invest on a state of the art photocopy machine.
Death to Android.
lets hope by next christmas – rejoice!
Boom.
While the lawsuits are dragging on, Apple’s competitors are using the time to attempt to design around the key patents (if possible). If there are no substantial penalties, I could see this going through several successive cycles of “cat and mouse” with Apple never receiving just compensation.
Not true. Apple has worked out licensing with IBM and Nokia. Just because Apple is working quietly in the background to earn these licenses doesn’t mean that they’re not ongoing. So just compensation is being worked on both behind the scenes and in the courts.