“Apple has lost a patent case against its Cover Flow and Time Machine interfaces, despite some of the infringement charges from claimant Mirror Worlds being ruled invalid,” Josh Ong reports for AppleInsider.
“Mirror Worlds LLC filed the lawsuit in 2008, alleging that Apple had infringed on patents for creating “streams” of documents sorted by time. According to Bloomberg, a federal jury sided with Mirror Worlds on Friday, although specific details of the ruling were unavailable,” Ong reports. “The judgment wasn’t completely one-sided, though. Legal news site Law360 noted (registration required) in August that some of Mirror Worlds’ claims again Apple had been ruled invalid for ‘indefiniteness.'”
Ong reports, “The lawsuit was submitted to the Tyler County court in eastern Texas, an area known for favoring patent owners. In a study by Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley, an analysis of ten years of patent lawsuits revealed that the Eastern District of Texas has a higher than average claimant win percentage and a better chance of going to trial.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]
Looking over what is provided in the source article, I have to ask:
What was actually on trial here? Patents or the US patent system? Considering the fact that the lawsuit is dickering over dead basic database technology with cute GUI elements sprinkled on top, I have the opinion that the loser is the US patent system, or rather its creative victims.
How about I patent the human elbow! I’ll make <I>$billions<I> suing Gawd!!!
What a bunch of crybabies. Hope you never work for a little company and one day some big bad company (not apple of course) takes your patent. You probably think music should be free too.
What a bunch of crybabies. Hope you never work for a little company and one day some big bad company (not apple of course) takes your patent. You probably think music should be free too.
I don’t know the specifics of these cases, but didn’t Apple loose “look and feel” lawsuits in the 80s? Its sounds like these cases are “look and feel” which would be unfair to Apple since Apple lost such cases previously.
I don’t know the specifics of these cases, but didn’t Apple loose “look and feel” lawsuits in the 80s? Its sounds like these cases are “look and feel” which would be unfair to Apple since Apple lost such cases previously.