“The company — about which Google hasn’t indexed anything except for a few references to this patent suit — holds a user interface patent and yesterday filed a complaint with the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, asserting it against 11 defendants: Apple, the top four Android device makers — Motorola, Samsung (two different Samsung entities are named), HTC, LG –, Nokia, Adobe, Palm, Opera and Quickoffice,” FOSS Patents reports. “The company seeks injunctive relief and monetary damages for what it claims to be infringements of US Patent No. 7,171,625 on ‘double-clicking a point-and-click user interface apparatus to enable a new interaction with content represented by an active visual display element.”
MacDailyNews Take: Rocket docket.
FOSS Patents reports, “The application was filed on 18 June 2002 and assigned to Actify, a San Francisco-based software company specialized in computer-aided design (CAD). The nature of the relationship between Actify and Hopewell Culture & Design is unclear at this stage.”
Full article with a list of the accused products here.
MacDailyNews Take: Prior art. Case closed. Next?
Does that Next in MDNs take mean next POS lawsuit, please.
Or is it, Next has the prior art and Apple owns Next’s IP?
PUHLEEZ!
Hmm, Eastern District of Texas. That rings a bell.
They should fire it towards the Amazon, because Apple has licensed the one-click thingy from Amazon and it about covers all the things possible.
Though to be in the safe side I will patent the 195,67 click method used in Nokias Ovi Store and 9873,444443333 point system used by Microsoft in the Zune Store.
Does this suit have any merit at all? Can double click be patented? What about all those years when Apple brought out the Macintosh in 1984 that had GUI and a mouse? Wouldn’t that be double clicking to access a program?
This ridiculous patent (cf Google patent search) was filed on
June 18, 2002
and awarded on
January 30, 2007
The examiner was Cao (Kevin) Nguyen. Awarding this absurd patent is just cause for terminating Nguyen and reopening every patent he examined.
California company sues California company in East Texas. Smells like ass to me.
I’m going to patent using one foot placed in front of the other foot to use a forward propelling motion to get from one place to another place. Then I’ll sue anyone that walks, jogs, or runs anywhere.
Hmm, I double-click all the time! Better cut that out.
Meanwhile, can we do something about the Eastern District of Texas? Forced succession or something?
@ Dmitri
Gov ‘Good Hair’ Perry wanted to secede — let’s help him do it!
I think it’s time to gather up torches and pitchforks and march down to this outfit’s headquarters and teach them a little bit of frontier justice. Liars and scalliwags like these people deserve to be rooted out of society and made to pay a heavy price for their chicanery!
I’m pretty sure this message contains at least three words which do not appear in the usual MDN comments.
@dmitri,
While I hate patent trolling I wouldn’t mind at all seceding.
Does somebody already own a single-click patent? If not, well…
Software patents are a VERY VERY VERY bad idea. It stifles innovation.
Apple invented Multi touch. I’ve seen many Android phones bragging about Multi touch. Apple should sue them all. Now, off to patent breathing
… “prior art” cover that? Filed in 2002? Both Apple and Microsoft had been using the double-click for … a decade? … by then. Just because they didn’t patent it does not mean anyone else is free to do so. All it means is that some other company – like Microsoft – is free to USE the technology.
bunch of f-ing lawyers.
Does somebody already own a single-click patent?
Wasn’t it M$ taht got a patent for this double-click story?
wait what?!?
If they win this I’m moving to canada that’s just retarded, apple has had a function point and click user interface since 1983 (lisa) and this patent was filed in 2002?!?!