“Apple has raised bludgeoning competitors with patents on key technologies to a fine art. (Just ask Samsung.) And now it may have a new blunt object to wield,” Erik Sherman reports for CBS News.
“A reissue of a patent originally dating back to 1998 — and that Apple got from Xerox — has delivered into CEO Tim Cook’s hands some serious, and scary, potential control over location-based services,” Sherman reports. “If you thought that Google, Samsung, HTC, and others were already depressed over the legal success Apple has had in fighting Android, it’s now officially worse.”
Sherman reports, “Even more, it could bring some important activities of other companies, such as Facebook and Foursquare, under Apple’s purview — which is another way of saying that Apple might be able to tell these companies to pay up if they wanted to use location services… This patent is so basic that it would be hard to get around it. Just about any location-based system at its heart has to transmit a local location and receive information in return. That leaves the question of what Apple will decide to do.. and to whom.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t steal Apple’s IP and there’ll be no reason to fear being bludgeoned.