“Until now, it’s been assumed that Apple’s playing absolute hardball in its various patent lawsuits around the world — that the company has no interest in licensing its patents, especially patents that cover fundamental parts of iOS,” Nilay Patel reports for The Verge.
“Turns out that that’s not entirely true: Apple’s licensed at least one iOS software patent related to scrolling functionality to Nokia and IBM, and offered a license to Samsung during failed settlement negotiations in November 2010,” Patel reports. “The patent in question is #7,469,381, which covers the distinctive ‘scrollback’ behavior of iOS that displays a background texture when you scroll beyond the edge of a document of webpage.”
Patel reports, “The Verge that confirm the ‘381 patent was licensed to IBM and Nokia, and that Apple offered a license to Samsung in November of 2010 as part of settlement negotiations…What we don’t know is how or why those November 2010 settlement negotiations fell apart: Apple could have been asking for exorbitant rates on a patent license, Samsung could have refused to pay because it thought the patents were invalid, or Jobs could have simply called the whole thing off.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]