“Two of Apple’s three multi-touch software patents asserted at last year’s Samsung trial in California, the ‘381 rubber-banding patent and the ‘915 pinch-to-zoom API patent, are under reexamination pressure at the United States Patent and Trademark Office,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents. “A few weeks ago the USPTO affirmed only three of 20 rubber-banding claims and issued a “final” (though not truly final) rejection of all others, including the one at issue in the Samsung case. In December the USPTO tentatively rejected the ‘915 pinch-to-zoom API patent. Samsung would like the California case stayed while these reexaminations are ongoing, but Apple yesterday filed its response and says that a stay would be ‘unwarranted and prejudicial.'”
“Apple expresses its confidence that ‘the claims will be confirmed’ when all is said and done and argues that ‘if final adverse decisions were the ultimate result, they likely would not occur until mid-2017 or later.’ That is four years out,” Mueller reports. “Apple writes that ‘[t]he ‘381 and ‘915 reexaminations are many years from completion, unless they culminate in an earlier finding that the claims are patentable’ and points to the complex and long-winded proceedings that lie ahead of Samsung’s quest for invalidation of these patents.”
Mueller reports, “During all of the time it would take until the related patent claims are actually invalidated, Apple would be entitled to damages.”
Read more in the full article here.
So is that good or bad news?
Either way they will drive the stock price down.
LOL pretty much.
I take it as good news. Google and its Android days are numbered. I believe the courts have a foggy impression of the truth here. iPhone should have been treated as the Nations Hero. It has changed the world the day it arrived. The idea of competition needs to be heavily reviewed because history again has repeated the Mac vs Windows – Graphic User Interface yet this time far more evil and far deeper.
I’m not from the US but i agree, looking back, i thought Apple would’ve been praised by the whole country with US governments and US companies being all iPhone only and being patriot like. To now have a lot of people and even its own government buying Korean and phone makers that are owned from other parts of the world instead of a homegrown American classic like Apple that started personal computers for the masses etc etc. Its strange to me.
Android’s true competitor comes from Tizen OS and whatever Samsung or China’s copy cat smartphones use as their OS… Because one day it wont be Android…
As for Apple… they will ALWAYS be around… we know their DNA… they are already thinking beyond the iPhone as we know it… we will get a good glimpse of what Jony Ive and the team have in store this summer…
agreed – no other phone on the market today should have Pinch to Zoom. In Fact, no phone should have multi-touch at all.
Nor Siri assistance integration and many other things found in iOS. Nothing out there should be anything similar to iOS at all.
Googles’ free Android is the traitor here. It needs to be eliminated. Samsung would have had to use Symbian or whatever other OS to mimic Apple. It’s Android to blame here; it brought all the others the capability to clone the closest and fastest with functions only available before on iPhone.
I am no genius nor programmer yet I can already see in my mind an amazing simplification of what Apple has done with iPhone. And things can go much further.
A simplified SmartPhone – and still three devices in one; actually four. Camera/Video, Browser, Music player and Phone. Can you see the simplification now too? An inexpensive FEATURE full iPhone delivered with the best CORE apps (all Apple Apps) however no third party applications will be available. A communication device PURE to APPLE yet remains faithful to be of high quality and superbly reliable. A device created by its innovators which handles exactly what it was MADE to do. Less of a mobile miniaturized computer and more of an iPhone. There doesn’t need to be a iPhone Killer… just refining the Think Difference once again.
And don’t forget sophisticated navigation device.