The ex-Apple engineer who claims he helped invent “Find My iPhone” and other features has beaten Apple in a preliminary court hearing.
Apple lost its bid to dismiss the former employee’s lawsuit earlier this week. The suit claims Apple left him off a list of five patents on which he was a rightful co-inventor. Along with “Find My iPhone,” Darren Eastman also notably worked on Passbook, the electronic ticketing system.
Kieren McCarthy for The Register:
While the court didn’t rule on the actual merit of those claims – that is what the requested jury trial would have to figure out – it dismissed Apple’s assertion that there wasn’t a case to answer. This may give some credence to Eastman’s case, which has been amended to include in-depth explanations of what he did and how his work directly connects to the patents themselves.
The court is clearly sympathetic to Eastman’s case, making several jabs at Apple’s case including admonishing it at one point for ignoring a key legal case that made the opposite case to Apple’s argument.
As for Eastman, he claims to have been contacted by a number of former and current Apple employees who say the same thing happened to them: the corporate giant patented their work without giving due credit.
MacDailyNews Take: If Eastman deserves to be on the patents, he should be added to them. Let a court of law decide.