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Apple Sued Over iPhone Browser
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Nov 26, 2008 09:49 AM
from the just-this-once-then dept.
from the just-this-once-then dept.
SpuriousLogic writes "A Los Angeles real estate developer is suing Apple for patent infringement over the way the iPhone navigates Web sites. The suit, which was filed on behalf of EMG Technology, seeks unspecified damages.
EMG Technology is a company that holds the patents of Elliot Gottfurcht, the real estate developer, as well as Marlo Longstreet and Grant Gottfurcht. The company claims that the iPhone infringes on patent 7,441,196 — a patent that was approved only last month, after a filing process that began on March 13, 2006.
That patent is for an invention that displays 'on-line content reformatted from a webpage in a hypertext markup language (HTML) format into an extensible markup language (XML) format to generate a sister site.' This sister site is a simplified version of the original site that is then displayed on any number of devices — including cell phones, EMG says."
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Looking to test Bilski? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope this case is the first of many to be swiftly decided for throwing out the patent entirely based on In re Bilski.
Dan Aris
Re:Looking to test Bilski? (Score:5, Informative)
The Bilski decision was limited to method claims, and so it won't apply without a fairly liberal extension of that holding.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but the apparatus is nothing more than an ordinary computer. It's rather hilariously described from fairly elementary principles:
"FIG. 4 is a block diagram of a client hardware architecture of one embodiment of the invention. A processor 100 is coupled to various memory units and an I/O bus bridge 110 by a local bus 102. Among the expected memory units are random access memory (RAM) 106, which may be any standard RAM, including standard dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and may be symmetric or asy
Re:Looking to test Bilski? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparatus claims are not sufficient to get around In re Biski. Simply adding the words "On a computer" or "On a handheld device" (or long drawn-out complicated descriptions which equate to the same), to a process that is, in itself, purely algorithmic or an abstract process that could equally apply to any number of pre-existing machines, does not rise to the level of the machine requirement in In re Biski.
I like to put it his way (though this is overly simplified, perhaps): If you come up with a novel way to use a screw driver, you cannot patent your method, because you didn't have to invent the screw driver to do it. The screw driver already existed.
In this patent, you could substitute the words, "web page displayed in a browser, running on a hand-held computer with a touch screen" for the bulk of the claim copy. Well, none of that qualifies a process as unique to a specific machine. The fact that there are many different devices that meet his description, devices that are in no way intrinsically linked to this patent, brings this into direct conflict with In re Bilski.
Parent
Re:Looking to test Bilski? (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno, if I discovered a way to browse webpages on my screwdriver, I'd probably be able to patent it legitimately... :D
Parent
Re:Looking to test Bilski? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, in the legal world, intuition must sometimes give way to legal formalisms.
In this case the formalisms are the statutory categories of invention. Processes (methods) constitute one distinct statutory category, and machines (apparatuses) another.
Getting back to your point, you are correct to say that, after Bilski, a method (process) claim that is otherwise not patent eligible may not become eligible by simply providing that the disclosed method is executed on a general purpose machine (computer).
HOWEVER, an apparatus claim is separate and distinct from a method claim that is tied to an apparatus.
So while it is true that tying a method claim to a general purpose computer is not sufficient to overcome Bilski's machine requirement, it remains true that the holding of Bilski DOES NOT APPLY TO APPARATUS CLAIMS.
As an example, consider the following:
Method claim: "A method of
Method claim tied to a general purpose computer: "A method of
APPARATUS claim: "A computer readable storage medium containing instructions, when executed by a computer processor, operable to
Parent
Re:Looking to test Bilski? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Looking to test Bilski? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Oh, well... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh, well... (Score:5, Funny)
That is certainly a necessary invention for a real estate developer...otherwise how could they display information about their latest housing projects or large malls on an iPhone?!
You're only allowed to invent something that you can personally use? You do know that tampons weren't invented by a woman, right?
Parent
Re:Oh, well... (Score:4, Funny)
you do know that they were originally developed for diarrhea, don't you?
Parent
Re:Oh, well... (Score:5, Funny)
Your shitting me right?
Parent
Re:Oh, well... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That's Hedley [imdb.com]!
Yet another patent troll. (Score:5, Interesting)
So- they essentially patented WAP? I think Apple can come up with enough "prior artwork" for this one. It's unfortunate though that companies like this (EMG) are allowed to even exist. When will it end?
Re:Yet another patent troll. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's worse than that. They basically patented XSLT, and the application of it to target different devices.
Another completely retarded patent.
Parent
Re:Yet another patent troll. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
There's prior art (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Yet another patent troll (Score:5, Funny)
Changing "prior art" to "prior artwork" paints an interesting picture of a potential courtroom exchange...
"I would like to present Exhibit A, "Motherboard Descending a Staircase" by Ed Picasso, painted in January 2006. Despite its neo-cubist style, this work shows an example of "client hardware architecture" much more clearly than the patent troll--I mean, defendant's patent documents.
Parent
Decoding anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Decoding anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Patent reform (Score:5, Interesting)
How long before we see a patent on "a system of placing letters and numbers in sequential order in order to convey something meaningful"?
Re:Patent reform (Score:5, Funny)
How long before we see a patent on "a system of placing letters and numbers in sequential order in order to convey something meaningful"?
Sadly, there's no prior art for this on the internet...
Parent
Re:Patent reform (Score:5, Funny)
How long before we see a patent on "a system of placing letters and numbers in sequential order in order to convey something meaningful"?
Sadly, there's no prior art for this on the internet...
Yes. There is. /. is a great example [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:Patent reform (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you'rr wronajf aopfjawr pojasf poawtj ow ao BANANA BANANA BANANA BANANA
Parent
Re:Patent reform (Score:4, Informative)
We need some serious patent reform. Patents are good and necessary in general...
I seriously doubt this. The claim for patents is that they protect the 'useful arts' by offering inventors a limited-time monopoly on whatever they have invented - provided that the invention passes some test of non-obviousness and utility.
However, if you look back in history to periods in which some countries had patent systems and some did not - the United Kingdom and Germany in the nineteenth century, for example - it's clear that lack of a patent system did not in the least hold back inventors in Germany from inventing and developing new technologies. On the contrary. So the intellectual justification for having a patent system in the first place looks a bit thin.
I think we'd all - drug companies included - be better off if there were no such things as patents.
Parent
Uh... wrong browser? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know Opera Mini and some other mobile browsers do this, but I thought Safari worked on the HTML itself. Wouldn't that render the patent irrelevant?
Re:Uh... wrong browser? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're going to interpret rendering a page with less "features" as generating a sister site then Mosaic 1.0 is prior art for this patent. Try browsing the web with Mosaic 1.0 and you'll see a drastically different web "scaled down" for older computers by cutting out Flash, Java, Javascript, CSS... hell, it may not have even supported tables.
Parent
Oh boy... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh boy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
But... they sued the wrong company (Score:5, Informative)
Safari doesn't create a different version of the web page. It shows the original HTML version, just graphically scaled down. So EMG should be suing all the other cell phone browser companies. As the article notes:
Re:But... they sued the wrong company (Score:5, Interesting)
Four possibilities:
1) They wish to claim that "scaled down" is included in their definition of a "Sister site" (absurd)
2) They believe the Safari browser in the iPhone is not showing the "real" site (uninformed)
3) They are trying to use Safari as a test case since Apple's best argument is that it "doesn't scale things". Even if they lose, they can't point to this lawsuit and use it as a basis to force other cell phone makers to pay up (since they can't claim apple's defense) (unlikely, but plausible. IANAL)
4) They are going after Apple because its the "hot" thing with lots of money to go after (likely)
Anyone have any other ideas? :)
Parent
Re:But... they sued the wrong company (Score:5, Funny)
5) They're a real estate company that doesn't know their head from their ass. -ets.
Parent
Re:But... they sued the wrong company (Score:5, Informative)
4) They are going after Apple because its the "hot" thing with lots of money to go after (likely)
"We haven't looked at anything other than the iPhone," Gibson told Reuters [reuters.com]. "That was the device that we looked at. Obviously it's very popular."
Parent
Reformat content? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, at the end of the day, I fail to see how this applies to any modern smart phone. Only the older phones, or non-smart phones, can't render HTML as is. Of course most of these problems are caused by graphic designers not understanding HML, and borking the standard so we now have web pages that make no sense in almost an common browser.
Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Worst... patent... ever...
Just kill patents now, please, they are just in the way and never ever actually protects individuals, only capital, and money should flow to help innovation, not be collected by greedy old men to lure attractive (but oh so dumb) women to be with them.
Junk patent: lots of prior work (Score:5, Informative)
Juliana Freire, Bharat Kumar, Daniel F. Lieuwen: WebViews: accessing personalized web content and services. WWW 2001: 576-586
Anyone reasonably skilled in the art could have gone from my paper to that claim without much trouble---we use htmltidy to turn html into xml and used xpath to extract pieces out of it which we could transcode in various ways including in voicexml. We built a system that did just that. And thats just one paper. WWW had a number of papers, any which of them should have killed this patent if the patent examiner had done the proper due diligence.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ya, but this patent adds "on the Internet". :-)
The iPhone Browser is plain WebKit, renders HTML (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just awesome. The "Dumbest Fuck Ever"-Award clearly goes to the lawyer who filed this laughably thin suit against a company that never has done anything funky to display HTML on its handhelds. The iPhone runs OS X, slightly scaled down for memory and power consumption gains.
Eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
XSLT is the key (Score:4, Informative)
Easy prior art :
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3c.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
</xsl:stylesheet>
XSLT clearly existed in 1999... And if you use an empty stylesheet, you get a (very) simplified document which only contains the text nodes, without any HTML (or other) tags...
That can easily be displayed on text-only devices.
If you add a
<xsl:template select="a"> />
<xsl:copy-of select="."
</xsl:template>
The links are preserved (but are the only kind of formatting preserved)... That's basic XSLT and I guess that many teachers who give XML lessons have used similar examples...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway this patent is bullshit. If the iPhone were transforming the site in some meaningful way, it would be guaranteed to break any JavaScript in the page. That code calling document.getElementById("foo") would break when "foo" wasn't there or was rearranged. Safari might scale images or reflow the content, or ignore certain style rules but nothing
What do you expect (Score:5, Funny)
When does Apple ever do anything creative?
(WARNING: The above post contains a large amount of sarcasm. It is not intended to be taken seriously. If you feel a need to argue with this point ("No way, Dude! Apple is the bestest company in the whole wide world!). Go download an iPhone application. I hear there's a new one out that's nice and shiny. If you want to defend this post (Yeah, Apple Sucks!). Go back to your PC and marvel at the wonders of Vista. If you only use Linux as your operating system, let your parents know I feel sorry for them.)
Prior Art (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, IANAL. I am a law student with IP and patent law classes under my belt, but I'm still just a law student. Take the following with a grain of salt.
In a lot of the patent articles on Slashdot, where someone will ask "Isn't X prior art?" Often, even though it seems intuitively that it should be, it's not.
Actual prior art, which would be sufficient to legally defeat a patent, must read on all of a patent's claims. Assume the patent in question has claims (basically, technical description of features) A, B, and C. You research patents, and you find older patents:
Patent 1 has claims A and B.
Patent 2 has claims B and C.
Patent 3 has claims A and C.
None of those will defeat the patent in question on prior art grounds, because none of them include all of the claims A, B, and C.
What you may have at that point is an obviousness objection. You could argue that because there are patents 1-3 exist, that combining them to create A, B, and C was so obvious to someone skilled in the art that the patent should be invalidated for failing to be non-obvious. But that's different than prior art.
Having a patent invalidated for prior art is actually pretty uncommon. Obviousness issues are more common, but often, it's cheaper to just settle.
Re:Prior Art (Score:4, Insightful)
As a law student what would be your take on this company that seemingly has sued Apple when their technology doesn't infringe on the patent at all. Now I haven't read the exact patent and don't pretend to fully understand it but the article quotes:
Most phone web browsers do this because of the limitations on the device. Apple's iPhone however scales the web page in size for memory and screen considerations but does not rely on a sister site nor simplifies the page. At best this is a case of a plaintiff not doing their research. At worst, it's another patent troll company looking for the biggest fish.
Parent
Re:Prior Art (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not a lawyer either, but I have successfully contested several patents in court (one European, one US case), and had them invalidated. Your statement is not quite correct.
Usually a patent has a series of independent claims. A piece of prior art must read on all the elements of a single claim to invalidate that claim. However you can use different pieces of prior art to invalidate different independent claims.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that's fine, but from what I gather this patent has a couple of points against it in that (a) its claims seem quite simple and happen to only encompass a process that has been quite common for several years, and (b) it the iPhone doesn't even implement the process covered by this patent; it doesn't even come close to implementing it, in fact, it's the one phone on the market that is overwhelmingly not covered by this patent, unless I'm vastly misunderstanding the content of this patent.
Prior art aside
I don't think so (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a lawyer, or even a law student, but am an engineer who has worked under the direction of patent attorneys to evaluate patents to determine whether or not my employer's work infringed or whether we could demonstrate prior art.
From my experience, patents consist of a series of claims that are independent and severable, except where they explicitly depend on one another. That is, a patent often consists of claims A, B and C, where B and C are both extensions of the idea in A.
Each independent claim contains multiple elements, and for prior art to apply, or a technology to be infringing, ALL of the elements of a given claim have to apply. It is not, however, necessary for all of the CLAIMS in the patent to apply. If I have prior art that covers everything in claim C, then claim C is invalidated. Since claim C is an extension of claim A, then the prior art also contains everything in A and it is invalidated. But if B contains elements that are not in the prior art, then that portion of the patent stands.
So far, this is consistent with what you said, but the point is that if B is the only claim left standing, then ONLY technologies that implement B can be infringing. So even when prior art doesn't completely invalidate a patent, it often dramatically pares down its applicability. Often to the point where it's a trivial matter to sidestep a patent.
Having a patent invalidated for prior art is actually pretty uncommon. Obviousness issues are more common, but often, it's cheaper to just settle.
True, but don't forget that prior art is often a key part of the settlement negotiations. If the alleged infringer can show prior art that would invalidate a large part of the patent, they can reduce the settlement to almost nothing. It's even been known to happen that in a case where the defendant has been able to come up with not only prior art but also some counter claims, that the plaintiff ends up paying a settlement to avoid having their patent dragged through court and invalidated.
Parent
Hmmm. (Score:5, Informative)
The patent doesn't claim that representing a web site in XML is original. Instead, it seems to be claiming patent rights on a caching mechanism somewhat like the tiling scheme used in Google maps, except that instead of converting a map into a series of image tiles, they convert a web page into a series of tiles on the server. In Google Maps, this allows a huge document, if you will, to be served in bandwidth efficient chunks to support a responsive user interface.
This tiling strategy is clearly not original, so the claim is for a mechanism for doing this by converting a web page, server-side, into an XML document, portions of which can be fetched (in cases of adjacent tiles preemptively) from the server, updating the display using DOM style manipulations. The HTML->XML transformation is used to try to convert a number of common practices, inventions:tiling and caching content, displaying advertisements in response to web page navigation events, doing said things on the server side or client side, doing it on mobile devices and set-top devices; doing it in response to voice command, doing it in response to keyboard entries, doing it in response to mouse clicks; allowing the user to zoom in on a tile, etc.
The supposed secret sauce is converting an HTML web site into geometric tiles represented by XML. That's what's supposed to make this thing stick when thrown against the wall. Everything else in the patent is there to maximize the size of the blob sticking to the wall. Oh, yes and mumbo jumbo that makes the idea sound a lot more mysterious than it really is.
I'm guessing that what they are going after is Apple's implementation of something analogous to tabbed browsing on the iPhone, an interface that has a coverflowish feel. The patent claims rights to using zooming/magnification with three dimensional representations of web sites created with their secret XML sauce. You can sort of imagine confusing the Safari interface with this if you had never seen it in action, but the inexplicable thing is that Apple isn't using the secret sauce of HTML-XML conversion to produce their interface. You can sort of imagine going after low end phone news and messaging browsers that use WML as looking something like the secret sauce in that it uses HTML to XML conversion, but it doesn't use it in the way specified by the secret sauce. And it's prior art.
Basically, this is a worthless BS patent. Even if this were not BS, what it describes doesn't apply to the iPhone browser. They don't have any chance at all. So I can only speculate they're trying to hype the value of their "property" to attract stupid investors.
Re:Question (Score:5, Funny)
Parent