Push Email Suspended On iPhones In Germany 164
Posted
by
timothy
from the fine-grained-patent-sniping dept.
from the fine-grained-patent-sniping dept.
New submitter elashish14 tips this news, snipped from Ars Technica: "Apple has been forced to disable push e-mail delivery for iCloud and MobileMe users in Germany this week. The move is thanks to a recent injunction awarded to Motorola as part of the ongoing patent dispute between the two smartphone makers.... The patent at issue relates to older pager designs, but Motorola was able to convince a German court that it applied to Apple's implementation of push e-mail that syncs across devices via iCloud. The injunction went into effect on Thursday of this week, requiring Apple to disable push e-mail syncing in Germany."
only hope? not really. (Score:4, Informative)
invalidating the patent is not apples only hope.
they could, heaven forbid, licence the patent for actual money.
Re:only hope? not really. (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure Apple had a bucket load of old Motorola pagers in the room when they were designed the push software for the iPhone.
Unlike copyright law, patent law doesn't require that you knew the patent for it to apply.
IP laws prevent progress (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Truce (Score:5, Informative)
You can patent the "push e-mail to device instead of polling" part, because it does not relate to software. You could implement it with manual labor and pidgeons and would still be violating the patent.
What you can't patent in Germany is algorithm, so a claim that says "push e-mail where the e-mail headers are processed via regular expressions" would no be valid.
what is stranger is that if the patent is very broad, it could be invalid because regular letters, faxes, teletypes, etc. have all been based on pushing the message to the receiver so there should be prior art.
Re:Truce (Score:5, Informative)