This article does not seem to understand the difference between "an idea" and what is actually patentable ("a method").
It is a method, but depends on your context of the actor. If you are a computer programmer, then yes you are looking for the code that does the work. However from the context of the user, this is a method to get real work done. The method is that the computer reads the text and provides you links so that you can perform a task fast. That is a user interface method independent of how it is structured in code (which is also important).
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
Just because it's something you need doesn't mean it's not patentable. It's because of inventions like these that you have a modern world and that deserves to be rewarded. Sorry Charlie.
As has been said before, you can only patent a specific implementation of an idea, not an idea itself. You can patent a specific implementation of a product, not a product itself.
What Apple is trying to do here is the equivalent of an automobile company attempting to patent power steering or cruise control. Ford, Honda, Toyota or whoever can certainly patent their own power steering or cruise control design, but they cannot stop other companies from implementing their own power steering and cruise control technology. Even if it works the same way and the user experience is the same (i.e. a Ford driver engages, disengages and uses cruise control in the same way as a Toyota driver does, i.e. by pulling the same switch or pushing the same button that is in the same place) it cannot be patented.
Look at the appliance market, for goodness sakes. Washing machines, dryers, stoves, refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners: they all pretty much look and work the same. The same doors, the same temperature and timer controls, the same buttons and knobs, you name it. That stuff is impossible to patent, and even if it were patentable, it would be impossible to practically enforce.
Apple is tilting at windmills here. We get it ... they put in a lot of years of R&D and aesthetics research in order to put out a superior product only to have it closely emulated. But that is the business world. It happens to EVERYBODY not just Apple. The only way to prevent it is to become a monopoly, a monoculture where there are no real competitors like Microsoft. And even that doesn't necessarily stop it. Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora tried for years to get the Microsoft Windows look and feel. (Now they are going for an I-Pad/Android type look and feel.) OpenOffice and LibreOffice ripped off everything they could from Microsoft Office except for the copyrighted fonts, but they came out with their own very similar fonts. Google Docs copied Microsoft Office even more closely than OpenOffice/LibreOffice did. That stuff is entirely legal so long as
A) No former or current Microsoft employees bound by intellectual property agreements contributed to it
It contains no code or design/implementation methodology that is unique to Microsoft
It is the same way with Apple's stuff. People are going to copy it as closely as they can. What allows them to get away with it is not the refusal of the courts to for some strange reason give a level of protection to Apple's patents and Apple's patents alone that they do not provide to anybody else. What allows the copying to take place is Apple's pricing. Apple's pricing allows companies to make reasonable facsimiles of Apple products - similar function, form, look and feel with decent quality - and sell it at lower price points.
That was the case with Microsoft and Windows. It is the case with Android versus IOS for smartphones and tablets. And it would have been the case with the I-Pod had the Shuffle not eliminated the ability of the competition to undersell Apple.
As has been said before, you can only patent a specific implementation of an idea, not an idea itself. You can patent a specific implementation of a product, not a product itself.
You cannot try and patent anything, I've run a few patents by the USPTO office here in VA, if something is not patentable then there is no way to proceed. What may be unclear here is that if this "inspiration" or "copying". Inspiration is legal, copying is not.
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
Why do you comment on things you know nothing about? This patent does not patent links in any way shape or form.
It seems that the idea itself is trivial, its usage scenarios a few hours work and its implementation difficult and time consuming.
So if Google and/or Samsung stole the implementation or perhaps the algorithms that lead to the implementation, Apple has a case, otherwise not.
It sounds like you are confusing copyrights and patents.
Interesting. This article describes slide to lock and data detectors as key Apple patents. Well if data detectors were invented in the early 1990's as mentioned here guess what that's 20 years ago. What is the term of a US Patent? 20 years. Time's up.
Slide to lock has long been scoffed at as a key patent. There is a lot of prior art, some of which was recently presented at trial. Very doubtful Apple can claim this as one of their innovations.
Apple Macintosh innovations? All presaged by work at SRI and Xerox. Really there was very little that was attributable to Apple except for Steve Jobs' ability to market it.
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
I commend you for the ability to post something with absolutely zero factual accuracy and convincingly pass it off as the truth. You're not a politician by any chance are you?
I can forgive not understanding something, but when one is repeatedly corrected by different posters, and in different ways from simple to complex then all hope is loss. I can be hard headed at times, but this is insisted ignorance.
It's awesome how you can patent what is basically a link. Well this is the U.S patent office after all. I believe they allowed some dude to patent toast in 2003. This is what happens when you have a horrible patent office. In most develop countries, trials occur to determine the value of a patent, in a dump patent orgizational structure like ours, trials happen to determine if the baffoons at the patent office had enough time to properly review a patent and if it's even valid.
I was with Personics Corporation in the 1980s when we sold, among other software utilities, a product called SmartNotes. It was basically 3M post-it notes for your computer. That was in the day of DOS-based 80x25 character displays. So what SmartNotes did was to allow you to attach a pop-up note to any context on your screen; you highlight some text in a word processing document, or a specific cell in a spreadsheet or a record in a database, then type your note. You could then share note files on the network, so when another person with SmartNotes installed is looking at that part of the document, spreadsheet, or database, the note would pop up. The pattern-matching algorithms needed to, behind-the-scenes, watch the screen memory and match what is there against a potentially large number of available notes, was quite intense and complex.
Personics, later purchased by Datawatch, also brought the Monarch data extraction product to market. Monarch used pattern-matching technology to deconstruct hierarchical mainframe reports (the ascii and ansi text files underlying such reports) and turn the extracted data back into a flat database structure with records and fields. The pattern-matching technology in Monarch was more brute force as data extraction was run as a batch job and not done in real time as a user moves from screen to screen within a context, but nevertheless was quite sophisticated. Monarch is still available today as a suite of data extraction and analysis tools.
Point is, unlike some of us who have related experience in the subject matter, you feel free to trivialize what all of Microsoft couldn't accomplish on their own and that Samsung and Google needed to be shown how to do.
When choosing whether to buy a phone or not, I never once thought to myself: Hmmm, I wonder whether it has data detectors or not? And then made a decision whether to purchase it or not based on that criteria.
I guess I personally don't value that feature very highly.
In some situations a feature directly plays into a consumer's buying decision. In others it's more about the overall experience after purchase. You also have not taken into account the fact that, had Samsung's phones not had this and other disputed capabilities, Apple would have been able to market those capabilities in favor of its handsets and against Samsung's. With the allegedly stolen capability present in both vendor's handsets, Apple lost that marketing opportunity and you and other consumers lost the opportunity to see a difference in innovation between the two companies, a factor that plays into confidence in your decision to choose one vendor over another.
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
You have this wrong. The patent has nothing to do with someone sending a link in an email. A pre-defined link is not what the patent is about. The patent is about, for example, you asking your friend in an email or text if they would like to meet for lunch tomorrow. There's no embedded link or conscious intention to create one when you write the email. The patent is about Apple's software looking at the email and creating a link on the text "lunch tomorrow", with the link intelligently inferring that this context implies the potential for the email recipient to wish to create a calendar entry, and so turning this static text into a link that initiates creation of a calendar entry.
It's also not about file association, which is the notion of associating a specific file type with an application used to display or edit that file.
Clever but should be patented, its basically a hyperlink. Clicking on a phone number and then opening a phone app, is that differentiate enough from clicking a youtube link and opening the YouTube web page or the YouTube app. Or from clicking the address and opening a map. Apple patent the idea of doing that. How can you copyright that idea. Show the code, show how you impliment it. An example would be patenting the picking of cotton, instead of the cotton gin. Show the code and how you did it, copyright that code, but you should not be able to patent that basic structures if linking.
You are speaking to what happens after a link exists. The patent is about creating the link in an appropriate form in the first place, out of plain text and the context within which the plain text resides. You seem quite confused on this issue.
Why do you comment on things you know nothing about? This patent does not patent links in any way shape or form.
There is no other way for anyone else to link to anything other than a precise weblink with apple holding this patent. Apple with this patent has a monopoly on linking on anything that is not a pricise directory location. Because only Apple has the right to decided that a phone number is a phone number and open the proper app.
Basically in plain English this patent states. These values represent something only we have the right to determine what those values mean and proceed with an action.
No one else can tap on a phone number and have it open the phone app, or a phone number and have it open a maps app. Only apple has the right to provide value to those data sets.
How they did it, doesn't matter, that someone can use a different method to achieve the same act, doesn't matter.
So you know when you do a Google search and a map comes up, and you click on it and it opens the full maps web app, well apple has a patent on that, unless that link is a full URL link Google needs to stop. Or when you are in chrome for android and iOS and you see a phone number and it opens up the phone app. Well only apple can do that.
Does it matter how Google is it? No. Does it matter if it did it differently?
You might say to yourlsef well that patent must include some code, of how apple accomplish its data linking process? No just diagrams.
It would be like if Google said, hey we have this way to rank pages by how many connections they received, but provided no page rank algorithm.
Data linking is like patenting picking cotton instead of the cotton gin. Horrible patent, which is why the rest of the world views it as the joke it is.
And you dont understand how broad this patent is and how this is the patenting of the idea of a link and hyperlink. I'm not arguing apple created something I'm arguing the broad protection it has gained. Patent or copyright the process or method of data linking, not the idea. Basically with this patent no one else can make something that allows you to click on a address or phone number and have it open the proper application without the consent of apple. Doesn't matter how you so it, different code, different touch pattern, found a way to make it quicker, allowing that data point to open Multiple applications. Apple patented the wheel with that "invention".
Of course you are wrong. If I include a hyperlink in an email to you, and that hyperlink is a phone number that points to the phone app on your smartphone, I'm not violating Apple's patent by sending you the link and you are not violating the patent by clicking it. The link itself is not the thing that is patented. It's the innovation of taking plain text and the context it exists within, and determining that some part of that plain text is actionable and specifically what the appropriate action might be and then turning that plain text into an appropriate link. You seem to interpret this as, any link on the internet violates Apple's patent. Not true.
Basically this patent says, only apple can link to anything that is not an exact web link.
You're getting closer. At least you seem to be recognizing that the patent isn't about clicking on a pre-defined link to a Youtube video. You've [barely] taken a step in restoring my faith that people can learn.
So, Apple has a patent or patents that it cannot assert because of potential for damage to the common good. [1] Sounds like innovation would be required to have such an impact, [2] so much for patents then.
Of course you are wrong. If I include a hyperlink in an email to you, and that hyperlink is a phone number that points to the phone app on your smartphone, I'm not violating Apple's patent by sending you the link and you are not violating the patent by clicking it. The link itself is not the thing that is patented. It's the innovation of taking plain text and the context it exists within, and determining that some part of that plain text is actionable and specifically what the appropriate action might be and then turning that plain text into an appropriate link. You seem to interpret this as, any link on the internet violates Apple's patent. Not true.
So only apple has a right to determine the representation of a set of values on the fly. Say I sent you and email and I said call me at 000-000-0000. What apple does it look at that email and determine with a code that hey, that 000-000-0000 number is a phone number when the user clicks on it, open the phone app. That is what the patent says, also says the same thing for an address.
Now Google and anyone else for that matter cant determine that number is a phone number, that is what apple patented, not the process of regonizing that that number is a phone number, just that it is phone number. No matter what anyone else does, just the actualization of that its a phone number violates apples patent.
That is how ridiculously broad this patent is. Only apple is allowed to analyze data.
Comments
This article does not seem to understand the difference between "an idea" and what is actually patentable ("a method").
It is a method, but depends on your context of the actor. If you are a computer programmer, then yes you are looking for the code that does the work. However from the context of the user, this is a method to get real work done. The method is that the computer reads the text and provides you links so that you can perform a task fast. That is a user interface method independent of how it is structured in code (which is also important).
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
Just because it's something you need doesn't mean it's not patentable. It's because of inventions like these that you have a modern world and that deserves to be rewarded. Sorry Charlie.
As has been said before, you can only patent a specific implementation of an idea, not an idea itself. You can patent a specific implementation of a product, not a product itself.
What Apple is trying to do here is the equivalent of an automobile company attempting to patent power steering or cruise control. Ford, Honda, Toyota or whoever can certainly patent their own power steering or cruise control design, but they cannot stop other companies from implementing their own power steering and cruise control technology. Even if it works the same way and the user experience is the same (i.e. a Ford driver engages, disengages and uses cruise control in the same way as a Toyota driver does, i.e. by pulling the same switch or pushing the same button that is in the same place) it cannot be patented.
Look at the appliance market, for goodness sakes. Washing machines, dryers, stoves, refrigerators, microwaves, air conditioners: they all pretty much look and work the same. The same doors, the same temperature and timer controls, the same buttons and knobs, you name it. That stuff is impossible to patent, and even if it were patentable, it would be impossible to practically enforce.
Apple is tilting at windmills here. We get it ... they put in a lot of years of R&D and aesthetics research in order to put out a superior product only to have it closely emulated. But that is the business world. It happens to EVERYBODY not just Apple. The only way to prevent it is to become a monopoly, a monoculture where there are no real competitors like Microsoft. And even that doesn't necessarily stop it. Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora tried for years to get the Microsoft Windows look and feel. (Now they are going for an I-Pad/Android type look and feel.) OpenOffice and LibreOffice ripped off everything they could from Microsoft Office except for the copyrighted fonts, but they came out with their own very similar fonts. Google Docs copied Microsoft Office even more closely than OpenOffice/LibreOffice did. That stuff is entirely legal so long as
A) No former or current Microsoft employees bound by intellectual property agreements contributed to it
It is the same way with Apple's stuff. People are going to copy it as closely as they can. What allows them to get away with it is not the refusal of the courts to for some strange reason give a level of protection to Apple's patents and Apple's patents alone that they do not provide to anybody else. What allows the copying to take place is Apple's pricing. Apple's pricing allows companies to make reasonable facsimiles of Apple products - similar function, form, look and feel with decent quality - and sell it at lower price points.
That was the case with Microsoft and Windows. It is the case with Android versus IOS for smartphones and tablets. And it would have been the case with the I-Pod had the Shuffle not eliminated the ability of the competition to undersell Apple.
As has been said before, you can only patent a specific implementation of an idea, not an idea itself. You can patent a specific implementation of a product, not a product itself.
You cannot try and patent anything, I've run a few patents by the USPTO office here in VA, if something is not patentable then there is no way to proceed. What may be unclear here is that if this "inspiration" or "copying". Inspiration is legal, copying is not.
Why do you comment on things you know nothing about? This patent does not patent links in any way shape or form.
It sounds like you are confusing copyrights and patents.
Slide to lock has long been scoffed at as a key patent. There is a lot of prior art, some of which was recently presented at trial. Very doubtful Apple can claim this as one of their innovations.
Apple Macintosh innovations? All presaged by work at SRI and Xerox. Really there was very little that was attributable to Apple except for Steve Jobs' ability to market it.
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
I commend you for the ability to post something with absolutely zero factual accuracy and convincingly pass it off as the truth. You're not a politician by any chance are you?
I can forgive not understanding something, but when one is repeatedly corrected by different posters, and in different ways from simple to complex then all hope is loss. I can be hard headed at times, but this is insisted ignorance.
It's awesome how you can patent what is basically a link. Well this is the U.S patent office after all. I believe they allowed some dude to patent toast in 2003. This is what happens when you have a horrible patent office. In most develop countries, trials occur to determine the value of a patent, in a dump patent orgizational structure like ours, trials happen to determine if the baffoons at the patent office had enough time to properly review a patent and if it's even valid.
I was with Personics Corporation in the 1980s when we sold, among other software utilities, a product called SmartNotes. It was basically 3M post-it notes for your computer. That was in the day of DOS-based 80x25 character displays. So what SmartNotes did was to allow you to attach a pop-up note to any context on your screen; you highlight some text in a word processing document, or a specific cell in a spreadsheet or a record in a database, then type your note. You could then share note files on the network, so when another person with SmartNotes installed is looking at that part of the document, spreadsheet, or database, the note would pop up. The pattern-matching algorithms needed to, behind-the-scenes, watch the screen memory and match what is there against a potentially large number of available notes, was quite intense and complex.
Personics, later purchased by Datawatch, also brought the Monarch data extraction product to market. Monarch used pattern-matching technology to deconstruct hierarchical mainframe reports (the ascii and ansi text files underlying such reports) and turn the extracted data back into a flat database structure with records and fields. The pattern-matching technology in Monarch was more brute force as data extraction was run as a batch job and not done in real time as a user moves from screen to screen within a context, but nevertheless was quite sophisticated. Monarch is still available today as a suite of data extraction and analysis tools.
Point is, unlike some of us who have related experience in the subject matter, you feel free to trivialize what all of Microsoft couldn't accomplish on their own and that Samsung and Google needed to be shown how to do.
When choosing whether to buy a phone or not, I never once thought to myself: Hmmm, I wonder whether it has data detectors or not? And then made a decision whether to purchase it or not based on that criteria.
I guess I personally don't value that feature very highly.
In some situations a feature directly plays into a consumer's buying decision. In others it's more about the overall experience after purchase. You also have not taken into account the fact that, had Samsung's phones not had this and other disputed capabilities, Apple would have been able to market those capabilities in favor of its handsets and against Samsung's. With the allegedly stolen capability present in both vendor's handsets, Apple lost that marketing opportunity and you and other consumers lost the opportunity to see a difference in innovation between the two companies, a factor that plays into confidence in your decision to choose one vendor over another.
Its basically the idea if a link. The patent is absurdly broad. It basically says only apple has the right to link. Basically say you receive an email form your friend, and it's a YouTube link, clicking on that link and opening the YouTube web page is in violation on that ridiculous patent. Or you receive an email of your friend sharing a document and you click in it and it opens in your Microsoft word app in your android. This is how ridiculous this patent is. If this dubious patent us actively enforced the way we interact with the digital world would only be available to Apple.
You have this wrong. The patent has nothing to do with someone sending a link in an email. A pre-defined link is not what the patent is about. The patent is about, for example, you asking your friend in an email or text if they would like to meet for lunch tomorrow. There's no embedded link or conscious intention to create one when you write the email. The patent is about Apple's software looking at the email and creating a link on the text "lunch tomorrow", with the link intelligently inferring that this context implies the potential for the email recipient to wish to create a calendar entry, and so turning this static text into a link that initiates creation of a calendar entry.
It's also not about file association, which is the notion of associating a specific file type with an application used to display or edit that file.
Clever but should be patented, its basically a hyperlink. Clicking on a phone number and then opening a phone app, is that differentiate enough from clicking a youtube link and opening the YouTube web page or the YouTube app. Or from clicking the address and opening a map. Apple patent the idea of doing that. How can you copyright that idea. Show the code, show how you impliment it. An example would be patenting the picking of cotton, instead of the cotton gin. Show the code and how you did it, copyright that code, but you should not be able to patent that basic structures if linking.
You are speaking to what happens after a link exists. The patent is about creating the link in an appropriate form in the first place, out of plain text and the context within which the plain text resides. You seem quite confused on this issue.
There is no other way for anyone else to link to anything other than a precise weblink with apple holding this patent. Apple with this patent has a monopoly on linking on anything that is not a pricise directory location. Because only Apple has the right to decided that a phone number is a phone number and open the proper app.
Basically in plain English this patent states. These values represent something only we have the right to determine what those values mean and proceed with an action.
No one else can tap on a phone number and have it open the phone app, or a phone number and have it open a maps app. Only apple has the right to provide value to those data sets.
How they did it, doesn't matter, that someone can use a different method to achieve the same act, doesn't matter.
So you know when you do a Google search and a map comes up, and you click on it and it opens the full maps web app, well apple has a patent on that, unless that link is a full URL link Google needs to stop. Or when you are in chrome for android and iOS and you see a phone number and it opens up the phone app. Well only apple can do that.
Does it matter how Google is it? No. Does it matter if it did it differently?
You might say to yourlsef well that patent must include some code, of how apple accomplish its data linking process? No just diagrams.
It would be like if Google said, hey we have this way to rank pages by how many connections they received, but provided no page rank algorithm.
Data linking is like patenting picking cotton instead of the cotton gin. Horrible patent, which is why the rest of the world views it as the joke it is.
But in the U.S you can patent toast, so yeah.
And you dont understand how broad this patent is and how this is the patenting of the idea of a link and hyperlink. I'm not arguing apple created something I'm arguing the broad protection it has gained. Patent or copyright the process or method of data linking, not the idea. Basically with this patent no one else can make something that allows you to click on a address or phone number and have it open the proper application without the consent of apple. Doesn't matter how you so it, different code, different touch pattern, found a way to make it quicker, allowing that data point to open Multiple applications. Apple patented the wheel with that "invention".
Of course you are wrong. If I include a hyperlink in an email to you, and that hyperlink is a phone number that points to the phone app on your smartphone, I'm not violating Apple's patent by sending you the link and you are not violating the patent by clicking it. The link itself is not the thing that is patented. It's the innovation of taking plain text and the context it exists within, and determining that some part of that plain text is actionable and specifically what the appropriate action might be and then turning that plain text into an appropriate link. You seem to interpret this as, any link on the internet violates Apple's patent. Not true.
Basically this patent says, only apple can link to anything that is not an exact web link.
You're getting closer. At least you seem to be recognizing that the patent isn't about clicking on a pre-defined link to a Youtube video. You've [barely] taken a step in restoring my faith that people can learn.
So, Apple has a patent or patents that it cannot assert because of potential for damage to the common good. [1] Sounds like innovation would be required to have such an impact, [2] so much for patents then.
Apple waited too long to sue.
So only apple has a right to determine the representation of a set of values on the fly. Say I sent you and email and I said call me at 000-000-0000. What apple does it look at that email and determine with a code that hey, that 000-000-0000 number is a phone number when the user clicks on it, open the phone app. That is what the patent says, also says the same thing for an address.
Now Google and anyone else for that matter cant determine that number is a phone number, that is what apple patented, not the process of regonizing that that number is a phone number, just that it is phone number. No matter what anyone else does, just the actualization of that its a phone number violates apples patent.
That is how ridiculously broad this patent is. Only apple is allowed to analyze data.