Infringement can't be said to have occurred until after a patent is issued, but it could still be infringement even if Apple had never heard of the patent, patent-holder, or any ideas derived from them until the lawsuit. If the patent is valid, Apple continuing to market the technology is infringing on the patent nonetheless.
However, what's described does seem to be a quite a bit different process from what mobile safari does. This patent is for techniques more complicated than just navigating a web browser on a handheld device.
The patent is absurd. XML isnt a display language. Websites may, or may not, convert HTML to xml for mobiles , other devices or applications to read the data ( i.e. RSS readers) but not only is that nothing to do with how mobile phones ( even simple ones) operate - it is clearly prior art so this patent should never have been issued. And the iPhone clearly uses Safari to browse full websites - the very fact that Apple has been targeted when it has a full browser shows the absurdity of this claim, the patent holder ( absent prior art) might have had a claim against WAP phones but not the iPhone.
These idiots have to be stopped. Frivolous patent claims should be penalized with a fine - up to a million dollars - if the patent is deemed to be useless if used to sue in court ( before that we should allow patents to be granted provisionally until tested in court to allow innovation, but we need to stop frivolous lawsuits).
anyway Apple legal should be able to take this one on. Companies like Apple and others need to lobby government a bit more to change laws to make these cases more difficult.
Agreed. And remember patents are not a file first and win forever thing. All the sued company has to do is show prior art and the patent becomes invalid because it is no longer advancing the art, just documenting where the art was previously advanced by someone else.
This sounds an awful lot like how WAP browsers worked, back in 1998, and how Opera Mini worked, back in 2005 (before EMG's patent filing).
Sounds pretty similar to stuff I described in a whitepaper submitted to one of the early WWW conferences: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/1995/57/index.html (which Palm then went on to describe in a presentation of their own in 2000)
This doesn't say when the patent was submitted, but the iPhone was demonstrated in January of 2007 and has been for sale since the summer of 2007. Unless the patent was submitted in early 2006, I doubt that Apple saw the patent when it was pending and copied it.
Oh well... I guess we'll see how this plays out.
Edit: I found the link to the patent here. It says that the patent was applied for on March 13, 2006. I guess this company could have some merit.
yes but these days it has been decided by the courts that patents need to be specific. you can't patent 'have a way to zoom websites on a mobile phone to make them easy to read'.
you can however patent "use of a two finger stretch and pinch movement on a touchscreen based mobile device to zoom and shrink content' because that is specific.
so the validity will depend on what exactly the patent covers technology wise.
"A method of navigating the Internet, comprising: displaying on-line content accessed via the Internet, the 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, the sister site including a portion or a whole of content of the web page reformatted to be displayed and navigable through a simplified navigation interface"
.
which begs the question, who is doing this remarking. seems to me that by copyright laws, it would have to be the peeps that originally created the content. add to this that most pages on an iphone aren't 'iphone friendly' and clearly apple isn't touching them.
so the lawsuits should be on the folks creating the content.
although I thought that the whole html/xml was more of a public domain/open source gig so folks can use them as wanted and folks have been creating versions of sites chosen by detecting OS, browser etc for years. way before EMG and the mobile phone. how is this any different.
It says that the patent was applied for on March 13, 2006. I guess this company could have some merit.
keep in mind however that before the iphone was the Newton project which was in the mid 90s. and apple continued some if not all of the patents from that project. so they might have patents dating before this March 2006 filing date.
Comments
Infringement can't be said to have occurred until after a patent is issued, but it could still be infringement even if Apple had never heard of the patent, patent-holder, or any ideas derived from them until the lawsuit. If the patent is valid, Apple continuing to market the technology is infringing on the patent nonetheless.
However, what's described does seem to be a quite a bit different process from what mobile safari does. This patent is for techniques more complicated than just navigating a web browser on a handheld device.
The patent is absurd. XML isnt a display language. Websites may, or may not, convert HTML to xml for mobiles , other devices or applications to read the data ( i.e. RSS readers) but not only is that nothing to do with how mobile phones ( even simple ones) operate - it is clearly prior art so this patent should never have been issued. And the iPhone clearly uses Safari to browse full websites - the very fact that Apple has been targeted when it has a full browser shows the absurdity of this claim, the patent holder ( absent prior art) might have had a claim against WAP phones but not the iPhone.
These idiots have to be stopped. Frivolous patent claims should be penalized with a fine - up to a million dollars - if the patent is deemed to be useless if used to sue in court ( before that we should allow patents to be granted provisionally until tested in court to allow innovation, but we need to stop frivolous lawsuits).
anyway Apple legal should be able to take this one on. Companies like Apple and others need to lobby government a bit more to change laws to make these cases more difficult.
This sounds an awful lot like how WAP browsers worked, back in 1998, and how Opera Mini worked, back in 2005 (before EMG's patent filing).
Sounds pretty similar to stuff I described in a whitepaper submitted to one of the early WWW conferences: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/1995/57/index.html (which Palm then went on to describe in a presentation of their own in 2000)
This doesn't say when the patent was submitted, but the iPhone was demonstrated in January of 2007 and has been for sale since the summer of 2007. Unless the patent was submitted in early 2006, I doubt that Apple saw the patent when it was pending and copied it.
Oh well... I guess we'll see how this plays out.
Edit: I found the link to the patent here. It says that the patent was applied for on March 13, 2006. I guess this company could have some merit.
yes but these days it has been decided by the courts that patents need to be specific. you can't patent 'have a way to zoom websites on a mobile phone to make them easy to read'.
you can however patent "use of a two finger stretch and pinch movement on a touchscreen based mobile device to zoom and shrink content' because that is specific.
so the validity will depend on what exactly the patent covers technology wise.
"A method of navigating the Internet, comprising: displaying on-line content accessed via the Internet, the 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, the sister site including a portion or a whole of content of the web page reformatted to be displayed and navigable through a simplified navigation interface"
.
which begs the question, who is doing this remarking. seems to me that by copyright laws, it would have to be the peeps that originally created the content. add to this that most pages on an iphone aren't 'iphone friendly' and clearly apple isn't touching them.
so the lawsuits should be on the folks creating the content.
although I thought that the whole html/xml was more of a public domain/open source gig so folks can use them as wanted and folks have been creating versions of sites chosen by detecting OS, browser etc for years. way before EMG and the mobile phone. how is this any different.
It says that the patent was applied for on March 13, 2006. I guess this company could have some merit.
keep in mind however that before the iphone was the Newton project which was in the mid 90s. and apple continued some if not all of the patents from that project. so they might have patents dating before this March 2006 filing date.