In one of the many-pronged attack that Apple has been making on Android, it's scored a victory at the International Trade Commission, where it's been determined that the idea, that if you see a phone number in an email or on a web-page and click it to call the number, is so special and wonderful that only Apple could possibly use it. It's rulings like this that make anyone with a modicum of technology smarts shake their heads and wonder why we let clearly non-technical people make decisions like this. Patents are supposed to protect inventions that are non-obvious to those skilled in the space. If you put a 100 groups of five engineers in rooms, asking them to design various smartphone features and interfaces around things like this, I'd bet 99 would come up with a similar feature. It's just natural.
In the meantime, Apple's statements about the ruling are equally ridiculous, given Apple's history of copying others (including Android):
Copying an idea and building on it is not "stealing." And if Apple had to build its devices without building on the ideas of others, it wouldn't have very much today. This whole thing is a joke, and it's rulings like this that make engineers have even less respect for the patent system.
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/t...ver-android-features.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
