Ok those patents are BS....highlighting phone numbers and addresses?? They can't be serious. Not sure what the second patent pertained too but I don't think this will change anything.
"Stay classy interwebz"
How the hell were they allowed to patent something like this ? This is just ridiculous , my first PDA phone had this in 2000 , that's 7 years before the iPhone , shouldn't presenting in court a Nokia Communicator from 1997 or something like that render the patent invalid ? Is there a lawyer on this forum to advise ?
It sounds like you can patent pretty much everything . I wonder if there's a patent for "a box with cold air" , I should register this and the sue all the refrigerator manufacturers , frigorific vans , cars with A/C . cooler manufacturers . carbon ice shipments , Coca-Cola vending machines etc.
Its not that simple though, now they seem like trivial patents but at one point this was brand new technology. So yes it seems like something so simple and stupid now but it wasn't always that way. If I were the first to invent a box with cold air, you bet your sweet cheeks I would patent it, license it or go after those who dont use my license.
But the thing is , when they released the iPhone this wasn't new technology at all . I can't talk about the second patent , but the first one refers to features that were integrated in PDA phones and computers way before . Now I see that the first patent was filed inFebruary 1 1996 but it still refers to a method that was pretty common at the time in tech world and was used in computers since 60's board games only that nobody thought of patenting something like that . The principle even goes back all the way to 1700 with Baye's theorem .
I think they should have intellectual rights over the source code that allowed them to achieve this , but it's ridiculous to have a patent for the result when there was already something similar to this used in other fields . But what to expect from a company that copied most of their technology , put it in a nice package , have to give them that , and now they are crying that somebody else is stealing the technology that they have previously stolen .
so is it Apple's fault they were awarded these patents???
See that's the pat response from the apple haters, make some extremely ridiculous analogy and act like it actually fits the situation. I hate the lawsuits too but it's not like Apple doesn't atleast have a case for these lawsuits, if they didn't the courts wouldn't even take them as far as they do but I am sure that's all just a conspiracy of Apple paying off the courts. :blink:
