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"Limited victory" is right, starts with 10 patents and gets reduced to one patent covering automatically linking phone numbers to bring up the dialer on click?
by talmand 15y ago
"Limited victory" is right, starts with 10 patents and gets reduced to one patent covering automatically linking phone numbers to bring up the dialer on click? Seems to me the result is that Apple lost rather badly in this case. This is the second time I've seen a misleading headline suggesting a Apple victory in a patent case but turns out to be a loss once you've read the details. What's the deal with that?
But really? They have a patent for making telephone numbers in a document click-able to call that number? That seems so obvious a thing to do on a phone why grant the patent? Plus, if HTC can come up with a workaround so easily and quickly doesn't that also support the thought it's an overly obvious (i.e., useless) patent? Did I understand that part correctly?
- Karunamon 15y agoI'm pretty sure I saw that functionality in devices that existed long before the iPhone.. fucking patents. But to be fair, an import blockade is a pretty solid victory. Unfortunately for Apple, HTC can release a software update to disable the "infringing" functionality and quite possibly reinvent it in a way that isn't infringing anything.
- vidarh 15y agoA blockade now would have been a solid victory. A blockade months into the future for a trivially disabled feature is pretty much a joke. I worked on a touch pad in '99 that had this functionality, and I'm pretty sure we didn't come up with the idea. Unfortunately we never got it into mass production, and I doubt sufficient details were released to use it as prior art. Nokia's Screen Phone might have had similar functionality. (Search for FreePad if interested - still a few articles available)