Last year, Twitter announced something it called the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which would keep patents in the hands of the designers and engineers that came up with the technology behind them. What this agreement serves as is a promise to only act on a patent for “defensive purposes.” Anything outside of that scope would need to be signed off on the creator of the patent itself. → Read More
Companies like Google, BlackBerry, Earthlink, Red Hat, and others in the tech community, have been piling pressure on the U.S. government to take a stronger stand against companies that file patent suits but don’t actually make any products themselves — known formally as “patent assertion entities” but more commonly as patent trolls and patent privateers (a term favored by Google). Now someone in… → Read More
The USPTO published a number of Apple patent applications Tuesday, including two related to automobiles (via AppleInsider). The car patents both describe systems that can be built into future iPhones, replacing most of the functionality of your standard key fob with the smartphone, and providing a way to help drivers navigate the often maze-like interiors of parking garages to find their ride. → Read More
Nokia today posted Q1 earnings that show the Finnish company still trying to recover from a fast-declining legacy handset business. But in the meantime, it is continuing to play another card in its hand, that of patents and intellectual property licensing. This is an area that will bring Nokia €500 million ($653 million) in revenues this year, CFO Timo Ihamuotila said in Nokia’s earnings call… → Read More
A new patent published by the USPTO today (via PhoneArena) indicates that Amazon is looking into a way to limit the amount of data exchanged when two parties engage in a mobile payment transaction. The patent describes a way to sub in unique identifiers for information like name and email address that would otherwise be used to verify the identities of buyer and seller. → Read More
Microsoft just scored a coup on the patent royalty front, with a new deal with Taiwanese phone maker, Hon Hai, which owns Foxconn. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will get paid a flat fee per Android and Chrome-based device that Foxconn makes. And there are a lot of those. A whopping 40 percent of the world’s phones come from the firm’s China-based factories. Foxconn is an ODM… → Read More
Google, along with BlackBerry, EarthLink and Red Hat, today appealed to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to take stronger action against companies like Lodsys, Intellectual Ventures, and other “patent assertion entities” (aka patent trolls or so-called patent privateers) — companies they believe abuse patents for financial gain and are an increasing detriment to the… → Read More
A couple of new Apple patent applications published today show how the company might be thinking about competing with recent innovations from other big tech companies with similar, but different designs. The first is a filing that describes a convertible MacBook design, with a touch-sensitive screen that separates from the base. The second is a method for navigating a Street View-style view of… → Read More
Google today pledged that it will not sue any users, distributors or developers who have implemented open-source versions of its MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets, even though these implementations (including, for example, Apache Hadoop) probably infringe upon 10 patents Google holds for this technology. This move, the company’s senior patent counsel Duane Valz… → Read More
Samsung lost out big to Apple last year in a mobile patent blowout in the U.S., but it’s been slowly building up an arsenal of patents that potentially will keep it from falling into the same situation again. Samsung, also currently the world’s biggest mobile company, received the most mobile patents in 2012, and it now holds the most mobile patents of any company worldwide, according to the … → Read More
A new Apple patent filing describes a variety of methods to protect a dropped iPhone during a fall, lessening damage through a number of clever systems. The USPTO filing, spotted by AppleInsider, includes a rotational mechanism to change the orientation of a falling iPhone, for instance, as well as on-device thrusters, and a way to clamp down on inserted cables when a fall is detected. → Read More
Apple has been awarded a patent today (via AppleInsider) that describes an augmented reality (AR) system that can tag real-world items in a live video stream and display information about them in a HUD overlay. It sounds exactly like Pop-Up video in practice: turn your device to focus on Rick Astley, for instance, and get a pop-up picture of the singer belting out “Never Gonna Give You Up.” → Read More
Apple has a couple of new interesting glimpses into possible new future tech published by the USPTO today, including a patent application for an iPad Smart Cover with a built-in battery and induction charging, and a mobile camera design that offers true optical zoom, instead of the low-quality digital zoom we’re all used to in current devices. → Read More
Apple has been granted a patent today (via AppleInsider) in an area where it hasn’t had tremendous success: social networking. But the system described in the patent isn’t specific to Apple’s own social services, and instead describes software that could be integrated into iOS and made accessible to other apps and services as an API to help regulate and maintain a common… → Read More
Over the past few years there has been a lot written by me and others about Twitter’s acquisition of the pull-down-to-refresh patent application with its purchase of Tweetie. According to Public PAIR (search for application number 2010-0199180), the USPTO has completed its examination of the patent application, and found allowable claims. Twitter has decided to take the allowable claims… → Read More
Microsoft and Google are currently involved in a patent lawsuit in Germany that could, according to FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller and a number of German reports, lead to an outright ban of Google Maps in the country. Microsoft’s EP0845124 patent in Europe is for a “computer system for identifying local resources and method therefor” and was issued in 1996. The issue was… → Read More
Apple received a patent from the USPTO today (via AppleInsider) that describes a technology that would allow device casings to employ a combination of pressure and capacitive sensitivity to detect input. At the very least, the tech could be used to map functions like those Apple currently assigns to the home, power and volume buttons to areas of an iPhone or iPad’s bezel. → Read More
Apple’s landmark $1 billion damages award over Samsung has been partially vacated by presiding judge Lucy Koh, FOSS Patents reports. The judge has orders just north of $450 million be struck from the $1 billion total, an amount which relates to 14 Samsung products involved in the case, pending a new trial to determine appropriate damages for those specific devices. → Read More
Apple was issued a couple of interesting new patents today (spotted by AppleInsider), including one that could make an iPhone aware of changes in a user’s situation, and alter phone settings accordingly. That would make for a mobile phone that might be able to automatically switch to silent mode when in a movie theatre, for instance, or which could wake from sleep upon being pulled out of a… → Read More
Via Licensing Corporation today announced that China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom joined the company’s LTE patent pool for standards-essential patents. The two telecom giants join AT&T, Clearwire Corporation, DTVG Licensing, HP, KDDI Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and ZTE Corporation in this pool that launched last October. Give the vagaries of the patent… → Read More
Editor’s note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA, focusing on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas.
One of the main changes resulting from the passage of the America Invents Act (AIA) is the transition of U.S. patent law from a “first-to-invent”… → Read More
Following up from its legal filing yesterday in the U.S., Google has now officially served BT with legal papers for patent infringements in its home market of the UK. While yesterday’s suit concerned enterprise services, the UK finding reveals that Google is using Motorola patents to go after BT, claiming it is making infringements in its IPTV services and its set-top boxes. Thus a legal battle… → Read More
Google today stepped up its battle to protect its patents, with the latest target a countersuit against BT, the UK incumbent telecoms carrier, along with Ipanema Technologies, which resells some of BT’s services. The suit relates to four patents that Google says are being infringed by services that BT runs over its IP network, specifically relating to its conferencing services and quality of… → Read More
A new patent granted to Apple today by the USPTO (via AppleInsider) describes an invention called “microslot antennas,” which would integrate cellular and wireless radio antennas directly into case materials, which could both reduce the size requirements of internal elements of a device, and also make it so that there’s no evidence on a gadget’s external case of the antenna’s presence, to the… → Read More
Editor’s note: Leonid (“Lenny”) Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, specializing in developing IP strategy for young technology companies.
Patent assertion entities regularly engage in the practice of sending patent demand letters to unsuspecting startups and small businesses in preparation for going after much larger entities. → Read More
It’s been a bad week for online security. An “extremely critical” Ruby on Rails security hole; a Yahoo! Mail XSS exploit; and yet another Java 0-day vulnerability. I know, I know, security is hard: still, it’s difficult not to be left with a frustrated throw-up-your-hands “can’t anybody do anything right?” feeling. → Read More
This week U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Samsung will indeed have to reveal specific device sales numbers for a variety of its gadgets, denying the Korean company’s request to keep that information secret. Samsung has to pony up the information after Apple made a follow-up request to its $1.05 billion award from a jury August 24 regarding damages resulting from the sale of Galaxy… → Read More
RIM responded to Nokia’s request to have its devices removed from sale following a patent decision in the Finnish company’s favor by working out a settlement, and now we’re beginning to get a sense of the specific terms of said arrangement. AllThingsD has uncovered an SEC filing that details RIM’s first lump-sum payments, which amounts to €50 million (or around $65 million). Following that… → Read More
The European Commission has delivered a “statement of objections” to Samsung’s leadership, in which it claims that Samsung was abusing its standard-essential patents in preventing Apple from making use of the same. Providing written notice is the next step in the EC’s investigation of Samsung, which began due to the Korean company’s many injunction requests and lawsuits filed in EU member states… → Read More
Two new patent applications published by the USPTO today describe a couple of pieces of tech that both help make mobile devices smarter, albeit in very different ways. The first is a facial recognition system that can identify people and things using vector-based “faceprints” picked up from photos, and the second is a call waiting system that can provide inbound callers with a lot more than just a… → Read More
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