There has been so much said already about patents and lawyers killing innovation, but if this is not a perfect case in point then I don't know what is.
HTC is specifically citing the US customs delay related to Apple's current lawsuit as one of the reasons they are lowering their guidance for the current quarter. I'd say that's pretty good evidence. There are consequences for lying to investors about this sort of thing, after all.
Please be careful about throwing around the "anti-competitive" phrase. It has a specific meaning that does not apply here.
Apple has every right (and obligation) to defend patents that were legally acquired. You can argue that the patents are invalid but that is a different story.
Anti-competitive doesn't mean illegal. It is perfectly reasonable to describe gaming the system to block your competition as anti-competitive. After all, that kind of behavior is, quite literally, opposed to competition.
Patents are intrinsically anti-competitive (preventing competition is literally the point of a patent) even if they are legal and/or desirable. But I agree that "anti-competitive" has negative connotations that are clearly a matter of opinion.
Quite the contrary, the term "anti-competitive" is entirely correct here. Abusing the patent system to unfairly crowd out legitimate competition is no different than abusing tariffs or other legal constructs to achieve the same goal.
Even though I've done it before, it's worth beating this drum again.
The patent that might kill HTC is for a ridiculously obvious "invention": Find "interesting" items in some text using a regular expression and present them to the user as clickable actions [1].
As a non-lawyer why am I confident my patent summary is accurate? Because that's what the Android code at issue here (Linkify) actually does (plus HTC included the processor, memory and other components to run this on, of course). Apple originally applied for it based on some behavior of the Power Macintosh help system.
Examples of potential prior art (though I'll admit they didn't include the processor and memory):
Live URLs in Netscape Navigator 2.0b1
Highlighting misspelled words in Microsoft Word 95 (if Word 95 included the context menu for misspellings, which I don't remember)
Potentially impacts:
- Every modern web browser (note that one of the things HTC has lost on so far is the behavior of their default browsers)
- Every modern email client (detecting clickable anything in email)
- Every word processor that lets you click on misspelled words and choose how to handle it (I guess Google shouldn't have added system-wide spell-checking to ICS)
- The search-result sub-items Google generates for some sites
- ...
[1] Whether or not alternatives can be presented is an open item of controversy, I believe. IIRC, handlers for file extensions were common at the time the patent was filed, though, which gets back to obviousness.
11 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 38.9 ms ] threadIt could just be that Samsung is better at the game.
Apple has every right (and obligation) to defend patents that were legally acquired. You can argue that the patents are invalid but that is a different story.
The patent that might kill HTC is for a ridiculously obvious "invention": Find "interesting" items in some text using a regular expression and present them to the user as clickable actions [1].
As a non-lawyer why am I confident my patent summary is accurate? Because that's what the Android code at issue here (Linkify) actually does (plus HTC included the processor, memory and other components to run this on, of course). Apple originally applied for it based on some behavior of the Power Macintosh help system.
Examples of potential prior art (though I'll admit they didn't include the processor and memory):
Live URLs in Netscape Navigator 2.0b1
Highlighting misspelled words in Microsoft Word 95 (if Word 95 included the context menu for misspellings, which I don't remember)
Potentially impacts:
- Every modern web browser (note that one of the things HTC has lost on so far is the behavior of their default browsers)
- Every modern email client (detecting clickable anything in email)
- Every word processor that lets you click on misspelled words and choose how to handle it (I guess Google shouldn't have added system-wide spell-checking to ICS)
- The search-result sub-items Google generates for some sites
- ...
[1] Whether or not alternatives can be presented is an open item of controversy, I believe. IIRC, handlers for file extensions were common at the time the patent was filed, though, which gets back to obviousness.