Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google's mobile OS -- declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question. The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle's Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.) read more..
Thursday, 24 May 2012
Patent Infringement Case-Deliberations-Bated Breath-Oracle
Monday, 7 May 2012
Smithsonian Institute-Steve Jobs-Patents
Steve Jobs fans in the Washington, DC area will want to check out an exhibit of his patents. Jobs had more than three hundred patents to his name, and 312 of them will be on display at the S. Dillon Ripley Center, which is part of the Smithsonian Institute. The exhibit contains physical examples of the patented items, like an Apple II, a Lisa, a NeXT computer and an iPod, as well as a facsimile of the accompanying patent. The exhibit was created by the nonprofit Invent Now, Inc, which works to highlight creativity and invention. It will run from May 11 to July 8. Tickets will be made available through the Smithsonain Associates website.Traveling exhibit to display Steve Jobs patents originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 03 May 2012 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Software Patents-Ferguson
In case you haven't seen it yet, the fourth episode of Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" series went live in mid-February on Ferguson's site. As in the previous three episodes in the series, Ferguson examines modern attitudes toward "intellectual property" and how these attitudes rather counterintuitively stifle creativity rather than fostering it. Part 4 of "Everything is a Remix" deals largely with the contentious subject of software patents, a subject we've covered many times here at TUAW. According to Ferguson, 62 percent of all patent lawsuits are now over software patents, and he estimates the total wealth "lost" (read: siphoned off from "infringing" companies and individuals towards patent holders and their lawyers) at half a trillion dollars. Apple has found itself on both sides of the software patent trench warfare, as both target and aggressor. Ferguson makes it pretty obvious that Apple is just as guilty of hypocrisy as everyone else when it comes to software patents; he points out that Steve Jobs from 1996 proudly stated "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," while Steve Jobs from 2010 said he was going to "destroy Android, because it's a stolen product" and was "willing to go thermonuclear war" on Google and its allegedly copycat product. As Ferguson points out, "When we copy, we justify it. When others copy, we vilify it. Most of us have no problem with copying as long as we're the ones doing it." The question remains, however, where to draw the line between copying as a necessary portion of innovation and copying as an admission of a failure to innovate. Some might say all Samsung has done with its many riffs on Apple's products is "remix" the iPad and iPhone, but even after viewing Ferguson's series I'm not wholly convinced of that. On the other hand, Apple itself has long been accused of "copying" innovations at Xerox PARC for the first Mac OS -- something Ferguson himself addressed in an earlier episode of his series -- so the demarcation between "remix" and "shameless knockoff" isn't always easy to find. Ferguson's entire series is very well put together, and is itself only possible because of the very "remixing" he discusses. If you haven't caught the earlier episodes, I'd highly recommend setting aside an hour to watch all four parts back-to-back.'Everything is a Remix' examines software patents originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Touchscreen Keyboards-Mechanical Keyboard-Pressure Switch-Keyboard Design-Apple Patents
The touchscreen keyboards on Apple's iOS devices are great space savers, as they're never around when you don't need them. For all the great leaps forward Apple has made with Multi-Touch technology over the past five years in both its iOS devices and Mac touchpads, its physical keyboards still use some well-established and comparatively old technology. Apple has apparently turned its eye on the traditional mechanical keyboard and tried to figure out ways to shrink that down, too. AppleInsider discovered a patent filed in August of 2010 that shows Apple is brewing up ideas to shrink its physical keyboards even farther than it has already. Current keyboards rely on a somewhat elaborate system consisting of a "scissor" mechanism that keeps keys suspended over a rubber dome switch, which when pressed, completes a path on the underlying keyboard circuitry, sending that key's signal to the computer's logic board. Apple has been thinking of ways to improve that system. All keyboard design is fundamentally about a spring-loaded pressure switch completing an electrical circuit. When pressure is applied -- usually via an intentional keypress, sometimes by a wandering cat -- the switch completes a circuit and sends an input signal. When pressure lets off, the circuit breaks. Older keyboards relied on actual spring mechanisms, which is why those older keyboards were quite large, heavy, and loud (clackety clackety CLACK). Some companies briefly experimented with membrane-style keyboards, but in a way those are almost worse than touchscreen keyboards; they have the same suboptimal level of tactile feedback to the user, but they also generally require more pressure to operate than a capacitive touch-style keyboard. Apple's proposed new keyboard design replaces the currently prevalent "scissor" style mechanical lever with a setup that reminds me of a device that pre-dates even the original typewriter: a telegraph machine. Like one of the old-style telegraph generators, the assembly consists of a key at the end of a long lever which, when pressed, completes a circuit and sends a signal. The support lever in Apple's proposed design would be made of a flexible material with good tensile feedback to the user. Design for an electric Morse key, patented in 1837 The upshot of this design? Traditional spring-loaded keyboards required a key travel of between 4 and 5 millimeters, with the "scissor" style setup in current notebook and portable keyboards requiring a smaller travel length of 1.5 to 2 millimeters. Apple's patent allows for a keyboard that needs only 0.2 millimeters of key travel. This obviously has implications for the design of Apple's notebooks. So far the keyboard itself hasn't been an especially important constraint on the overall thickness of Apple's notebooks -- battery design and the need to keep motherboards from spontaneously combusting has been more of a factor -- but it's not hard to envision a point where that 1.3 to 1.8 millimeters of potential space savings does indeed come in handy for an even thinner version of the MacBook Air.Apple patents design for ultra-thin keyboard originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 24 Feb 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..