Apple Taps Multi-Touch in Motorola Patent Lawsuits - PC World

Apple's patent lawsuit against Motorola is just another thread in a rather complicated litigation web, but it's also unique for busting out multi-touch, a hallmark feature of modern smartphones.

In total, Apple is wielding six patents across two lawsuits against Motorola, as detailed on Patently Apple. The lawsuit is a counter-attack against Motorola, which in October claimed that Apple infringes upon 20 of its patents, so 26 patents are actually in play.

But the two patents that raised my non-lawyer eyebrows are the following:

Ellipse Fitting for Multi-Touch Surfaces: "Apparatus and methods are disclosed for simultaneously tracking multiple finger and palm contacts as hands approach, touch, and slide across a proximity-sensing, multi-touch surface. Identification and classification of intuitive hand configurations and motions enables unprecedented integration of typing, resting, pointing, scrolling, 3D manipulation, and handwriting into a versatile, ergonomic computer input device."

Multipoint Touchscreen: "A touch panel having a transparent capacitive sensing medium configured to detect multiple touches or near touches that occur at the same time and at distinct locations in the plane of the touch panel and to produce distinct signals representative of the location of the touches on the plane of the touch panel for each of the multiple touches is disclosed."

You don't have to be a master of legal jargon to see that both patents involve touching a screen with multiple fingers at the same time. Apple has never used these patents for lawsuits before, and from what I can tell, Apple's lawsuits against other smartphone manufacturers, such as HTC and Nokia, don't specifically target multi-touch.

The closest Apple has come in the past is with "Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics," applied against both HTC and Nokia. This was once regarded as Apple's key multi-touch patent, but as Engadget's Nilay Patel points out in January 2009, there's really nothing multi-touch about it. The patent simply covers the way an iPhone can tell if you want to scroll up and down only, or side-to-side as well, based on the angle your finger hits the screen.

This seems kind of crazy now, but there was a time when other smartphones didn't use multi-touch. After Palm broke the mold with the Pre, and didn't get sued, Android followed, and multi-touch is now a standard smartphone feature. According to one rumor, Google had a gentleman's agreement with Apple not to use multi-touch in Android, as part of a fragile partnership between the two companies. Apple and Google are now bitter smartphone rivals, so the agreement has presumably fallen apart.

Apple won't attack Google directly in court, so for now Motorola's taking the blame for allegedly using one of the iPhone's most important features. The implications would appear to be huge, but as with all the other patent lawsuits in play, this one's not going to be resolved anytime soon.

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Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent - Tom's Guide

Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent Tom's Guide, Tech for real life Gadgets Home Web Life Gadgets Software Style Downloads Shopping Tech Support Forums Tom’s Hardware Tom’s Games Sign Up |Sign In Gadgets News Articles Ads Tom's Guide> Gadgets > Smart Phones > News Smartphones > Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent 10:40 PM - October 13, 2010 - By Jane McEntegart - Source : Tom's Guide US

Apple has just been awarded a patent for what people are already calling 'anti-sexting' software.

Kids these days and their cell phones -- you just never know what they're talking about with their friends. Fear not, Apple can help you! TechCrunch reports that the Cupertino, California-based company has just been awarded a patent for a "text-based communication control for personal communication device." The patent description claims that there is "no way to monitor and control text communications to make them user appropriate," and goes on to give children sending and receiving messages with objectionable language as an example.

"Users such as children may send or receive messages (intentionally or not) with parentally objectionable language," it reads.

The software would allow parents to implement parental controls that evaluate whether or not the message in question contains only approved words. If an unauthorized word is detected, it can be omitted from the message, and the application could alert the user or a designated third party to the presence of the unauthorized text. The application may require the user to replace the unauthorized text with words that are allowed, or it may automatically delete the offending words. A third option is that the application would just delete the entire message.

However, despite it being easy to assume that anti-porn Apple's main goal for this software is to help parents prevent kids from swearing or telling each other all about their naughty, hormone-induced urges, it seems the company is also aiming to improve language education.

The abstract for the filing says that although some incoming or outcoming messages could be blocked if they contain "forbidden content," parental controls also make it possible for the phone to require certain text be present in messages. The company goes on to give the example that you could require a certain number of Spanish words per day to be included in emails if your child is learning Spanish.

Check out full details of the patent here.

Source: TechCrunch

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Send* The email addresses collected via this form are not recorded on our servers and are only used for the sending request Sony Reveals Google TV New Product Line-upApple 'Back to Mac' Event Hints at OS X 'Lion'Spotted: Palm Pre 2, Which Could Hit Next MonthSoon Mac Users Can Sync Windows Phones TooFCC Cracking Down on Cellphone ''Bill Shock''LG Launching World's Largest 3D TVGoogle Will Gladly Help Fight Piracy... for a FeeBlizzard Banning SC2 Single-Player Cheaters Too?Google Improves Map Images Using ''Kite View''Porsche Car Chase Ensues Because of PlayStationDeleted Facebook Pics Still There 16 Months Later Featured topics Apple Here Comes Windows Phone 7 Web Site Redesign: Dos and Don’ts The New Xbox 360 Dashboard Latest Apple News Approved: Apple's 'Anti-Sexting' Software Patent Apple 'Back to Mac' Event Hints at OS X... Soon Mac Users Can Sync Windows Phones Too FCC Cracking Down on Cellphone ''Bill... iPhone 4 Glass Breaking 82% More Than on 3GS Latest Apple reviews Apple Vs. Everyone Else: The Top 4 iPad Alternatives Apple iPod Retrospective Take Your iPad To College How To: Turn A Netbook Into A Hackintosh Will iTunes 10 Bring 10 Companies Down? Comments Read the comments on the forums Show comments: By defaultAllGood ratingsPoor ratings   zerapio10/14/2010 4:51 AMHide-1+Can it return the message to the sender if it's written in ALL CAPS? If so sign me up!

Lekko10/14/2010 4:55 AMHide-3+Considering how kids spell these days, that software is going to have to work really really hard to catch stuff.

nukemaster10/14/2010 4:57 AMHide-2+Yay, now any phone company that wants to implement a filter will have to pay apple.

keczapifrytki10/14/2010 5:07 AMHide-0+In other news, 11 year old kids know more swear words than their clueless parents regardless of the censorship imposed on their lives.

eric_son10/14/2010 5:11 AMHide-1+I like the idea...

However, I think this will just encourage the kids to invent their own language where the offending words are masked inside plain old non-offensive words.

zachary k10/14/2010 5:23 AMHide-0+Quote : "text-based communication control for personal communication device."
so that covers sex-based ascii art. wonder when they will move on to media file-based communication.

BBS user10/14/2010 5:25 AMHide-0+How in the hell could Apple get a patent approved on this. There is prior art on text based keyword / bad language filtering from way back in the BBS text chat days. The US PTO doesn't have a clue and just doesn't do the research before approving these bogus patents. I guess Apple now gets to sue anyone who puts a bad language filter into their smart phone?

jdevoy10/14/2010 5:29 AMHide-0+These big companies are just falling over themselves to patent every idea they can come up with, no matter how stupid or obvious...or with how much prior art.

DEZigns33310/14/2010 5:32 AMHide-0+It's censoring software. It's not about sexting, it's for censoring conversations by government agencies like China and UAE.
But your mom can use it too.

ccobrachoppergirl10/14/2010 5:38 AMHide-0+Yes, that's right, condition citizens to be censored from an early age. They'll be great subservient tools for the police state. As if they aren't already, ripped away from the family and schooled in slavery conditions to state mandated education. None of them had a vote as to whether they have to go to school or not, none of them get paid for a darn bit of work they do at school, and none of them have any free time with homework spilling into all the rest of their lives. Why let them have freedom of speach as well.

frostyfireball10/14/2010 5:44 AMHide-0+This is rediculous and there better be a way to trun it off if it's ever implemented. Honestly, who wants this BS except overprotective parents and the likes of jobs. I don't want some software telling what i can or can't say.

the_krasno10/14/2010 5:45 AMHide-0+Answer: use 1337 H4X0|2 M4D SKILZZZZ

People can always circumvent these sort of BS, teenagers are very crafty for the credit people give them.

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Apple Challenges $625.5M Jury Award In Patent Case - InformationWeek

Apple has asked a federal judge to toss out a $625.5 million award by a jury that found the Mac maker had violated three patents related to how documents are displayed on a Mac, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The U.S. District Court jury in Tyler, Texas, found on Friday that Apple had infringed on the Mirror Worlds patents in developing Time Machine, Spotlight and Cover Flow. The jury awarded the plaintiff $208.5 million on each patent.

Time Machine, Spotlight and Cover Flow allow people to scroll through files in a way that's like flipping through a deck of cards. Cover Flow is for scrolling through album cover art when looking for music in the iTunes library in Apple devices, Time Machine makes backup copies of files and Spotlight is used to search for files. The latter two are in the Mac.

On Sunday, Apple filed an emergency motion asking U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for a stay of the jury decision, saying that the damages awarded on each patent amounted to Mirror Worlds "triple dipping." In addition, Davis had said that he would reconsider the evidence regarding infringement of two of the patents and could reverse the jury's ruling, Apple argued. The judge's decision on the request is pending.

The patents reflect the work of Yale computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter, who in the mid-1990s recognized that the desktop metaphor has its limits and proposed to organize computer documents in a time-ordered stream.

Mirror Worlds, which sued Apple in March 2008, began operating in 1997 and shipped its first enterprise software product, Scopeware, in March 2001. In 2002, it released a desktop product called Scopeware Vision. The company closed its doors on May 15, 2004.

SEE ALSO:

Apple Faces Time Machine Patent Lawsuit

Apple Sued Over iPhone Liquid Sensors

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