Apple found guilty of willful patent infringement
Nibble
Claimed it was obvious
Monday, 27 April 2009, 12:22
FRUIT THEMED toymaker Apple has been found guilty of deliberately infringing on a patent owned by another company and ordered to pay $19 million in damages.
Opti got a patent in 2002 for predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses. The method enables better transfer of data between a CPU, memory, and other devices.
Apple admitted that it had a similar bit of kit but said it was prior art and obvious and wanted the case chucked out.
The jury didn't agree and thought that a company that claims it is the most innovative in the world should come up with its own ideas or at least do better patent searches to make sure it doesn't step on anyone else's toes. µ
L'Inq
Ars Technica
Share this:
Share
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
INQ Whitepapers
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Jobs
Advertisement
INQ Poll
Problem here is the patent office granted this one man band and Apple the same patent. So you have 2 parties using the same patent without knowing about each other.
I wonder how many other cases like this are floating around and if Apple will sue over there patent.
Who wins? Lawyers win as always. thats what its all about.
The US Patent system is so broken that they would grant a patent for a left handed coffee mug, if it were worded the right way.
The US patent office will grant a patent on almost anything these days, even if there is prior art, then it's up to the patent owners to duke it out in court to find out if the patent is worth even the paper it is written on.
But then Apple has a long history of stealing other people ideas, basically everything in and around the early Macs were stolen from Xerox, WSIWYG, GUI OS, the Mouse, Ethernet, Laser Printing.
More recently Apple stole the iPod user interface from Creative. Apple rearly comes up with a new idea, they just package other peoples ideas really well.
The concept was licenced from Xerox not stolen, Microsoft on the other hand was given no licence.
And the Creative interface patent was on a portable list based interface that Apple has a patent on a computer based list interface. So there patent should have in theory covered the iPod.
Though the computer industery as a hole is built up of "borrowing" ideas. As AMD borrowed X86, and Intel borrowed x86-64 and on chip memory controler.
In software every system has Icons, Windows, and menu's. These are the basics Xerox developed, Apple added to this the ability for Windows to over lap, be resized, and a functioning graphical file manager.
@taz-nz - Why do people bash the 'US' patent office, when Australia let someone patent the wheel? Literally, the wheel, it made headlines.
Why not complain about patent offices in general? Why the hate?
There used to be a website paying bounties for prior art to shoot down patents. One of the winners won because he had patented exactly the same thing a couple of years earlier.
no more "fruit" puns. its getting as bad as the rest of your writing you sour fruit smelling writer.
Unfortunately, it was their patent searches that would have got Apple into trouble in the first place. Under US law, if you search and find a patent, and conclude that you won’t be infringing it, and a court finds that you did, then it becomes wilful infringement (as opposed to just infringement), and you become liable for triple damages.
That’s why lawyers advise their clients NOT to do patent searches. It’s safer that way.