back to article Apple-HTC patent deal doesn't include designs, 'cloned' iDevices

Apple's licensing agreement with HTC excludes any of the fruity firm's design patents and any HTC products that are "clones" of iDevices. The deal has been published in a heavily redacted format with a California court as a result of Samsung's ongoing legal struggles with Cupertino, in which Samsung successfully petitioned the …

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  1. Eponymous Cowherd
    FAIL

    Pot, Kettle, Black

    Dear Mr, Mrs,Miss or Ms Obviously!

    Does this ring any bells?

    "For a tech site, the opinions of the commentards scares me.

    It's unbelieveable just how one sides and blinkered you techies really are!

    Definately not considered opinions, just bollox.

    EPIC FAIL ladies and gentlemen."

    Epic FAIL, indeed.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Pot, Kettle, Black

      Looking at the rest of his/her/its comments, that one is particularly ironic as he/she/it has repeatedly been guilty of the same crime.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Pot, Kettle, Black

        Well, quite. I'd accuse Obviously! of being a snivelling hypocrite gobshite, but I suspect that he's not bright enough for that. He's either a super-determined troll or an educationally subnormal adolescent. Sadly, Poe's law makes it hard to tell which.

        If I might take a moment to stick up for the Register for a minute (not something I would normally do), I have reported a lot of his more offensive and hateful homophobic comments, and they did get removed. However, I would prefer him gone, as he's a waste of bandwidth, without an intact, let alone original thought in his head, and his prose "style" gives me a headache.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Pot, Kettle, Black

      ^Oh so anti gay comments aren't allowed, but racist ones are?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Pot, Kettle, Black

        @AC 13:24 - What the hell are you talking about?

        1. Richard 120

          Re: Pot, Kettle, Black

          the AC @13:24 was implying that the phrase "Pot, Kettle, Black" is racist.

          Clearly he forgot the joke icon, and given that it's not actually very funny it's probably for the best.

  2. Richard 120
    Trollface

    Obviously

    Obviously! is an obvious troll.

    Sorry for not posting anything relevant to the Article, but Obviously! started it.

  3. Miek
    Trollface

    When are Apple going to sue the etch-a-sketch folks for having rounded corners then?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    I had to laugh buying Aldis own brand Weetabix yesterday with the slogan "we don't cut corners" on their rectangle shaped biscuits. I am amazed apple has not sued them yet.

    My point being, its getting ridiculous.

    1. frank ly

      Wait a minute

      'Weetabix' is a registered trademark of Weetabix Ltd. Be very careful.

  5. Alan Denman

    Apple clones of the ancient Galaxy S led Sasung to relaunch..

    ............Samsung relaunched it with the Galaxy S3 Mini.

    So is the S3 Mini now a copy of the iPhone 5?

  6. SteveK

    One way deal?

    "Apple's licensing agreement with HTC excludes any of the fruity firm's design patents and any HTC products that are "clones" of iDevices."

    Yes, but doesn't Apple consider pretty much any modern smartphone as being a clone of an iDevice?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: One way deal?

      Nope. That would be wrong. Apple has been very deliberate in who they have sued. It may have escaped you notice, but most phones don't infringe on the patents Apple asserts, and unsurprisingly Apple have not sued the makers of these phones.

      Start with every Nokia phone released in the past 2 years. Any takers for one that might infringe the patents asserted by Apple?

  7. LPF

    Doesn't this mess up Samsungs case, as it proves that apple did not sub license its design patents?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      No..

      .... it proves at Apple's claim of irreparable harm which was part of their injunction argument is false

  8. lukewarmdog
    Childcatcher

    If only

    A judge would just tell them all to grow up, deny the opportunity to appeal and let the consumer decide which phone they actually want.

    Love / hate of a brand is more powerful than design, patents, apps.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Doesn't include design patents

    but they are the only ones that Apple have so HTC gain nothing

    1. wowfood

      Re: Doesn't include design patents

      That's not true, they also have a patent on somebody elses wireless charging tech but with a few words changed.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

      There were more technical patents at stake than design patents. The jury found a number of Samsung devices didn't infringe the design patents. What screwed Samsung were technical patents like over scroll bounce-back (which Google had removed from stock Android and Samsung had put back in)

      1. MrXavia
        WTF?

        Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

        But that those kind of patents are being called 'technical' patents is the problem, no way is bounce back technical, its a few lines of code and obvious...

        I am glad I don't live in the US of A right now with those dumb patent laws, and for once I am glad to be in the EU with the UK overriding Germany's stupid court (not stupid for the decision per say but stupid for taking the case when there was one already in EU courts

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

          " its a few lines of code and obvious..."

          If it were so obvious, why wasn't it done previously? I mean the hardware has been able to support the functionality for yonks. Disregarding whether software should be patentable, bounce back is an elegant solution and apparently Apple were first so they get the rights.

          Petition your local congressman if you disagree with software patents. Bellyaching here won't help.

          1. Rabbit80

            Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

            "If it were so obvious, why wasn't it done previously?"

            It was done previously, but according to the jury foreman it didn't count because it didn't run on the same processor. The Ah-ha moment.

          2. dajames
            WTF?

            Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

            If it were so obvious, why wasn't it done previously? I mean the hardware has been able to support the functionality for yonks.

            No, the functionality hasn't been around for yonks. It depends on the new, faster, screens with more responsive, capacitative, touch technology that only became widely available about in time for the iPhone.

            Look at pre-iPhone touch-screen devices that had the older resistive type of touch screen -- like the Palm PDAs and Treo phones, or the Nokia N97 smartphone -- and you'll see that they scrolled with a scrollbar or by pressing up/down keys so the notion of bounce isn't relevant.

            Once you bring faster and more sensitive screens into the equation different things become obvious. Bounce is one of those things.

            ... bounce back is an elegant solution ...

            Solution? What problem does it solve? It's one of a limited number of behaviours that a GUI might be made to exhibit when overshooting on touch-scrolling, but it's not the only one (though, to my mind, not the best) and they're all pretty obvious.

            1. Steve Todd

              Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial? - @dajames

              Samsung's argument was that this kind of thing had existed on Surface (the original MS version) like devices before Apple's claim. There was plenty of speed and responsiveness on those devices, but they chose to implement scrolling like standard Windows (and AFAIK, all desktop operating systems), by coming to a hard stop at the limit of scrolling. Windows Mobile did the same thing. It wasn't an obvious idea because, although there was plenty of hardware and opportunity with which to come up with the idea, no-one thought of it.

              Once Apple demonstrated the idea to the world, THEN it became obvious (and its more than a couple of lines of code BTW), and there in lies the problem. Many ideas from the past look obvious in hindsight, but taking the conceptual leap to them isn't.

              Google meanwhile have worked out a perfectly good alternative that doesn't infringe the patent, so there is no reason that Samsung had to fall foul of this. They walked into it chin first.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Steve Todd

                Apple did not make it obvious, physics did. If you throw a ball at a wall does it come to a dead stop? No, it bounces back. What this 'innovation' is is nothing more than a computer representation of a real world action and so it is obvious and it shouldn't be able to be claimed for sole use by any company.

                1. Steve Todd
                  Stop

                  Re: Steve Todd

                  Bouncing a ball may demonstrate the laws of physics in action, but in case you hadn't noticed windows aren't physical objects. Using computers to do physical-like things certainly can be patentable as what you're patenting is the method to make a computer behave that way.

                  1. Anonymous Coward
                    Anonymous Coward

                    Re: Steve Todd

                    The method would be the code written to generate the effect. That code should be covered by copyright not a patent leaving it so that others can reproduce it as long as they write their own code.

                  2. Anonymous Coward
                    Anonymous Coward

                    Re: Steve Todd

                    "Using computers to do physical-like things certainly can be patentable as what you're patenting is the method to make a computer behave that way."

                    No, patents protect the idea, copyright protects the specific "method to make a computer behave that way". Software patents should die a slow and horrible death.

                  3. Vic

                    Re: Steve Todd

                    > Using computers to do physical-like things certainly can be patentable

                    Not so.

                    From the USPTO site :

                    In addition, 35 U.S.C. 171 requires that a design to be patentable must be “original.” Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute.

                    Now whilst that is from the Design Patent Application Guide, its designation of such simulations as "not original" carries into Utility Patents as well.

                    Vic.

                2. Paul Shirley

                  If you throw a ball at a wall

                  "If you throw a ball at a wall does it come to a dead stop? No, it bounces back."

                  Now go read the bounceback patent... your ball would have to penetrate the wall (the overshoot) then bounce back to match it.

                  An implementation matching a ball bouncing of a real world wall would squash horizontally as it hit the buffer then expand back. It would work perfectly well but cost more in graphic processing, not something todays devices would have a problem with but not necessarily an obvious option most would settle for.

                  1. Trevor Marron

                    Re: If you throw a ball at a wall

                    On a pool table the ball compresses the cushion before bouncing back......

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

              You need to learn to read,.

              OP "... the hardware has been able to support the functionality for yonks."

              You: "...No, the functionality hasn't been around for yonks"

              OP: Insightful

              You: Moron

          3. Mark .

            Re: Did you learn nothing from the Samsung trial?

            By this argument, nothing is obvious, because no matter when it was first done, I can say "Why wasn't it done before that". Unless we're talking about things that were done by the very first human, according to you, everything is non-obvious.

            (The actual answer is that some things aren't required or possible to be done until the required underlying technology or market appears. At which point, there might be several obvious ideas that people then implement, but there will always be one that is first - that doesn't make it non-obvious.)

            "Bellyaching here won't help."

            But then you are posting here...

            1. Paul Shirley

              obviousness

              The test of obviousness is not that it's an obvious idea in hindsight. Obviousness is: if faced with the same problem to solve how easily would other people have discovered the same solution.

              The answer to 'why wasn't it done before' is sometimes simply that it didn't need to be done before. In this case in a world of scrollbars and sluggish responses there was no need for a redundant end-of-scroll effect. The most obvious idea in the world is worthless without a problem to apply it to.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Triple damages and a ban on those and other (newer) infringing models - that'll show 'em. Fire at will.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh my

    http://allthingsd.com/20121206/ftc-slams-google-for-seeking-iphone-ipad-ban/

    You can even spot the UK todgers that can't tell the difference between FRAND and non-FRAND in the comments section.

  12. Roland6 Silver badge

    Does this mean the we'll be seeing an iDesire?

    "Full" text here http://appleinsider.com/articles/12/12/06/redacted-version-of-apple-htc-settlement-reveals-licensed-patents-little-else

    What I found interesting is that Apple's design patents are explicitly excluded from the agreement, whereas HTC's are not, seemingly leaving room for Apple to use HTC's designs but not for HTC to use Apple's...

    What is also interesting is the discussion of implementations of 'patented Apple' experience features that will be deemed okay. These sections certainly give some wriggle room to third-parties.

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