When you have deep pockets, you’re likely to be the target of lawsuits. That maxim has never been more true than with Apple. A week after Nokia again sued the Cupertino, Calif. company, a graphics display outfit in Washington State has sued Apple, claiming the iPhone infringes its patents on scaling web graphics to mobile devices.
Patent No. 7461353, entitled “Scalable Display of Internet Content on Mobile Devices,” mentions many iPhone-centric features, including manipulating the size of on-screen graphics. “Mobile devices enabled to support resolution-independent scalable display of internet (Web) content to allow Web pages to be scaled (zoomed) and panned for better viewing on smaller screen sizes.”
Elsewhere, the patent, filed in Juanuary 2005 and listing Gary Rohrabaugh and Scott Sherman as inventors, describes scalable “content and/or data derived therefrom are then employed to enable the Web content to be rapidly rendered, zoomed and panned.”
Softview also names AT&T in the lawsuit.
Last week, Nokia filed a patent infringement lawsuit in Wisconsin, alleging Apple’s iPhone and iPad violated five patents. This lawsuit is on top of lawsuits Nokia filed in Maryland, as well as a complaint before the U.S. International Trade Commission.
Still unknown is how Apple will react to the Softview lawsuit and whether the Cupertino, Calif. company will countersue.
[via TechCrunch and Softview Lawsuit]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
