patents - page 15

The United States International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled in favor of Apple today by finding Samsung guilty of patent infringement in two cases. This marks the ITC’s final ruling from the original complaint Apple filed against Samsung back in 2011, reports FOSS Patents. Apple won a decisive victory against Samsung last year that involved over a half billion dollars in damages, and President Obama recently vetoed a sales ban on older Apple products that the ITC had awarded Samsung.

Over the weekend, President Obama weighed in on the famous Apple vs. Samsung patent disputes by vetoing an import ban proposed by the International Trade Commission that would have prevented Apple from bringing iOS devices older than the iPhone 4S and iPad 3 into the country.

An avowed fan of Apple’s products, it was the first time a U.S. presidential administration had vetoed a product ban by the ITC since 1987, and seemed to signal that the Obama Administration was not going to penalize an American company like Apple in favor of a foreign company like Samsung.

Financial Markets took notice. Samsung’s market cap is down a billion dollars since the vetoing.

Apple and Motorola are set to do battle in a Miami courtroom in August 2014, but before the fight can begin, the two companies have decided to drop 14 patents from litigation.

At the behest of Federal Judge Robert N. Scola, the two companies are starting narrow down the list of patents they want to sue each other over. The trial originally started with 24 patents under review, but Apple dropped six patents yesterday and Motorola dropped eight. 

Apple’s “pinch to zoom” patent, which features prominently in a patent dispute against Samsung, has been dismissed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to documents filed by Samsung in a U.S. federal court, all 21 claims of the patent have been rejected in a “final office action.”

Google copied pretty much every aspect of iOS when it came up with Android, so I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that the Search Giant is now shamelessly copying Apple’s patents… right down to the drawing.

As noticed by Patently Apple, on the left you have Apple’s already granted patent for a wider MacBook trackpad that would be able to use the Facetime camera to detect whether someone was just resting their hands on the trackpad, or actually using it.

On the right? A new Google patent for a Chromebook that can detect a user’s presence based upon the forward-facing camera. Notice the line drawings used for both are essentially identical. Ballsy, Google!

Source: Patently Apple

Apple and Samsung will meet in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit court next month as Apple steps up its bid to have a number of Samsung devices banned in the United States.

The Cupertino company is hoping to reverse the court’s decision not to remove then handsets from sale when they were found guilty of infringing Apple patents last August.

Apple has asked the International Trade Commission to postpone an import ban on the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2 while a court considers its appeal. The ban is set to go into affect on August 5 — just under four weeks away — but Apple has argued that it will “sweep away an entire segment of Apple’s product offerings” and harm iPhone carrier partners.

Apple has lost its bid to add the new Galaxy S4 to its ongoing patent lawsuit against Samsung. U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal said that adding yet another device to the case is a “tax on the court’s resources,” and that it takes time away from other parties who require the court’s attention.

A Tokyo court has today found Samsung guilty of infringing an Apple “bounce-back” or “rubber banding” patent that covers the popular scrolling feature built into its iOS platform. Apple has been using the patent against Samsung in a number of courtrooms all over the world, but back in April, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office deemed it invalid.

Wouldn’t it be great if your iPhone automatically increased its speaker volume when you pulled it away from your ear, or decreased it as you moved it closer? According to a new Apple patent recently published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, this could be a feature of future iPhones. 

Apple began adding the Galaxy S4 to its ongoing patent-infringement case against Samsung last week, and it has now specified five patents which it believes the device is breaching. The Cupertino company has also taken aim at Google Now, which allegedly infringes its unified search patent.

The patent war between Apple and Samsung has no end in sight. After Apple won a landmark victory against Samsung for patent infringement last summer to the tune of about $1 billion in damages, the court later deducted $450 million from what Samsung owes Apple. The California judge presiding over the case, Lucy Koh, said that the jury miscalculated what the damages should be for the 14 included Samsung devices.

All of the various charges and reexaminations being thrown around mean that Apple and Samsung will be heading to trial in the U.S. again not once, but twice in the coming year.

Apple and Samsung will again go head to head in court this November after presiding Judge Lucy Koh called for a new trial to recalculate the damages awarded by a jury last August. The move comes after Judge Koh cut $450.5 million from the $1.05 billion originally awarded to Apple due to uncertainty over the jury’s findings.

iCloud push services could soon resume in Germany more than a year after they were killed after a high court stayed Motorola’s patent trial against Apple on Wednesday. Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court issued a press release that said both Apple and Google — which now owns Motorola — agreed to the stay, which has called into question the validity of Motorola’s patent.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC)  has officially ruled in favor of Apple against Google’s Motorola Mobility in a patent case that began in 2010. The last patent Motorola was using to sue Apple for infringement has been ruled invalid by the ITC.

Motorola sued Apple for allegedly violating six of its patents three years ago, and today’s patent was the last of six patents to be thrown out of court. If Motorola would have proven Apple’s infringement of this particular patent, the ITC could have possibly blocked sales of certain iPhone models.

U.S. District Judge Robert Scola believes Apple and Google-owned Motorola are more interested in using litigation as a business strategy than they are in resolving patent disputes. Both companies accused each other of infringing patents related to wireless technologies back in 2010, and today the case is still on going.

“The parties have no interest in efficiently and expeditiously resolving this dispute; they instead are using this and similar litigation worldwide as a business strategy that appears to have no end,” said Judge Scola in an order dated yesterday. “That is not a proper use of this court.”

Palm and its line of smartphones might be extinct, but its patents have managed to live on after the company’s death, and Apple’s ready to scoop some of them up.

Apple reached an agreement with Japan’s ACCESS Co., Ltd. to license $10 million worth of patents that were originally created by Palm and PalmSource. Other patents were included in the deal from Bell Communications and Geoworks as well.

Even though it’d probably be pretty cool, we’ve concluded that a touchscreen MacBook Air or iMac probably wouldn’t be fun to use for an extended period of time, thanks to gorilla arm syndrome.

But what if Apple made an iPad/MacBook Air hybrid? It turns out that Apple has been considering the idea of it for sometime, and based on its patent filings, the iPad/MacBook hybrid would look a lot like some of the PC options that are already on the market.

Apple has been forced to change the way in which its VPN On Demand feature works on iOS devices following a patent lawsuit it lost last November. The Cupertino company has published a new knowledge base article to explain to users how the change will affect their devices.

Apple has been dealt yet another blow by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office after receiving confirmation that its famous “rubber banding” patent, which plays a key role in the company’s fight against Samsung, is invalid. The “final” decision comes after the USPTO tentatively rejected all claims in the ‘381 patent back in October 2012.

We’ve been waiting for Samsung to launch a new smartphone with a flexible, wraparound display ever since the Korean company began showing off its new technology at trade shows like CES. But it may need to move a little faster if it wants to be the first to market with this new form factor.

A new Apple patent published today by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office shows the Cupertino company has been also experimenting with wraparound displays for the iPhone, which provide a more rounded form factor not too dissimilar to that of the fourth- and fifth-generation iPod nanos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ku0H10_G1X4

One of the curses of being an innovator is every time you innovate, someone comes along and says they had a patent on it first. Apple knows this dilemma well, and the latest patent infringement claim Cupertino has to defend itself against is in China over Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant.

The Google Glass project has been in the news a fair bit in recent months, but it seems Google may have another wearable gadget in development that’s been flying under the radar. The Financial Times reports that just like Apple and Samsung, the search giant is working on its own smartwatch that will act as an extension to the smartphone.

A new Apple patent filing describes a future iPhone with one curious trick: it can twist itself in mid-air like a cat, not to land on its feet, but to smash into the ground in such a way that it’s least likely to get harmed.

A joint venture company between Philips and Sony called Intertrust, has decided to file a patent infringement suit against Apple, asserting that 15 of the company’s patents have been violated.

Intertrust’s patents cover a range of devices and services for digital restrictions management (DRM) to protect intellectual property.