Imagine a lifetime job with Apple, that doesn’t require you going into the office every day, from which you can never be fired, but which still gives you a sizeable guaranteed paycheck at the end of each month.
If that sounds like a dream come true, apparently you share the same utopian vision as a little company called Hall Data Sync Technologies: a non-practicing patent troll company which just filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple.
Steve Jobs was a visionary, a futurist and a business genius … but he was also an inventor with more than 458 patents to his name. What better way to spend this holiday weekend than getting yourself up to speed with the inventions of one of the most prolific patenters of the 20th century?
The patent-holding consortium Rockstar — which includes Apple among its members, alongside Microsoft, BlackBerry and others — has reached a settlement with Google.
In a lawsuit filed last October, Rockstar alleged that Google was infringing on 7 different search-related patents, which had been acquired by Rockstar in 2011 following the bankruptcy of networking products supplier Nortel.
Rockstar outbid Google to acquire the patents, for which it paid $4.5 billion. Some reports put Apple’s contribution as high as $2.6 billion.
It’s been decades since pagers played a central role in our tech lives, but the beeper is causing some headaches for Apple lately. A federal jury just slapped Apple with a $23.6 million fine for infringing patents related to ’90s technology.
Mobile Telecommunications Technologies sued Apple last year for violating several of its patents that govern two-way exchanges of data. Apple services such as iMessage, calendar invitations and emoji allegedly violated the patents, and after six hours of deliberation, the jury found Apple was guilty of five out of the six charges.
A budding feud between Bose and Beats Electronics has ended with both sides settling out of court. Although the terms haven’t been made public, according to Bose the matter has been satisfactorily “resolved” and will no longer go to trial.
Both sides have agreed to pay their own costs and legal fees, and have asked the International Trade Commission to suspend its investigation into the disagreement.
A U.S. judge has ruled in Apple’s favor in litigation filed against the company by Canadian patent licensing company WiLan, reports Reuters, after the judge issued a public statement on the case Wednesday afternoon.
Apple was being sued for supposedly violating two LTE patents held by WiLan, but a summary judgement from Judge Dana Sabraw ruled that the patents were invalid and note infringed.
When you’re a company with the kind of bank that Apple has, it’s no wonder that you’d be a target for patent trolls.
Well, it seems that the trolls are out from under their bridge again, because Secure Web Conference Corporation based out of Melville, New York has filed a new patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, claiming that its FaceTime technology (and the hardware it’s currently running on) infringes on an earlier patent.
Apple has been awarded a new patent for adding moving radial menus to both Macs and iOS devices.
The use of radial menus would give Apple an alternative to the pull-down menus currently used in most applications — allowing context-specific menus and submenus to be created at optimal positions close to a user’s mouse cursor or, in the case of an iPhone or iPad, their finger.
Have you ever cracked a Lightning connector, or — perish the thought — your iPhone itself when roughly yanking it out of a dock? Apple’s working on the problem. Cupertino’s patent department just filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a sort of super dock that will make docking your smartphone safer and easier than ever.
We’re all so used to using our iPhones as our primary cameras these days that it’s difficult to remember what it was like in the dark days before the device came along.
Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a new series of Apple-related patents, including an historic 2008 filing for an Apple camera. While the patent covers both a standalone camera (something Apple hasn’t done since the QuickTake camera launched in 1994) and a camera integrated into a PDA, it is likely that this is the patent which covers the original iPhone.