

Apple 'Safe Deposit Box' Patent Revealed Ahead of Mac OS X Lion - anderzole
http://www.macrumors.com/2011/02/19/apple-safe-deposit-box-patent-revealed-ahead-of-mac-os-x-lion/

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mryall
This is a really interesting way to sell cloud-based storage. My parents use
Dropbox for synchronisation of files on multiple computers, but they don't
really understand how it acts as a backup system too. Pitching cloud storage
as a safety deposit box clearly spells out the benefit to people.

On a related note, Mac OS X can already create password-protected encrypted
disk images with a few clicks in Disk Utility. These are great for creating a
"safety deposit box" yourself on an existing system.

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joebananas
> but they don't really understand how it acts as a backup system too.

Maybe your parents are just more sophisticated than you and know the
difference between redundancy and backups.

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Locke1689
You're playing semantics. Fundamentally all "backups" are just storage
redundancy.

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andrewvc
The difference is isolation. If I accidentally rm a file on a RAID, which is
redundant, but not a backup, it's gone for good. Backups protect you by
providing a distinct interface to >= 2 copies of a piece of data, this
provides greater protection against malice, mistakes, and hardware failures.

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cosmicray
As you say, RAID (specifically RAID level 1) is redundancy.

Time Machine is a form of generational/chronological backup.

Apple has stated that Time Machine is not archival. I wonder is this new
patent is referring to an extension of TM, to the cloud, to provide something
as close to archival as can be achieved.

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bayareaguy
Prior art?

2009 - [http://www.randomwire.com/storing-sensitive-data-in-the-
clou...](http://www.randomwire.com/storing-sensitive-data-in-the-cloud)

2008 - [http://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/truecrypt-virtual-
enc...](http://firmit.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/truecrypt-virtual-encrypted/)

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masklinn
Stop that, it's very silly: <http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-
tridgell-patents/>

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bayareaguy
Care to elaborate in your own words why you think so?

I will be quite peeved if something I have been doing for years with
combinations of tools like Dropbox and Truecrypt becomes more difficult or
costly to me _or my customers_ due to a patent like this one.

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caf
Basically, it comes down to: the claims in patents are interpreted very
narrowly.

If your device/method doesn't _exactly_ match the claim elements of the
independent claim(s) in Apple's patent - even one little difference in
implementation is enough - then your device/method is not infringing. Don't
worry, be happy.

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dualboot
I'm just happy they properly called it a "Safe deposit box."

It annoys the crap out of me when people call it a "Safety deposit box"

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code_duck
How does this differ from the iDisk system? Just asking, I'm relatively new to
Macs and I see that in Finder under Devices but have never used it. Also, how
does iDisk differ from DropBox?

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pyre
IIRC, iDisk was just an easy way to mount the storage on your .Mac account (or
whatever they are calling it nowadays). There was no auto-sync, so it was
basically a network mounted filesystem (I doubt the system's backend was
distributed, so I'm not going to call it a 'cloud-based' mounted filesystem).

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dchest
Actually, there's a full sync option in MobileMe preferences.

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idonthack
so they've patented a password-protected network filesystem?

how did they miss the prior art on THAT one?

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epistasis
If you read the post, it doesn't appear that they've patented anything like
that.

Just because something is used in an invention doesn't mean that component is
now part of the patent; for example if somebody uses a gear in their patented
design, it's OK for others to use gears.

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pedalpete
Could you please elaborate on what you see as being patented then?

I agree a patent on a gear does not allow others to use the same gear, but
said gear would need to have a uniquely defining quality which differentiates
it from the other gears already in existence.

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epistasis
I'm not going to go trawling through patents (I'm superstitious), but based on
only the figures in the linked article, there's at least a password protected
file-system _and_ the interface for accessing it. And going on the text,
there's going to be something about the security implementation as well that's
in the patent.

This sounds very similar to DropBox, but this is just a high-level
description. It's extremely unlikely that they could describe their system in
sufficient detail without distinguishing it from DropBox in some way.

There's a tendency to hear the title of a patent and think that it covers all
systems that could possibly be described by that particular title. This is not
the case! Also, there's a tendency to hear about a patent and think that
because your system does something similar, it would be infringing against a
patent, but that also is not necessarily the case. The patent system can be
abused horribly, but not every instance of a patent is an instance of abuse,
and each patent should be evaluated on its own merits rather than the abuses
of others.

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psykotic
> Also, there's a tendency to hear about a patent and think that because your
> system does something similar, it would be infringing against a patent, but
> that also is not necessarily the case.

Right. You can often dodge patent claims by doing just one little thing in a
different way. When you see a very specific claim, it means the patent lawyer
was forced to write it that way by the examiner. A patent application starts
out as generic as possible and becomes increasingly specific in response to
push-back.

Of course, non-infringement is no guarantee against getting dragged into a
costly legal battle.

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tastybites
What could possibly go wrong.

~~~
alexobenauer
\--Mike Rowe

