

Apple sued over multitouch - chrischen
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/30/elan-microelectronics-turns-to-u-s-international-trade-commission-in-multi-touch-patent-dispute-with-apple/

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GHFigs
Apple _was_ sued by Elan a year ago. The news is that Elan has filed a
complaint with the US International Trade Commission asking to bar imports of
the allegedly infringing products. It's a sharper set of teeth, and more
pressure on Apple to resolve the suit.

Neither MacRumors nor the original Bloomberg article list patent numbers, but
this does not appear to involve any of the specific patents involved in the
Apple-HTC thing. It appears to relate more generally to the touch sensing
hardware Apple uses across their product line. That is _not_ part of the HTC
thing because HTC (like everyone else) uses Synaptics.

As mentioned in the Bloomberg article, Elan won a suit against Synaptics over
the same patent in 2008. It makes sense that they would pursue Apple next, as
Apple's Fingerworks-derived touch technology is (to my knowledge) the only
thing out there other than Synaptics with any market presence.

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DeusExMachina
I think that this takes the "nuclear bombs" metaphor for patents to the
extreme: once one party begins using them, everybody begins tossing them
around.

But I think that the more these lawsuits show up, the clearer becomes that
patents are really against innovation, so in the end it could be a good thing
for those hoping in a patent laws reform.

~~~
praptak
I don't think much will change until a huge company loses to an obvious patent
troll.

~~~
staunch
That happens quite regularly I think. I know Microsoft has paid out many
times. The most horrible example is probably related to IE plugins:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas#Litigation>

~~~
praptak
Yes indeed - I should have written "loses big".

~~~
DeusExMachina
They could also be not so big losses, but many of them. Companies need to
become strongly intertwined, having to pay a lot of other companies for
everything they make. They need to be ensnared by a lot of legal laces, unable
to move.

Then they will try to cut these laces. And these laces are patent laws.

------
RyanMcGreal
Original source:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aAUwSSjk1Qjk&pid=...](http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aAUwSSjk1Qjk&pid=20601087)

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mrcharles
I wonder if this is a case of a company attempting to give Apple a dose of its
own medicine?

Apple's own heavy handedness with multitouch related lawsuits and dealings may
have triggered this.

Either way, I'd like to see a lot more multitouch out there.

~~~
pieter
Apple isn't the only one suing. This is just one more lawsuit, see also
[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-
mob...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/an-explosion-of-mobile-
patent-lawsuits/)

~~~
jws
Seventeen arcs in that graphic and five of them are wrong per the March 5th
correction.

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KirinDave
Good luck Elan?

Last time I checked, Apple had bought Fingerworks which had a patent portfolio
that I'm told was "fairly large" and had been developing since before the
2000's. I'm pretty sure that what's going to happen is that Apple's going to
pull out a trump patent and get Elan's patent invalidated due to prior art
(which was itself approved by the patent office).

Why do we even engage in the polite fiction that patents are meaningful
anymore? They're just government-sponsored lawsuit cards now. Do they do
ANYONE any good in our modern legal system?

~~~
wtallis
It's easy for software people like us to fall into the trap of thinking that
all patents are bad, because software patents have so many problems. (Terms
that are way too long for the pace of the industry, too many vague and overly
broad patents being granted, patents being granted for what is arguably
mathematics, no provisions against patent trolls, etc.) We see and read about
mostly the bad side of the patent system, and unless we actually try to find a
good side, we'll assume there isn't one.

To give an example, I'm listed as a co-inventor on a pending patent
application (though I will never get any royalties from it). The patent is for
a type of device that costs more than a hundred thousand dollars to build. The
owner of the patent will be a small business that deals with such small
volumes that they will mostly have to license the patent to other companies in
order to fulfill demand, but they hope to build and sell several of these
devices themselves. When the project to develop this device started, most of
the experts in the field told us that it was impossible. Now that we've
published the basics of how our design works, it would be fairly easy for the
large players in the industry to replicate our results without having to buy
anything from us. If our patent application isn't granted, then the only way
for the company to recoup their costs would be to treat the results of my
research as a trade secret. (It's too late for that, though, and I've never
signed an NDA.) Going the trade secret route would be a loss for the market,
as I've already mentioned that the inventors can't meet the demand on their
own. Getting a patent is a good compromise that allows my employer to recoup
his costs, but also ensures that our invention can be put to good use.

~~~
barrkel
Patents are government granted monopolies. How do you know that a free market
solution wouldn't come about if it wasn't for the government interfering?

~~~
wtallis
Without patents, I see there being 3 possible outcomes for my employer:

1\. Get screwed. The big players profit from our discoveries, using their name
recognition and economies of scale to ensure that we get essentially no
business from our invention. We don't recoup our investment. Anticipation of
this scenario stifles innovation among start-ups and small businesses.

2\. Treat our discoveries as trade secrets, and attempt to have a monopoly. We
end up being able to sell enough to recoup our R&D costs. However, we're not
able to meet demand, so most of the market goes on buying the current
technology (more expensive and less efficient) until one of the bigger players
can reverse-engineer our stuff or re-invent it. Clearly, this is sub-optimal
for the market as a whole.

3\. Treat it as a trade secret, but using only contract law, license it enough
to meet demand. We are able to recoup our R&D costs, but without patent
filings as evidence, we run a high risk of this deteriorating to case 1 with
insurmountable legal costs.

All three options lack the guarantee that our findings will eventually become
public domain.

What other free-market solutions do you see that would be better?

~~~
ssp
But presumably the big companies have patents that read on other parts of the
device, so that they can just prevent any devices from being made altogether.
It seems this would give them all the advantages in a negotiation.

~~~
wtallis
Actually, in this case, I don't think there are any major looming patent
threats. Part of this is because this industry is much slower-moving than
software (so that 20 years isn't forever), but part of it is because what
we've done is sufficiently different that no reasonable patent for an existing
device could cover the core of our invention. (As I said above, conventional
wisdom was that this was impossible, right up until we made it work.) One way
of describing our research would be to say that this technology has been
evolving down a certain path for 50 years, and we backed up a ways and went
off in a different direction. (It's not quite that revolutionary, but it isn't
that active a field.)

------
jdc
Elan's multitouch product, the Smart Pad:

<http://www.emc.com.tw/eng/tpn_sp_fun.asp>

~~~
spectre
I like the Apple Macbook in the promotional video.

------
jodrellblank
I love the way we take monopolies away in one hand and give them out in the
other.

I'm glad Apple have so much spare cash that they can afford not to have their
arms twisted on this, and can afford to fight it, or negotiate it, or pay any
fines or settlements.

~~~
binspace
I'm not glad that it takes having Apple's money in order to legally defend a
product.

------
binspace
All of this suing goes to show how patents harm, rather than help innovation.
Let the engineers decide which technology is best, not the lawyers.

~~~
wtallis
I think it's clear from the wide differences in performance of multitouch
devices that there's a lot of room for valid patents to muddy the waters.

labs.moto.com has done some good testing of smartphone screens and found the
iPhone to be far more accurate than the competition. My own experience with
some non-phone multitouch devices has also shown Apple to be the only one to
get it truly right. Even Wacom's Bamboo tablets can barely manage to recognize
two-finger gestures, whereas a MacBook Pro can handle jitouch, and recognize
those complex gestures well enough for me to consider jitouch indispensable.

It's hard to believe that the differences could be due only to software or
even relatively obvious improvements in Apple's hardware, so somebody deserves
some patents, and it's probably Apple (unless they stole somebody else's
technology). The ensuing litigation storm then is more a result of how
lucrative the multitouch market is than it is a symptom of messy patent laws.

Ultimately, I think it was probably Apple that did (or bought) the research
necessary to make a multitouch sensor that is better than a gimmick, and for
that they deserve a period of exclusivity to recoup their costs and give them
some profits to invest into the next big thing. On the other hand, 20 years is
a long time for those of us with lesser budgets to wait for such a cool
technology. What we should be hoping for, then, is that somebody more inclined
to license their technology can or has independently developed a multitouch
sensor that is as good as or better than what Apple's been shipping, and that
they can prove this in court if necessary. Reducing the term of these patents
might be helpful, but I don't think that there's justification to eliminate
hardware patents like these.

~~~
ghshephard
"Ultimately, I think it was probably Apple that did (or bought) the research
necessary to make a multitouch sensor that is better than a gimmick, and for
that they deserve a period of exclusivity to recoup their costs and give them
some profits to invest into the next big thing. "

The only area that patent exclusivity should be granted are in those
technologies, processes, and methods that would not have been developed (and
divulged) otherwise. If superior Multi-Touch would have happened anyways, then
there is no reason to grant Apple a patent on the process.

Remember - the entire purpose of patents is "To promote the Progress of
Science and useful Arts..." - if the progress is going to happen anyways,
there is no need to issue a patent.

~~~
wtallis
The current lawsuits are about innovation that has already happened. Most of
the players are mobile phone makers that are trying to compete with the iPhone
by cloning its most distinctive features. If Apple can successfully use
patents to thwart those efforts, it forces Nokia et al to one-up the iPhone
instead of just making clones that they can sell to different carriers.
(Where's the plethora of multitouch screens with haptic feedback that we ought
to be seeing?)

The fact that good multitouch was developed by Apple (really, FingerWorks,
which Apple bought in 2005) instead of Synaptics or Cirque (who make pretty
much everybody else's touchpads) suggests that there was significant
innovation, rather than multitouch just being the logical next step.

~~~
bad_user
> _Most of the players are mobile phone makers that are trying to compete with
> the iPhone by cloning its most distinctive features_

Such as the iPhone cloning distinctive features that have been developed /
patented by Nokia and others. Double standards?

~~~
Maktab
I was under the impression that those were all WLAN, GSM and UMTS patents
relating to the radio equipment. Hardly 'distinctive features' on the same
level as accurate multitouch on a glass screen.

~~~
bad_user
Sure, if being able to actually call someone reliably isn't a distinctive
feature.

Every technology that's newly introduced into the mainstream is distinctive at
first. I don't see LEMS or NMT phones around anymore.

Yeah, multitouch on a glass screen, that's the killer feature that will make
mobile phones popular.

