One of the patents is for registering regular expressions to extract telephone numbers and contact information out of documents. This is a stupid patent for several reasons:
#1 It's bloody obvious. Pretty much everyone reinvents it (Microsoft Smart Links anyone?) SMS->Extract Phone number, etc
#2 It's so bloody obvious that there is prior open-source applications prior to 1996 that have this feature (turning phone numbers in web documents into clickable action links/context actions) I will say no more, but I have one in my possession.
#3 It's bloody LAME! Really Apple, you want consumers to not be able to use ANY Android device based on the ability to turn text links into actions that was originally issues for the NeXT Desktop? Is that really the competitive advantage between the iPhone and other devices, that it has phone number detection in text documents!?!?
Apple has proven with this that they are a patent troll. Are they suing over iPhone exclusive inventions, like multitouch, proximity sensor, using accelerometers to detect orientation, the "Swipe to Unlock" stuff and all of the things we saw in the original Jesus Phone presentation?
No.
They are trying to hurt competition over something developed for the desktop in 1996.
Multitouch was not an iPhone invention, though I'd believe details of how they did it were. (Or anyway inventions of the company they bought before starting the project.) And using accelerometers to infer orientation -- wasn't that what accelerometers were invented for in the first place? (With other applications like triggering airbags coming later? I'm not sure but that's the impression I'm under.)
#1 It's bloody obvious. Pretty much everyone reinvents it (Microsoft Smart Links anyone?) SMS->Extract Phone number, etc
#2 It's so bloody obvious that there is prior open-source applications prior to 1996 that have this feature (turning phone numbers in web documents into clickable action links/context actions) I will say no more, but I have one in my possession.
#3 It's bloody LAME! Really Apple, you want consumers to not be able to use ANY Android device based on the ability to turn text links into actions that was originally issues for the NeXT Desktop? Is that really the competitive advantage between the iPhone and other devices, that it has phone number detection in text documents!?!?
Apple has proven with this that they are a patent troll. Are they suing over iPhone exclusive inventions, like multitouch, proximity sensor, using accelerometers to detect orientation, the "Swipe to Unlock" stuff and all of the things we saw in the original Jesus Phone presentation?
No.
They are trying to hurt competition over something developed for the desktop in 1996.
Total losers.