Source: www.techdirt.com --- Friday, February 26, 2016
Apple may have been able to convince a jury that Samsung violated a bunch of its patents, on concepts like "slide to unlock," but apparently the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) disagrees. Despite the court's reputation for regularly expanding the power of patents (and getting smacked around by the Supreme Court for doing so), CAFC has sided with Samsung and tossed out a jury's $120 million award and with it some Apple patents -- including "slide to unlock." There were a few different patents in this lawsuit, and the appeals court found that Samsung didn't infringe on one of them and that two others were invalid. On the Slide to Unlock patent -- US Patent 8,046,721 -- the court said it was invalidated due to obviousness and the fact that all of the elements involved in slide to unlock were found in prior art. It notes that the "case for obviousness was strong" while "Apple's evidence... was weak." In fact, the court is not at all impressed by Apple's arguments for why "slide to unlock" was some great innovation -- including the idea that because the Steve Jobs reality distortion field made people all excited about it, that doesn't mean the idea wasn't obvious at the time. Apple appears to identify the unsolved problem as the lack of an “intuitive” method of unlocking a touch-screen portable device. But Apple provided no evidence showing that this problem was recognized in the industry. No reasonable jury could find ...
from Apple http://ift.tt/24tyxrO
No comments:
Post a Comment