Apple loses silly lawsuit against HTC

Arris

Posts: 4,719   +451
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18709232

Slide-to-unlock

HTC launched the London-based lawsuits a year ago as part of an effort to invalidate European patents Apple had referred to in a German court case. Apple subsequently countersued.

The four patents at stake were:
Unlocking a device by performing a gesture on an image.
The use of a multilingual keyboard offering different alphabets on portable devices, including mobile phones.
A system to determine which elements of a screen were activated by single-finger touches; which were activated multi-finger touches and which ignored touches altogether.
Letting a user drag an image beyond its limits and then showing it bounce back into place to illustrate that they had reached its furthest edge.

Apple had claimed HTC's Arc unlock mechanism infringed its technology

The judge ruled that the first three patents were invalid in this case, while the fourth did not apply to HTC's devices
 
"The judge said it would have been an "obvious" improvement for the developers to have offered users visual feedback in the form of a "slider" in the way that Apple later used."

Holy cow.. a judge with common sense.
 
The court said that HTC's devices did not infringe four Apple technology patents, including Apple's 'slide-to-unlock' feature.
 
Back