The specific part relevant to Android reads "The method includes displaying information on the touch screen display in a portrait view or a landscape view based on an analysis of data received from the one or more accelerometers."
- The MyOrigo smartphone could auto rotate its view four years before Apple invented the idea
Under US law a patent is not supposed to be granted if the invention being patented was "known or used by others in this country, or was patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country" before the date of the application.
So if a touchscreen phone existed prior to the patents application date of December 2007 that used an accelerometer to automatically alter the phones view based on input from that accelerometer, and this device is known about in the US before 2007, then prior art exists and the patent should not be granted.
Four years before Apples patent application, in 2003 the MyOrigo smartphone, a touchscreen phone, was unveiled by its creators and shown to the world.
It could auto rotate its view based on data from an accelerometer and was reported in a number of American publications, and on American web sites, a full four years before Apples application was made and yet somehow the US patent office still accepted and granted it, making Apple the legal rights holder to technology first seen on a non Apple device four years before Apple claim to have invented it.
But perhaps the best known patent used against Android to date is the "slide to unlock" patent, a patent Apple see as a magic bullet and which has helped secure it some high profile victories against companies that produce Android devices.
In Europe it is patent EP1964022 (filed in 2006) and in America the relevant patent is number 8,046,721 (filed in 2009). You can skip the next three paragraphs if you're not interested in the relevant text from sections of those patents.
The key part of the European patent states "In some embodiments, a method of controlling an electronic device with a touch-sensitive display includes: detecting contact with the touch-sensitive display while the device is in a user-interface lock state; moving an image corresponding to a user-interface unlock state of the device in accordance with the contact; transitioning the device to the user-interface unlock state if the detected contact corresponds to a predefined gesture; and maintaining the device in the user-interface lock state if the detected contact does not correspond to the predefined gesture".
The key part of the US patent states "The device is unlocked if contact with the display corresponds to a predefined gesture for unlocking the device. The device displays one or more unlock images with respect to which the predefined gesture is to be performed in order to unlock the device.
The performance of the predefined gesture with respect to the unlock image may include moving the unlock image to a predefined location and/or moving the unlock image along a predefined path. The device may also display visual cues of the predefined gesture on the touch screen to remind a user of the gesture".
Both the US and Europe have a similar understanding of prior art, it means that if a pre existing device uses the action of sliding a finger over a touch screen to lock or unlock the device and it existed before the earliest filing made by Apple (in 2006) then these patents should be invalidated because they were applied for after the technology had been invented and used by someone else (prior art).
Watch the video below and skip to four minutes in. You'll see some one reviewing a touch screen phone in 2005, using the exact method of unlocking it that Apple 'invented' a year later and later used in the iPhone (which came out two years after the phone shown in the video).
In one Dutch court case the court in question did see sense and say the unlock patent was too obvious to be patentable but the patents themselves still stand and are still allowed to be asserted, in fact they recently helped secure more high profile injunctions against Android devices.
The other key patent used against Android, and so far the hardest to defend against, is Apples "data tapping" patent, US patent number 5,946,647 (applied for in February 1996).
For the technically minded the patents abstract (description by Apple, the patentee) follows in the next paragraph, if you don't want to read it you can skip past the next block of text but for those interested in just how Apple describe and summarise their invention here it is....
"A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data. The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor. The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as a parser or fast string search function, to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. The application program interface communicates with the application running concurrently, and transmits relevant information to the user interface. Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions. Upon selection of an action, the action processor performs the action on the detected structure."
This patent covers what is now known as data tapping, when applied to Android it simply means that if you have information (such as an email address or phone number) in a document (for example if someone sent you a phone number by text or email) and your phone or tablet can act on that (for example it can dial the phone number if you click on it) then it is using Apples patent.
Androids can do this and so the patent is a key weapon, except that there is prior art for this patent too.
Lotus Agenda, a personal information manager for the DOS operating system, received its first stable release in 1992 a full four years before Apples data tapping patent application was made. In 1990, six years before the application by Apple, Agendas designers wrote about how it used heuristics and algorithms to infer and recognise unformatted information (data) in a document and generate actions as a result.
A description of the software from Wikipedia highlights this feature "Lotus Agenda is a "free-form" information manager: the information need not be structured at all before it is entered into the database. A phrase such as "See Wendy on Tuesday 3pm" can be entered as is without any pre-processing".
Six years before the Apple patent application the feature they claim is their own had already been described in detail by others, and four years before the application this feature was actually being used in a real product to do exactly what Apple described.
This case of prior art seems, however, to have gone un noticed and I have yet to hear of it being presented as evidence in a court case.
I am not a patent lawyer but I have spent a lot of time reading the specifics on what constitutes prior art in a patent application case and while the above examples are the earliest I have found to pre date the Apple patents it is a fact that they existed before the relevant Apple patent applications were made and should therefore serve as examples of prior art, so it is a surprise that despite this information the patents continue to be used successfully against the Android operating system.
One can only hope that sooner or later such erroneous patents will be discounted but for now, despite examples of prior art, Apple seem to have a knack for getting away with using patents that they should never have been awarded.
