Articles About Apple

25September

Jury Finds Apple Infringed Smartphone Patent

By Quandary Peak Research

A patent trial in the District of Delaware between MobileMedia Ideas (MMI) and Apple ended with a jury finding of infringement by Apple and an award of $3 million to MMI. The patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. RE 39,231, described the invention of the “polite ignore” feature on cell phones for silencing an incoming call in a way that prevents the caller from knowing that the call was ignored.

During the trial, which lasted a week, the jury heard expert testimony from Dr. Sigurd Meldal, a Professor of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering at San Jose State University and an expert with Quandary Peak Research. Dr. Meldal’s testimony related to technical aspects of the Apple devices at issue, the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4. Dr. Meldal, who was the sole technical expert called by MMI, had previously testified as a smartphone expert in other patent cases, including another trial between MMI and Apple that concluded with a favorable verdict for MMI in 2012.

After deliberating for less than two days, the jury found the patent valid and returned an infringement verdict with a damages award to MMI. Additional details about the case are available at Law360 and Delaware Law Weekly.

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15June

It’s Not Over Yet: Apple Inc. and the FBI Continue Fight Over Encrypted Data Access

By Quandary Peak Research

In what could’ve been the highest-profile case the tech world has ever seen, Apple Inc. (ticker: AAPL) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) locked horns for months over gaining access to an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino attacks. The world watched as the tech giant held its position seeking not to undermine the security of its products, and the FBI attempted to force Apple’s hand in creating code that would enable them to access information on a locked iPhone.

Normally, the force of the federal government would have this case framed as a David vs. Goliath. But Apple Inc. is the world’s second largest company by market capitalization (Alphabet is the first), and with $215 billion in cash as of year-end 2015, it is better capitalized than the federal government—Apple’s debt to cash ratio is around 30% while the federal government’s debt to GDP ratio is over 100%. This is Goliath vs. Goliath, where both entities seemingly have unlimited resources to fight this case to any end. And there’s sufficient pride on both sides to expect just that.

In a world where tech security is a growing paramount concern, the case was—and still is—poised to set a new precedent governing the complicated relationship between the U.S. government, tech companies, and access to private data. In the case of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, the FBI argued (inaccurately) that they would not be able to access important information contained on the phone without Apple’s help. They obtained a court order from a Federal Magistrate demanding Apple’s assistance after citing the All Writs Act, a 227-year-old law that can be used by the government to compel companies to perform actions by government order, so long as they are legal and for good reason. […]

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5November

Runaway Growth: China’s Dominant Role in the Smartphone Market

By Ed Flores

In 2012, China became the world’s largest smartphone market, having accounted for 26.5% of global smartphone shipments that year. That put it well ahead of the US, whose market share dipped from 21.3% to 17.8% year over year (2011-2012), according to research firm IDC. Looking forward, both countries seem set to continue along those divergent paths.

Chinese Consumers Rapidly Shifting to Smartphones

China now has over 1 billion mobile phone subscribers, and many of them are shifting from traditional mobile phones to smartphones. Domestic demand gets a boost in large part due to enhanced accessibility, more coverage, and lower prices, all of which stem from increased competition in the marketplace from the main players—Samsung, Lenovo, Yulong Coolpad, and Apple, Inc. What’s more, subsidies by operators like China Mobile and China Unicom are also making first-time purchases less expensive, which attracts even more buyers.

Cultural forces also provide a tailwind for domestic demand, as owning a smartphone equates to having social status, something that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of as the broader Chinese economy expands.

The effect of these forces on demand is remarkably quantified when you take a look at shipments year over year. In 2012, China shipped some 213 million smartphones, which was more than double the amount shipped in 2011. This year, according to research firm IDC, that figure is set to hit 360 million with further growth to 450 million by 2014, indicating truly astounding growth rates.

The rapid growth should only continue from here. Below, we’ll highlight two potential — and rather paramount — future shifts in the smartphone landscape, the confluence of which we believe serve as compelling reasons to believe China’s smartphone dominance should continue.

China Set to Issue 4G Licenses Soon

According to an October 23 statement issued by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China […]

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25September

Smartphone Patent Wars: Timeline of the Apple v. Samsung Legal Battle

By George Edwards

Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of intellectual property lawsuits involving Apple Inc. (who, ahem, does not like to be called Apple, Inc.). Apple went after Digital Research and Microsoft during the ’80s and ’90s for copying the “look and feel” of the Macintosh OS. But in the last five years, Apple has initiated a flurry of litigation, commonly known as the mobile device patent wars, that is likely to have profound legal and historical significance.http:

The back-and-forth legal sparring has been largely between Apple and Samsung, with suits over both design and utility patents that have captivated the legal community, investors, and followers of software patent litigation. Below, we highlight some of the important milestones in this high stakes legal tussle.

Click the image for a graphical view of the timeline.

April 15, 2011: Apple files complaint in US District Court for the Northern District of California against Samsung for patent infringement of iPhone and iPad. At the heart of the suit are three design patents or trade dress infringements. Apple accuses Samsung of “slavishly” copying their products in a way that was so “pervasive” as to make them indistinguishable from one another.

June 2011: Samsung countersues Apple over infringement of 3G data transfer features and nine other patents in South Korea, Japan, and Germany.

August 9, 2011: Apple wins a design-related preliminary injunction to halt sales of Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the European Union. Samsung appeals.

August 16, 2011: The injunction banning sales ban of Galaxy 10.1 lifted in European Union, but not in Germany.

September 2011: Apple’s injunction upheld in German courts. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales remain halted there. Shortly after, Dutch […]

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17September

Edwards Tapped to Testify on GPS, Navigation, and Mapping Patents

By Quandary Peak Research

Dr. George Edwards, Quandary Peak’s resident guru of location-based mobile services, has been asked to testify as an expert witness in a lawsuit alleging infringement of a patent for “Method and System for Providing an Image Vector-Based Traffic Information.” The case, Porto Technology, Co., Ltd. et al. v. Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless, was filed Sept. 20, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Claim 1 of the patent at issue in the case, US Patent 6,233,518, discloses a method of providing an image-based traffic information in a region having at least one time-variant real entity. The method includes forming a traffic state map, transmitting the traffic state map to a user device, and displaying an image in accordance with the traffic state map on a screen of the user device. The patent was filed in 1999 by Heung-Soo Lee and was granted in 2001.

Edwards was engaged by plaintiff’s counsel Fox Rothschild, LLP, a national law firm with over five hundred attorneys. Edwards expects to draw on his knowledge, skills, and training in a variety of mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, Qualcomm Brew, Palm Web OS, and RIM BlackBerry OS. Edwards’ conclusions will be based on a technical analysis of C++ and Java source code.

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9September

Wireless and Mobile Tech Trends: Tablet Data Usage and Android Jelly Bean

By Quandary Peak Research

Cellular data usage for tablets is up a marked 48% year on year in the first quarter of 2013, according to a data consumption report released by consumer market research firm NPD Group. This isn’t a huge surprise, considering people are increasingly shifting video consumption and web browsing to tablets, and given consumers use cellular when Wi-Fi, mobile hotspots, or tethering aren’t options.

A 48% jump in data usage may seem sizable, but it still only brings cellular usage for tablets to 12% of the total market in the US—meaning only three out of every twenty-five tablets are using cellular. Taken together with Consumer Electronics Association’s survey showing that 41 percent of the online US consumers polled already own a tablet and 72 percent plan to purchase one soon, this is an indication that there is significant market share for cellular data usage (and tablets) up for grabs.

What Does That Mean for Google’s Jelly Bean?

This past July, after much speculation and fanfare, Google finally released a new update to its Android operating system. Dubbed Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, it’s not available for everyone. Google has reserved the July release exclusively for its own line of products like the new Nexus 7. Reports, however, suggest that it will soon be available for widespread use.

Early chatter from the user community seems to indicate that Android 4.3 is making devices run faster, and in particular, Kevin C. Tofel reports that users of 2012 Nexus tablets are experiencing much better performance. On gigaom.com, Tofel highlights a specific software command in Android 4.3 called TRIM that works like “the old Disk Defragmenter on Microsoft Windows PCs which cleaned up the file system and put contiguous file bits in order on the hard drive to speed up I/O performance.”

Another interesting […]

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6August

Rationales for Software Patent Protection

By Quandary Peak Research

Legal scholars point to a handful of philosophical theories as the basis for the moral judgment that patents on technology are just and beneficial to society. Are these theories valid in the context of the modern software industry? In particular, do the unique characteristics of software, in contrast to other forms of technology, make the traditional rationales used to justify patents less valid for software patents?

The “Natural Rights” Justification

John Locke, a 17th century English philosopher, developed the intellectual foundation for the natural rights justification for patents. Put very simply, this argument posits that individuals have a right to ownership of their own labor, and when people apply their labor to create things of value, they obtain ownership of those things. As applied to patents, this theory argues that inventors have invested their labor to design a process or machine, and are entitled to own that process or machine.

Does this theory hold up in practical terms, when viewed in the context of the modern software industry? For the most part, yes: there are very few who question whether software engineers deserve to own the fruits of their labor.

One problem, however, with applying the natural rights rationale to software patents is that it doesn’t take much effort to imagine an abstract computer program that does something useful that no one has done before; all the hard work is in making it work well. Thinking of what you want a program to do is much easier than making it reliable, scalable, user-friendly, and so on. If “inventing” doesn’t require actually implementing the program in a way that has measurable quality, people don’t actually need to do much work to obtain a software patent.

The patent law contains a requirement for “enablement” that is supposed to ensure that inventors disclose how to make their inventions […]

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