Motorola monsters Apple's swipe-to-unlock patent in German court Apple has suffered yet another setback in its Bleak House lawsuits, with another German court deciding to throw out its swipe-to-unlock patent. The ruling confirms an earlier decision that the patent just didn't have the goods to stand up in Europe. As The Register reported at the time, “European law doesn't allow for the …
>The ones that exist are already identified and relate to filesystems and their ability to handle deprecated stuff from microsoft.
Prior art, just because MS used the BACKSLASH as a path separator when everybody else (slight exaggeration) used it as an escape character does not make a patent. Long file names existed way before MS came up with their poor mid(%filename%,0,6)&"~<n>" excuse ... just because they had not yet thought of the ^ as an escape character, or had they ... DOS experts ?
The only patentable feature of FAT is the name itself ...
Yep. As soon as someone brings a case.
This is a patent case. Filed by Apple and who ever was being accused of heresy against mother corporation's holy eye pee.
Not a case brought by the EU to stop Apple "innovating magical industrial design".
So if you have a grievance, and qualify as an interested party, bring a case, and a patent can be thrown out if it is without merit.
One day Apple might come up with something original, but it would be going against what Saint Jobs baked into their mindset from the start.
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Quite a lot of these patents are defensive in nature: if you don't patent it, someone else will do it and screw you over. Annul patent trolls and stop allowing wins over trivial shit and you may eventually end up with a patent system that does what it was supposed to do: protect innovation.
>Quite a lot of these patents are defensive in nature: if you don't patent it, someone else will do it and screw you over.
Cheaper to file than to fight in court. That sounds reasonable, but in that case, they should have contributed it to a patent pool and not held onto it.
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