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Cali court backs ex-Apple engineer who says he invented Find My iPhone and Passbook

JetSetJim
Headmaster

Patent #1: System and method for remotely initiating lost mode on a computing device. File date is June 2012. From the claims, seems to basically be a patent for a computer device to receive an authenticated command to go into lock-down mode (supress some functionality) or come out of it, transmitting time-stamped location info to the requesting user based on criteria (periodic, heuristic, ...) while in lost mode.

Patent #2: Remotely initiating lost mode on a computing device. File date is June 2012. Covers some server side functionality for receiving the lost phone data stream, plus mentions disabling power off and reporting battery life

Patent #3: Device locator disable authentication. File date is June 2013. Associates a device by hardware ID to a "cloud account" of some form, that allows for "lost mode" control, includes remote wipe functionality

Patent #4: Bypassing security authentication scheme on a lost device to return the device to the owner. File date is Nov 2013. Covers "privileged contacts" who can be contacted from the lost phone to override lost mode. Seems to be limited to WiFi connections only, but it's written in patent-speak, so difficult to tell :)

Patent #5: Location-Based Ticket Books. File date June 2013. Seems to be the Apple Wallet patent, storing "virtual tickets"

A lot of the first 4 patents' content is rather obvious considering there were products on the market for laptops which you could trigger to fire up the camera and take pics and send them to ppl - I even knocked one up in (crap) code to check a GMail account for a trigger email, do the pics and email them, from memory that was in 2011, but I didn't bother publishing it.

Similarly, the Prey app (one of many), was initially published in 2009, probably did what I was trying to do much better! this article seems to show a great deal of the "patented" features in action and available for desktop clients.

IANAPatent Attorney (but have read quite a few patents in my time), but all four Find My Phone patents look rather "obvious to one skilled in the art", if not already in the public domain at least a year prior to filing.

The Apple Wallet one? I was getting e-tickets to stuff before the file date, and they all came into my Gmail account. Might be moderately novel to merge tickets from different providers into an app for convenience, I'll give them that.

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