Palm Comments on Apple Multi-Touch Patents 9
Dieter posted up an article on Wednesday about an Apple exec talking lawsuits at the Apple Quarterly Conference call. Yep, Apple COO Tim Cook said that if their competition ripps off Apple's intellectual property, they'd go after them. Tim stated that they weren't mentioning any specific company. LOL, no need to mention a "specific" company though, huh? I'm sure that everyone knew exactly which company Cook was referring to.
Rene Ritchie over at our sister site The iPhone Blog got wind of a PC Mag article in which Palm has commented on Apple's possible lawsuit references.
From the PC Mag article:
A spokeswoman at Palm said Thursday that the company has not been contacted by Apple's legal team, to her knowledge. "Palm has a long history of innovation, obviously reflected in our own products and our own robust apps portfolio," she said. "We have long been recognized for our fundamental patents in the mobile space. If we're faced with legal action, we're confident that we have the tools to defend ourselves."
When asked whether gestures like "pinching" were universal, or belonged to Apple, the Palm spokeswoman said that "our position is that multitouch has been around a long, long, long time before Apple introduced it."
In his recent article, Dieter referenced a few patents Palm could probably sue over; one of them being 'cradle for synchronizing data'. Another interesting one is a patent for turning off the radio via software. Hmmm, I do believe I used something very similar while in a hospital waiting area yesterday. It was when I had to turn off the "airplane mode" on my iPhone when I saw a sign letting me know that all cellphones should be turned off.
Looks like things could get pretty prickly in the lawsuit arena. We'll be watching to find out what happens. Stay tuned....
9 Comments
re: "our position is that multitouch has been around a long, long, long time before Apple introduced it."
Heh. How does one "introduce" something that's been around a long time?
I would guess they meant something like:
"our position is that multitouch has been around a long, long, long time before Apple introduced it to consumers."
or "Apple introduced it to the masses."
Do not forget, Apple has a history of stealing technology and suing others that use the same techology. Apple stole the window and desktop metaphors from Xerox PARC. Apple then sued Microsoft for Windows. Eventually, Xerox sued Apple, but a judge denied their claim because they waited so long to file suit.
From Wikipedia:
The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product. Much later, in the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit in which Apple accused Microsoft of violating its copyright by appropriating the use of the "look and feel" of the Macintosh GUI, Xerox also sued Apple on the same grounds. The lawsuit was dismissed because Xerox had waited too long to file suit, and the statute of limitations had expired[2]. However, some dispute the degree to which the Apple interface was derived from Xerox designs. Indeed, prior to Apple's visits to PARC, its Macintosh project more closely resembled the Valdocs operating system of the Epson QX-10.
Was the quoted phrase the whole original sentence, though? If it was excerpted from a longer statement, "it" might have referred to the iPhone rather than multitouch as a concept.
That's the sound bite effect for you, though.
You go Palm, don't you budge. Apple has no right trying to claim multi-touch when it has been around for such a long time. Now let's see if you can deliver a better multi-touch experience than them...