Quote: “Yep.. The right to tap on a phone number and have a dialer application start and call the phone number, or to tap on an e-mail address and have it go to the e-mail program. Or to use a data connection to complete a purchase.”
Ok, then how do you do it? Tell me how to make that happen. I don’t mean go read the patent and tell me, I mean act as if you had never seen anything like it before and tell me how to do it. Ok, you have done it for decades, you say. Fine, then tell me how to translate what you have done for decades to a smart phone. I imagine that ANY invention looks simple with the benefit of hindsight.
You oversimplify the patent system and, as is typical, point to the numbnuts valueless patents to prove that it is “broken.” Just because someone has a patent doesn’t mean it is a pioneering or broad patent or that it has any value. It may be narrow and cover only an improvement. At the end of the day, the owner still has to enforce it and prove infringement. But it his the owner’s investment and its cost.
As for trolling, a patent troll is usually referred to as a company that does nothing but purchase patents and enforce them. They sell no prodcuts. Neither player in this game is a troll. They are both big boys playing in a highly competitive market.
Ban. That has been Apple's goal - no attempts to license, no negotiations, it's pure ‘we don't want your competition anymore, so go away.’ Explain just how this patent trolling - and make no mistake, it is trolling - they want to win, ban the phones and tablets, and THEN maybe make a licensing deal to PERMIT the infringing device in the United States.
All over a detail which has been part of the computer experience for more than two decades. Oh, and no, it's not satisfactory to Apple to have the specific abilities removed - as some user could easily decide to put that ability back in.
In reaction, Google used the sledgehammer of the 3G patent - another troll - Apple uses a Chinese manufacturer who has never licensed the ability to use a 3G data connection to transfer data from a mobile device to the ‘internet’ - boy, the person in the patent office who awarded that one must have felt good that day. Google’s solution, so long as Apple is trolling vendors who use Android operating system, is to ban every Apple product that uses 3G data chips that aren't licensed.
Do I consider anyone to be the good guys here? No. Both should have been tossed out of court the second they filed it, as NEITHER were protecting an intellectual property, but simply using it as an excuse to impact the marketplace. Neither case should have been filed in the first place.
Using a data network to transfer data isn't intellectual property - that's like saying that you can patent drinking water coming out of a kitchen sink. And then patent water for washing. And then patent water for ice cubes. The whole point is to deliver water - just as the whole point of a 3G data network is to deliver and receive data.
And I used the swing example because it is endemic of the entire patent system at this point - There's a patent for the OK button on a dialog. There's a patent for buying something online. There's a patent for using a credit card to pay for something you purchased online...
And yes, there is a patent for making a reply on an online forum to another user's message, and another one for directing it to a specific person and notifying them of the response. Thankfully, BOTH of those patents were gained and then specifically put into the public domain to keep the trolls from glomming onto them, else you would have seen them used against FreeRepublic multiple times by now.
“Tell me how to make that happen.”
Piece of cake and thousands of programmers do such things every single day. Responding to an event that says a user touched a button and then have that event call a function is done all the time. How the Hell did that even get a patent in the first place? That’s like patenting computer programmming itself.
“Tell me how to make that happen.”
private void lnkPhoneNumber_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
PhoneDialer Dialer = new PhoneDialer();
Dialer.Dial(lnkPhoneNumber.Text);
}
See? Piece of cake. Any idiot could do it.