Apple Scores U.S. Ban on HTC's Low End Phones

From DailyTech: Christmas came early for Apple, facing off in Washington D.C. before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). As companies have increasingly begun to do in recent years, Apple had turned to the ITC to play court and offer a back door to ban its competitors' products.

The ITC examined several of Apple's patent claims (including a humorous one in which Apple claimed to have "invented" interrupt driven undervolting of a computer chip). In the end it decided that HTC was presumably in infringement of only one of those patents -- U.S. Patent 5,946,647.

Like many of Apple's technology patents, it came from the lucrative period between 1998 and 2004, where Apple pushed through increasingly ambiguous patent claims, which it would use over a decade later as a club to try to beat back its mobile competitors.

The patent seems to cover in various vagueries some sort of software framework that takes messages and then launches events -- a nebulous description that could cover everything this side of Windows 7 to Watson the supercomputer.

The abstract reads:

A system and method causes a computer to detect and perform actions on structures identified in computer data. The system provides an analyzer server, an application program interface, a user interface and an action processor. The analyzer server receives from an application running concurrently data having recognizable structures, uses a pattern analysis unit, such as a parser or fast string search function, to detect structures in the data, and links relevant actions to the detected structures. The application program interface communicates with the application running concurrently, and transmits relevant information to the user interface. Thus, the user interface can present and enable selection of the detected structures, and upon selection of a detected structure, present the linked candidate actions. Upon selection of an action, the action processor performs the action on the detected structure.

The patent was filed in 1996, over a decade before Apple announced its first smartphone was coming.

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