Katie MarsalEMG Technology, LLC on Monday filed a formal complaint in the Eastern District of Texas (Tyler Division) accusing Apple of patent violation through "the way the iPhone navigates the Internet."
The suit comes a little more than a month after EMG was granted the rights to U.S. patent No. 7,441,196 titled "Apparatus and method of manipulating a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming and scrolling internet content."
Los Angeles-based real estate developer Elliot Gottfurcht is listed as one of the patent's investors. As the lone managing member of EMG, he's retained the services of JMBM's Stanley Gibson, one of the lead trial attorneys who won a $1.35 billion payment in the patent infringement case against medical technology firm Medtronic.
A copy of EMG's suit was not available as of press time, though Gibson claims the patent in question covers "the display of Internet content reformatted from HTML to XML on mobile devices — the industry standard currently displayed by the iPhone."
Additional patent claims in the suit, which seeks unspecified damages, include technology for manipulating a region of the screen for zooming and scrolling, Gibson said.
Meanwhile, the Standard is taking Apple to task for its employee email retention policy, or lack thereof. The publication reports that a recent filing in the Psystar vs Apple antitrust case reveals that Apple employees are responsible for maintaining their own documents such as emails, memos, and voicemails.
"In other words, there is no company-wide policy for archiving, saving, or deleting these documents," the Standard said. "This could pose a problem in the event of a lawsuit. In recent years, companies have been fined millions after failing to retrieve old emails and other files required as evidence."
The report goes on to cite an e-discovery lawyer who says Apple's lack of "organization or coordination" in regards to its employee email retention policy essentially makes it "incapable of compliance" with legal requirements surrounding document retention.
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Malcolm Owen
Christine McKee
Amber Neely
26 Comments
If you have a vague patent you should be required to do something more specific with it within a certain amount of time or loose it.
EMG Technology, LLC on Monday filed a formal complaint in the Eastern District of Texas (Tyler Division) accusing Apple of patent violation through "the way the iPhone navigates the Internet."
The suit comes a little more than a month after EMG was granted the rights to U.S. patent No. 7,441,196 titled "Apparatus and method of manipulating a region on a wireless device screen for viewing, zooming and scrolling internet content."
This doesn't say when the patent was submitted, but the iPhone was demonstrated in January of 2007 and has been for sale since the summer of 2007. Unless the patent was submitted in early 2006, I doubt that Apple saw the patent when it was pending and copied it.
Oh well... I guess we'll see how this plays out.
Edit: I found the link to the patent here. It says that the patent was applied for on March 13, 2006. I guess this company could have some merit.
Apple seems to be sued often, first pystar, now they have to turn around and fight this...
this patent is sort of vague, it seems to me all it is is basically having special websites for mobile phones that are easier to load, and also zooming and scrolling.
Edit: I found the link to the patent here. It says that the patent was applied for on March 13, 2006. I guess this company could have some merit.
"A method of navigating the Internet, comprising: displaying on-line content accessed via the Internet, the on-line content reformatted from a webpage in a hypertext markup language (HTML) format into an extensible markup language (XML) format to generate a sister site, the sister site including a portion or a whole of content of the web page reformatted to be displayed and navigable through a simplified navigation interface"
Erm, has anyone on the plaintiff's team actually used an iPhone?
IANAL, but this patent appears to describe a slicing service, whereby you visit a proxy site that divides up the web page you want to see into smaller chunks. How exactly this patent applies to any of Safari's inventions... which involve the site itself, no sister site, and no slicing... well, my soul would weep if the court found in the plaintiff's favor on this.
The patent filing is important because even before the iPhone, there were other handheld players with internet browsers. Both Palm and MS CE (WinMobile) both had browsers too.
It's really a shame that someone can get a patent for obvious functions. I'm really waiting for someone to patent breathing as a "Method of extracting oxygen for internal bio-processing and energy production".