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Comment by GHFigs | Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely imperative that we all formulate our opinions in ignorance of the patents themselves. Pay no attention to the following words and numbers.

  Common Name Space for Long and Short File Names: 5,579,517
  Common Name Space for Long and Short File Names: 5,758,352 
  Monitoring Entropic Conditions of a Flash Memory Device as an Indicator for Invoking Erasure Operations: 6,621,746
  Radio Interface Layer in a Cell Phone with a Set of APIs Having a
  Hardware-Independent Proxy Layer and a Hardware-Specific Driver Layer: 6,826,762
  Method and System for Managing Changes to a Contact Database: 6,909,910
  Flexible Architecture for Notifying Applications of State Changes: 7,644,376
  Context Sensitive Menu System/Menu Behavior: 5,664,133
  Method and System for Supporting Off-line Mode of Operation and Synchronization Using Resource State Information: 6,578,054
  Generating Meeting Requests and Group Scheduling from a Mobile Device: 6,370,566

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So I took a look at Method and System for Managing Changes to a Contact Database. It's a pretty straightforward patent. The gist of that you can store the call information from a previous call into your contact list. From a given call you can say, "This is a new contact" or "This is an updated contact".

It was filed in 2002.

The key to prior art here is to show prior to 2002 some device that that could either create a new contact or update a contact from the call log.

I almost certainly recall the ability to create new contacts from the call log prior to 2002. I think the tricky part is that I don't I'd seen updating of an existing contact.

To me this seems like an easy patent to get around though. Simply remove the ability to update contacts from the call log.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but why are they targetting motorola? Don't these patents apply to, well, every smartphone in existence? It can't be a matter of stupidity, so I wonder what made them decide to go after Motorola, and not Nokia, Apple, HTC, Palm, and everyone else who makes a phone with a "Contact Database."

Well you have to read the actual claims. The title means nothing... like literally nothing. It could be that in their patent they require the contact list to also show a nickname, and only Motorola does that.

Who knows, but you should never speculate based on the patent name.

HTC and Apple at least both have some licensing agreements with Microsoft that may cover these patents.

With the exception of 6,826,762 these are pretty laughable.

6,826,762 is pretty laughable too.

But patents are complicated animals - we have to pay attention to the specific claims they make.

I am sure they are equally laughable.

How did you read and understand 9 patents in under an hour? That is a feat that would be quite impressive for a seasoned patent attorney familiar with the technology covered by the patents.

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