Google Says Some Apple Inventions Are So Great They Ought to Be Shared

This is why Bing is desperate to get traffic- as long as it's numbers are low then it has significantly fewer signals which cause its ads to underperform.

This is also the source of the 'Bing is copying our results' kerfuffle last year- http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-.... Bing needed more signals, so used the toolbar to get them, inadvertently copying Google.

Sun Microsystems happens: a decade of stagnation followed by a quick and brutal collapse.

No one is alleging that anyone hired Apple employees to learn iPhone and iPad secrets (which is what the Google diaspora documenting the Secret Sauce would be) or stole Apple's trade secrets in other ways. For that matter, no one is even alleging that anyone reverse-engineered an iPhone in these cases (even though that is generally legal). That was obviously not required to reproduce the behavior as issue (e.g. universal search, slide-to-unlock, phone number and other "data detection).

Instead, at most, we're talking about someone looking at the external behavior of an iPhone (something publicly available for Google's search engine) and trying to incorporate parts of that behavior they found useful. In many cases, we're not even talking about that. After all "universal search" is the Android analog of Google Desktop Search, released a couple of months before Apple applied for the patent (Oct 2004 vs Dec 2004), plenty of smartphones detected phone numbers before anyone outside Apple had seen an iPhone, slide-to-unlock was anticipated by Neonode and so on.

For Google's behavior to be analogous to Apple's, they'd have to be suing someone for copying Google Instant, the way they surface interesting links from a search result, copying Android's Intents (I think they're actually collaborating with Mozilla and others on a copy) or something like that. Last I heard, they're not doing anything like that.

-) has quite a bit of prior art, most notably minority report

-) is similarly self-evident on a multi touch surface as drag-and-drop using a mouse or modifier keys on a keyboard

Meanwhile slide-to-unlock is a simulation of a real world object on a multi touch surface. I'd also argue that it's an idea Apple has clearly introduced with the iPhone with not much prior art.

Conclusion: Those gestures should be analyzed separately when one has to decide whether a design is infringing or not.

Unfortunately, one of the problems with the current patent system is that it isn't in Google's interest to do that before it comes to a trial. The first problem is that using prior art before a trial is legally risky. If you fail to invalidate a patent (and you might fail on a technicality like not documenting the prior art in exactly the way the patent office wants to see it), you don't get to bring up that prior art later. Second, good prior art searches (necessary if you want to have the best chance at a challenge) aren't cheap. They could easily waste their effort on patents that turn out not to be an issue at trial (patents that are relatively easy to work around, become less important because of the way the market evolves, dropped during the legal process because they seem to be relatively weaker claims and so on). The companies suing generally throw lots of patents at the wall to see what will stick. There's no sense in helping them sort that out before you have to.

Do you think it's not? My assumption is that that specific thing is patented, and is either expired or the owners don't enforce it or don't know they own it, or, that there is a broader patent whose owner may eventually decide to enforce in the context of a checkbox or similar thing.