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Comment by coob | Hacker News Reader

Yes yes, software patents are ridiculous. But they are a part of the current legal and business system and until that changes (and it should), Apple or anyone else would be idiotic not to play the game as it exists.

For those complaining that autocomplete is obvious and this patent is 'disgusting', they quite clearly have not read it [1].

The patent describes exactly how Apple's autocomplete implementation works, specifically on a touch screen device with a soft keyboard, right down to when things should appear depending on what punctuation is typed in and how new words not in the dictionary should be added. This is not a 'hurr-durr we invented autocomplete' patent, this is 'this is exactly how our autocomplete works' patent.

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

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> specifically on a touch screen device with a soft keyboard

But also rather ambitiously includes the use of autocomplete using a physical keyboard.

> 7. The method of claim 2, wherein the keyboard is a physical keyboard that is not a part of the touch screen display.

Which appears to describe a nearly identical system to the one used on www.google.com and in many other places; also for which examples of prior usage almost certainly exist. At first glance, I don't see anything that would prevent this patent from being asserted against a laptop manufacturer.

The physical keyboard refers to claim 2, basically implying that the system for responding to suggestions (with gestures) applies whether the initial typing was done on the glass or virtual keyboard. So it's not making such a sweeping claim.

In any event, specific claims can be thrown out as appropriate.

Specificity != innovation.

The job of parent trolls is exactly to write specific patents for common sense things or things they didn't invent, and then file some 200 other patents changing one detail. Now you have a broad net of specific patents.

White hat trolls, like Apple, just skip the last step to not be blatant. But they are still just describing common sense. Which is all patents are in the end. You just have subjective rules to draw a line on how common is the common sense being described. And using punctuation while predicting text is not that clever, sorry to break that out to you.

I've read it, claim 1 is, in plain English, ”auto-complete on a touchscreen keyboard". All the extra detail they provide adds on to that, to provide defense in depth, but they're claiming the whole enchilada too, just in case they get away with it, because there's no real downside for them to do something so immoral. (You might think that's inflammatory language, but Apple itself talks about theft of IP, yet they'll happily try to steal this from me and you)

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