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A comment on Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in serious trouble. Parent comment

Re:Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in seriou... by MatthewPhillips on Monday July 18, 2011 @02:33PM (#2777503)
Do you believe that Google and/or HTC used this particular patent to get the idea or work out how to implement it on their device(s)?

Does the answer to the above question affect how you feel about the patent (and/or patents in general)?

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Re:Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in seriou... by tptacek on Monday July 18, 2011 @05:08PM (#2778266)
No, I do not believe that Google benefited in any way from Apple's disclosure of their '96 invention.

Generally, I think software patents are as bad as we tend to say they are.

However, caricaturing their badness with statements like "Apple patented regular expressions on URLs" or whatever sucks power away from the argument that they should be abolished, by allowing the "grown-ups" to point and say that opponents of patents think that e.g. this one says you can't regex URLs.

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Re:Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in seriou... by GHFigs on Monday July 18, 2011 @04:35PM (#2778107)
used this particular patent to get the idea or work out how to implement it

A patent protects the invention, not the text of the patent. The more realistic question is whether HTC's implementation was worked out by looking at how the feature works on iOS.

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Re:Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in seriou... by fpgeek on Tuesday July 19, 2011 @12:46AM (#2779647)
I'd bet it wasn't. I saw this sort of thing shown off as one of the advantages of Android's Intent system (e.g. highlighting a URL or phone number in a note-taking app) at a developer event months before the G1's release.

So far as I understand, iOS doesn't have the same sort of Intent architecture, so it seems unlikely that that Google's implementation drew any inspiration from iOS (especially as the same sort of thing has been done in web browsers for years to the point where a browser might be prior art).

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