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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 codingthebeach on Monday July 18, 2011 @02:37PM (#2777521)
Completely agree. This is exactly what the patent covers: the automated hyperlink-ization, using regex, of discrete pieces of data ranging from URLs to phone numbers, on mobile devices. Which is an obvious improvement any competent programmer could come up with, and in no way the sort of "invention" patents were intended to protect.
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Re:Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in seriou... by kristianp on Monday July 18, 2011 @11:43PM (#2779527)
The thing that gets me, though is that the language used is so general. It says things like 'input device', 'output device'. My desktop has an 'input device': the keyboard and an 'output device': the monitor.

Also it talks about detecting structures in a grammar. That has been done before. So putting that on a server and accessing it with input and output devices makes it new and original? Surely an old-style unix terminal running awk on a PL/1 could fit in this broad terminology.

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