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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
According to the latest figures available, US highway deaths increased by more than 10 percent year-over-year during the first half of 2016. One big reason? Distracted driving with mobile phones. It's a reality that now has one phone-maker in some unusual legal crosshairs.
Apple, maker of the ever-popular iPhone, is being sued on allegations that its FaceTime app contributed to the highway death of a 5-year-old girl named Moriah Modisette. In Denton County, Texas, on Christmas Eve 2014, a man smashed into the Modisette family's Toyota Camry as it stopped in traffic on southbound Interstate 35W. Police say that the driver was using the FaceTime application and never saw the brake lights ahead of him. In addition to the tragedy, father James, mother Bethany, and daughter Isabella all suffered non-fatal injuries during the crash two years ago.
The Modisette family now wants Apple to pay damages for the mishap. The family alleges the Cupertino, California-based technology company had a duty to warn motorists against using the app and that it could have used patented technology to prohibit drivers from utilizing the app. According to the suit (PDF) filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court:
Plaintiffs allege APPLE, INC.'s failure to design, manufacture, and sell the Apple iPhone 6 Plus with the patented, safer alternative design technology already available to it that would automatically lock-out or block users from utilizing APPLE, INC.'s 'FaceTime' application while driving a motor vehicle at highway speed, and failure to warn users that the product was likely to be dangerous when used or misused in a reasonably foreseeable manner and/or instruct on the safe usage of this and similar applications, rendered the Apple iPhone 6 defective when it left defendant APPLE, INC's possession, and were a substantial factor in causing plaintiffs' injuries and decedent's death.
The patent referenced, issued by the US patent office in April 2014, is designed to provide a "lock-out mechanism" to prevent iPhone use by drivers. The patent claims a "motion analyzer" and a "scenery analyzer" help prevent phone use. The reliability of such lock-out services, however, has come into question.
"The motion analyzer can detect whether the handheld computing device is in motion beyond a predetermined threshold level. The scenery analyzer can determine whether a holder of handheld computing device is located within a safe operating area of a vehicle. And the lock-out mechanism can disable one or more functions of the handheld computing device based on output of the motion analyzer, and enable the one or more functions based on output of the scenery analyzer," according to the patent.
Apple has not commented on the lawsuit, but it has said that drivers are responsible for their behavior.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @04:12PM
So far everybody is arguing about whether it is reasonable to hold apple responsible rather than the driver.
I have a different take.
Why does Apple get to claim a patent on this and not use it? And if it doesn't work, why were they given a patent?
Yeah, I know literally why - because the industry is patent crazy, patenting nearly anything and everything in a land grab on technology.
Well, I think this case pierces the lie of patents. Especially software patents.
If you are going to patent something it really ought to work on the day of the patent filing. Not 10 years down the road after they figure out how to actually make it work.
Apple did this patent filing to scare away any one else from developing the technology before Apple got around to it.
Fuck that. Maybe Apple couldn't have stopped this accident. But by stopping competitors from inventing a working product they surely have made the world worse, not better.
There ought to be a price for that. A price greater than a patent filing fee.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Friday January 06 2017, @04:42PM
Your point about patents being misused is of course valid, but it's completely off-topic here. This is simply about idiot behind the wheel being distracted and causing an accident. Nobody else is responsible for him voluntarily taking his attention away from driving but himself. Means of distraction are completely irrelevant, whether it's phone, hot woman walking nearby, or, I don't know, observing a fascinating pattern of clouds in the sky.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 06 2017, @06:19PM
> Your point about patents being misused is of course valid, but it's completely off-topic here.
Yeah, on a tech site a discussion of the deleterious effects of software patents is off-topic.
Get over yourself.
(Score: 1) by RS3 on Friday January 06 2017, @07:21PM
I completely agree that the fault should be with the human driver who chose to do something other than purely focus on driving.
However I respectfully disagree with your point about topic, and I find it interesting how these discussions (here on SN and many/most other discussion blog/forums) get so far down a narrow path that they lose sight of the original topic.
In fact the topic of the news article and lawsuit is exactly about whether generally someone else has partial culpability, and in this case Apple having a patent on a technology which, if it had been implemented by Apple (installed in the iPhone), possibly would have prevented the driver from using FaceTime or any other driver-distracting app. Lawmakers, courts, and society in general have often decided that multiple factors add up to an unfortunate event/disaster. Psychologists have proven that people can be distracted by many means from almost any task. The question we're all facing is whether people should be allowed to have the freedom to do extremely stupid/dangerous things, or do we have a responsibility to try to limit things where / when we can.
I'm not a lawyer (sometimes think I should be) but if I were counsel for Apple, I would argue that this idiot was prone to distraction and if he had no phone at all, would have found something else to distract him from driving. Yes, that's speculative, and the whole case against Apple is speculative and should get tossed on that basis.
Eventually self-driving / robots will fix this. When they crash, who's at fault will be decided by corporations, insurance, tracking data, etc.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Saturday January 07 2017, @05:38AM
Why does Apple get to claim a patent on this and not use it? And if it doesn't work, why were they given a patent? Yeah, I know literally why - because the industry is patent crazy, patenting nearly anything and everything in a land grab on technology.
Or because the technology that the patent describes is not yet implemented, or depends on unavailable resources, or reduces the battery life, or... There can be many reasons why you can patent X but not use it right away.