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The German high court has upheld an earlier ruling, that Apple's "Slide to Unlock" Patent (EU Patent 1964022) is a trivial extension of the state of the art embodied by the Swedish Neonode N1 released in 2003 (with Windows CE), and is therefore invalid.
From Reuters:
The Neonode N1 had substantially similar technical features, the patent court had found. It ruled Apple's easier-to-use interface was not in itself patentable. Neonode sold tens of thousands of phones before declaring bankruptcy in 2008. It reorganized itself as an intellectual property firm licensing its patented optical technology for use in phones, tablets, readers and other touchscreen devices.
Motorola Mobility, at the time a unit of Google Inc but now owned by China's Lenovo Group Ltd, filed the original suit in a Munich court against the Apple user interface patent. Apple won that case but the ruling was later overturned by the federal patent court.
Also at Heise (German).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cmn32480 on Thursday August 27 2015, @12:40PM
It's about time that the courts took these companies to task for this kind of trivial garbage that is a pollutant in the patent system.
Hopefully it will start to happen in the US soon.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @12:56PM
the courts took these companies to task
Did they? It's years later. All the stifling-the-competition that the now-invalidated patent was supposed to accomplish, has been done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @04:01PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by theluggage on Thursday August 27 2015, @01:48PM
Hopefully it will start to happen in the US soon.
Don't hold your breath: In the EU, "computer programs" are explicitly excluded from patentability [wikipedia.org]. European "Software Patents" are still granted based on on doublethink that slides a cigarette paper between "computer programs as such" and a "computer-implemented invention" or "a technical solution to a technical problem". These are far less robust in court than the case law that US software patents rely on.