Apple's patent attack

HTC is not normally thought of as a Linux company; it is a Taiwanese manufacturer which provides cellular phone handsets to a number of other companies. HTC has only recently begun promoting phones under its own name; as it happens, a number of those run Android. Since Android increasingly looks like the base for some of the strongest competition against Apple's products, this suit certainly has the look of an attack against Android and not just an action against one hardware manufacturer. Indeed, Android is named specifically in both components to the attack.

There are some 20 patents named in Apple's actions. Ten of them are named in the patent infringement suit filed in Delaware:

1. #7,362,331: Time-based, non-constant translation of user interface objects between states. Filed in 2001, this patent covers basic animated movement of objects in graphics user interfaces; the core "innovation" seems to be that the function for determining the object's velocity is not constant. Apple has patented acceleration of objects on the screen.

2. #7,479,949: Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics. This patent was filed in April, 2008; Steven Jobs is the first on a long list of inventors. This patent claims the use of heuristics to determine whether a finger movement on a touchscreen display is vertical, diagonal, or is a "next item" selection.

3. #7,657,849: Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image. This patent (2005) covers pretty much what it says; it's requirement for "moving an unlock image" along the path suggests a fairly straightforward workaround might be possible.

4. #7,469,381: List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display (2007). This one is complex, but seems to cover the practice of "bouncing" the display when scrolled past the end of a document or list.

5. #5,920,726: System and method for managing power conditions within a digital camera device (1997). This is a hardware-related patent covering the process of powering down a digital camera in response to a low-power situation.

6. #7,633,076: Automated response to and sensing of user activity in portable devices (2006). This is a technique for filtering out touchscreen events resulting from putting a phone to one's ear. It requires the existence of a "proximity sensor" to determine whether a human is sufficiently close to the device.

7. #5,848,105: GMSK signal processors for improved communications capacity and quality (1996) is a signal-processing algorithm meant to improve interference rejection.

8. #7,383,453: Conserving power by reducing voltage supplied to an instruction-processing portion of a processor (2005). This hardware patent appears to be well described by its title; it covers a processor which can turn off its clock and reduce its operating voltage.

9. #5,455,599: Object-oriented graphic system (1995). By a broad reading, this patent would appear to cover just about any graphical system which maps between objects stored in memory and a representation on the display.

10. #6,424,354: Object-oriented event notification system with listener registration of both interests and methods (1999). The highly innovative technique of allowing one object to register an interest in changes to a second object and receive notifications is covered. This patent is owned by the "Object Technology Licensing Corporation" which is located at 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino - strangely enough, that's where Apple is located too.

Additionally, Apple has filed with the US International Trade Commission with the purpose of blocking the import of HTC's products into the US. That filing names a different, generally older, and more fundamental set of patents:

1. #5,481,721: Method for providing automatic and dynamic translation of object oriented programming language-based message passing into operation system message passing using proxy objects (1994). This patent covers sending messages between two objects in separate processes by way of "proxy objects" which translate the message for transmission. Remote procedure calls, in other words.

2. #5,519,867: Object-oriented multitasking system (1993) covers the entirely non-obvious technique of supplying an object-oriented wrapper around a procedural operating system's process creation and manipulation system calls.

3. #5,566,337: Method and apparatus for distributing events in an operating system (1994). Here Apple claims the technique of maintaining a list of events and processes interested in those events, then distributing notifications to the processes when the events happen. Broadly read, this patent could cover Unix signals, the select() system call, or the X Window System event notification mechanism - all of which predate the patent by years.

4. #5,929,852: Encapsulated network entity reference of a network component system (1998). An object is created to provide a graphical representation of a "network resource." When the user clicks on the representation, information about the resource is displayed.

5. #5,946,647: System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data (1996). This technique covers "recognizing structures" in data and allowing users to act upon those structures. Think, for example, of recognizing a phone number on a web page, then allowing the user to call the number or store it in a contacts list.

6. #5,969,705: Message protocol for controlling a user interface from an inactive application program (1997). This one covers the idea of an interactive program forking a worker process to do some processing and letting that worker process provide information which is shown in the user interface.

7. #6,275,983: Object-oriented operating system (1998). Another Object Technology Licensing Corp. special, this one covers the concept of providing object-oriented wrappers to procedural system calls; the one additional twist is that those wrappers are dynamically loaded at run time if need be.

8. #6,343,263: Real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data (1994). A computer with a "realtime signal processing subsystem" and a programming API allowing that subsystem to be used. Something that looks, say, like a computer with a cellular network radio attached.

9. #5,915,131: Method and apparatus for handling I/O requests utilizing separate programming interfaces to access separate I/O services (1995). This patent appears to cover the idea of providing different APIs for access to different types of devices. Something like ioctl(), perhaps.

10. #RE39,486: Extensible, replaceable network component system (2003, a reissue of 6,212,575 from 1995). Essentially, this is the technique of building objects around different network protocols so that they all appear the same to higher-level software and users.

A few of the patents are hardware-related and don't have much to do with Linux. Many of the rest, however, purport to cover fundamental programming techniques. It would appear that Apple wants to take Android out of the picture - or at least extract substantial rents for its continued existence. But many of these patents, if upheld, could have an influence far beyond Android.

Needless to say, the validity of many of these patents is questionable. Proving a patent invalid is a lengthy, expensive, and highly risky process, though; it's not something that one can automatically expect a litigation defendant to jump into. So there is no saying how HTC will react, or what sort of assistance HTC will get from the rest of the industry.

In summary: this may be the software patent battle that many of us have feared for a long time. An outright victory by Apple could well leave it "owning" much of the computing and mobile telephony industry - in the US, at least. One assumes that the rest of the industry is going to take note of what is happening here. Nokia is already involved in its own patent disputes with Apple, but this battle could spread well beyond Nokia and HTC. It will be in few companies' interest to let Apple prevail on these claims and entrench their validity. This battle is going to be an interesting one to watch.