Fun patent application of the day: location history

Posted Apr 27, 2011 15:21 UTC (Wed) by eMBee (guest, #70889)
Parent article: Fun patent application of the day: location history

"Perhaps it is in everybody's interest not to challenge this one."

why? just because this data can be abused, doesn't mean there is no good use for it. when i am traveling i want a record of the locatiosn i have been to so that i can later review my trip, add geolocation info to photos and what not.

currently i am doing this using gps, but that costs more battery, so if i can do this tracking by using cell-tower locations then i could go a lot further without draining the battery of my phone.

what is important is that the user is aware of what is going on and can turn this feature off. but please don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

greetings, eMBee.

Fun patent application of the day: location history

Posted Apr 27, 2011 15:26 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Sorry, that was meant to be at least a little bit funny.

The actual implications of such a patent could be unpleasant. If one reads "network transmitters" to include "GPS satellites," then any GPS tracking application would be in danger. That said, there might be just a wee bit of prior art out there for this kind of thing...

Fun patent application of the day: location history

Posted Apr 28, 2011 6:09 UTC (Thu) by SecretEuroPatentAgentMan (guest, #66656) [Link]

#include TINLA
#include IANYL

Apple is not having much fun with this application though they evidently had sufficiently high hopes to bring it into international phase where they let the European Patent Office examine it. The public registers show that the EPO was fairly thorough.

The application comprises 26 claims, all of which were found to be lacking novelty over 2 patent application and lacking inventive step in view of 3 more patent application. Interestingly the examiner chose to cite only US patent applications which means that not only will these have to be reported to USPTO in an IDS but since all are from the US the USPTO Examiner is also likely to actually use these.

This does not mean that Apple cannot get at least something out of this application as it is normal to go broadly in initial stages. The question is if they went so broadly as to render the search reports mostly useless. Next stage for Apple is to decide if to proceed to national/regional phase where further documents can be cited. In some countries also third party observations can be made.

In a lot of countries State of the Art is wide ranging. I know even childrens comics has been used to sink a patent application.

Fun patent application of the day: location history

Posted Apr 29, 2011 3:36 UTC (Fri) by eMBee (guest, #70889) [Link]

i'd actually hope that it is interpreted to include "GPS satellites", because then any GPS tracking application would be prior art.

greetings, eMBee.