Fun patent application of the day: location history

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.