I read a very interesting article today about an ongoing battle between Google, and their Motorola Mobility subsidiary, against Apple in an attempt to win a United States import ban on the iPhone. Google is claiming that Apple has infringed on its U.S. Patent No. 6,246,862, for a "sensor controlled user interface for portable communication device", which basically refers to the idea that the phone can ignore extraneous inputs which would cause it to perform an action. For example, if the phone is held close to the head, the patent refers to a technology to prevent accidental actions such as the inadvertent termination (or initiation) of a phone call.
Essentially, there had been two earlier hearings on the case, both of which were shot down by the presiding judge, Judge Pender. In his first ruling, Pender deemed the claim invalid for its "indefiniteness", but the Commission, a six-member decision-making body at the head of the U.S. trade agency, remanded the case. Regardless Pender again ruled against Google, on the basis of lack of novelty for their patent, to which the Commission responded with another remand of the case. Thus Apple is currently awaiting what seems to be a final battle with Google to determine the ability of its iPhone to remain being sold in the United States. Google must now prove that their claim is valid, and they must narrow their infringement claim construction in such a way that they can prove Apple infringed on their patent.
One of the most interesting ways that Google is going about tackling the case is trying to prove the non-obviousness of the patent, which Apple could use to have the claim thrown out. Interestingly, a prior court case stated that "[a]ppreciation by contemporaries skilled in the field of the invention is a useful indicator of whether the invention would have been obvious to such persons at the time it was made". Thus Google has gone to a quote from Steve Jobs in order to prove that their invention was not obvious, a quote in which Jobs refers to the idea of a "sensor that figured out when you put the phone to your ear" as a "breakthrough". However the hot point of dispute on this subject will be that Motorola's patent is not on a way to detect the proximity Steve Jobs was describing. THus it will be up to Google to prove Apple has infringed, and a decision is expected by April 22, 2013.
There are many interesting things that stand out to me about this case, but one of the most significant was how close Google is actually coming to banning the iPhone from the United States. The iPhone has now become such a ubiquitous part of many people's lives, it is hard to believe that it could ever be banned. Moreover, banning the import of iPhones would obviously harm both Apple and the US economy in the several billion dollar smartphone industry. Regardless, it was also interesting to see how the concepts of "novelty" and "obviousness" of a patent, as we discussed in class, were brought up and debated in order to determine the validity of Google's claim. The courts have several interesting systems to determine what constitutes either of these very subjective conditions, and it is interesting how one judge can be granted so much power as Judge Pender has been granted in this case.
Link: http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/03/google-quotes-steve-jobs-biography-in.html
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