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The 13 patents Apple is saying Nokia has violated

Categories: Apple, iPhone, Nokia
By: , IntoMobile
Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 11:08 AM

Just a few moment ago Apple filed a countersuit to Nokia’s charge that the company has violated 10 of their patents essential to the GSM, UMTS (WCDMA) and WiFi standard. Apple has said that Nokia has violated 13 of their patents. I’m surprised how old some of these are, especially the 10th patent which dates back to the early 90s; Apple was planning to make a mobile phone over a decade ago! Here is the complete list:

  1. Patent #5634074: “A self-configuring startup procedure for communications devices, including telecommunications adapters, provides unambiguous identification of the telecommunications adapter, or other communications device, connected to a serial port.”
  2. Patent #6343263: “A data transmission system having a real-time data engine for processing isochronous streams of data includes an interface device that provides a physical and logical connection of a computer to any one or more of a variety of different types of data networks.”
  3. Patent #5,915,131: “A computer system handling multiple applications wherein groups of I/O services are accessible through separate application programming interfaces. Each application has multiple application programming interfaces by which to access different families of I/O services, such as I/O devices.”
  4. Patent #5555369: “A development environment and method is provided in which a first computer system is used to develop an application for execution in a second computer system–such as a pen-based computer–having a graphical user interface.”
  5. Patent #6239795: “Systems and method for providing a user with increased flexibility and control over the appearance and behavior of objects on a user interface. Sets of objects can be grouped into themes to provide a user with a distinct overall impression of the interface.”
  6. Patent #5315703: “A system for an object based notification system. The notification system is designed in a flexible manner to support change notification in an object-oriented operating system. The change notification includes a memory for storing connection information including notification routing information and connection registration information.”
  7. Patent #6189034: “In a computer system having a memory, a processor, and a network interlace, a method for dynamically launching a conferencing application upon the receipt fl an incoming call having the steps of: receiving an incoming call signal on the network interface; processing the incoming call signal to detect an intended recipient application; and launching the intended recipient application.”
  8. Patent #7469381: “In accordance with some embodiments, a computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a device with a touch screen display is disclosed. In the method, a movement of an object on or near the touch screen display is detected.”
  9. Patent #RE 39,486: “An extensible and replaceable network-oriented component system provides a platform for developing networking navigation components that operate on a variety of hardware and software computer systems. These navigation components include key integrating components along with components configured to deliver conventional services directed to computer networks, such as Gopher-specific and Web-specific components.”
  10. Patent #5455854: “A method and system for enabling a set of object interface application elements and telephony system elements. Particular objects may be chosen depending on which elements of the telephony system will need to be interfaced. A particular object is capable of interfacing with one or more elements of the telephony system.”
  11. Patent #7383453: “One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates reducing static power consumption of a processor. During operation, the system receives a signal indicating that instruction execution within the processor is to be temporarily halted.”
  12. Patent #5,848,105: “A method and apparatus for separating and removing distortion from interfering co-channel signals and suppressing adjacent-channel interfering signals of the Gaussian Minimum-Shift Keyed (GMSK) or other MSK type with filtering structures that exploit the cyclostationarity of the received GMSK or other MSK signals in order to accommodate a greater number (or the same number, but with greater quality) of transmitted signals received by one or more antennas than can be accommodated by existing filters.”
  13. Patent #5379431: “A system is disclosed for use in booting a processor with a storage and attached peripherals. The system utilizes a technique for initializing a computer by resetting the storage and the one or more peripherals.”

About The Author

Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu (@WhatTheBit on Twitter) has loved technology since as far back as he can remember. It started with computers, but in the past few years his passion has turned to mobile devices. As a mobile phone enthusiast who lives and breathes devices that connect to the internet, he knows he is not alone with this radical fascination of all things wireless. He is strongly opinionated and enjoys a good debate so leave comments in his posts and he’ll get back to you! Stefan began blogging as a hobby in the fall of 2006 and joined IntoMobile in the summer of 2007. Later he got a job at Nokia in March 2008, but as of June 2009 he has rejoined the IntoMobile team. He is currently based out of Helsinki, Finland.

  • doax

    /Cartmanvoice LAME!

  • Shimmy

    Apple is basically “You really don’t want to play this game with us!”

  • Will Park

    The clash of the titans indeed

  • AE

    “A self configuring startup procedure … identification of communications adaptor.”

    I’d guess that Nokia’s lawyers will be laughing that that’s the best Apple can come up with. Nokia have several clear patents covering genuinely innovative tech about how GSM/UMTS work that have been acknowledged by all other telecoms companies. And Apple reply with auto-detecting the attached comms adaptor. Not even the messed-up US patent system is stupid enough to enforce idiotic patents like that.

  • TPR

    Apple has a patent portfolio of about 2,000 patents so this set was just chosen to be used in response of Nokia’s claims. It wouldn’t be wise to include the most valuable patents such as the multitouch functionality since this set is going to be used when negotiating licensing of the Nokia’s patents. So Apple wants to keep multitouch out of FRAND yet somehow limit the damages.

  • Markus

    @tpr – take a look at the touch patents awarded, and you’ll find Nokia has little to fear from Apple. The big thing about iPhone was that it took existing technology and re-adapted it for a great design. However, all the bits it took have been patented; even multitouch has plenty of areas patented by the likes of Nokia.

    I think it’s telling that Apple’s true strength in their patent portfolio comes from their long history of OS X patents. Not mobile.