Apple To Go "Nuclear" On iPhone Copycats

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc., usually on the defensive when it comes to intellectual-property lawsuits, is threatening to use its hoard of patents to quash iPhone competitors.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, pledged in January to go after companies that copy the iPhone's patented features. Apple won its latest patent Jan. 20 for so-called multitouch technology, which lets people work the iPhone by touching the screen with two fingers and making swiping motions.

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Comments

[mjb5406]

This would be great if Apple didn't patent things that were prior art, or themselves copy the patents of other companies. It's been shown (quite convincingly) that the Apple multitouch patents are prior art and will not hold up in a court of law. Plus, some of the things the iPhone does is nothing but a copy of, strangely enough, technology patented by Palm, such as the dialer. So, if Apple goes after the competition, I hope they're ready to do a major redesign of the iPhone, too.

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I think Tim Cook is so pumped with his sudden elevation to fame that he will be an uberjerk.

[netzwerg]

I have a fake iPhone i bought in Beijing for chinese money equal to 78EUR. It works incredibly well for that price for 1 year now, has dual-sim, real bluetooth, changable battery (uses nokias), sd-card-sl­ot,...

Interface is not as good as the real iphone of course, but it was definately a good buy.

BTW: All legal imported to holland, its legal here to import fake stuff for personal use for not more than 175EUR a trip.

[Sundialsvc4]

Ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby...

[mrcontinental]

Good thing Apple didn't invent anything important like the airplane or car because they would be demanding a monopoly there as well. Apple's days are numbered with this attitude.

[frantaylor]

This "scorched earth" tactic has been pulled by Thomas Edison, GM, IBM, Microsoft, etc. over the years, with varying degrees of success. All of these places are still around. Edison's old invention factory is now called "GE".

[The Wall Street Geek]

Amen! The new touchscreens by Blackberry, et al are ripoffs. If you aren't careful, you can accidentally buy one of those instead of the iPhone. Same with Amazon's Kindle--there's a similar model out by another firm which will remain nameless because they were shameless about stealing the Kindle's design.

[szlevi]

What a NONSENSE.

Touchscreen phones with menus, downloadable apps etc existed almost a decade before iPhone - Apple's iPhone is the classic example of creative re-inventing of existing things then selling it as new.
But hey, nothing's wrong with that - this is traditionally Apple's business model. :)

(And let's just forget the hilarious shortcomings of iPhone for now,,,)

[szlevi]

You mean Sony, who pretty much created the e-book market years ago?

For a "The_Wall_­Street_Gee­k " you don't seem to have too much clue about technology­... I must admit that Wall St types are usually clueless, indeed so nick is warranted. ;)

[frantaylor]

Apparently Apple invented every little plastic box with buttons on it. Next you're going to say that they invented the remote control and the pager.

[Erdgeist]

I am not surprised. Microsoft copied Apple's OSX with its Vista. What these companies do is wait for Apple to come up with neat stuff then steal it finding it cheaper to hire crooked lawyers than invest in research.

[szlevi]

FYI Apple literally *never* invented anything in OS X - however it's very good at re-inventing laborous or difficult tasks 'into' simple clicks.

[szlevi]

Stop spreading the Kool-Aid, it only shows utter lack of understanding.

[frantaylor]

OSX Is really just NeXTStep, which is really just BSD Unix.

[solarian]

unix was invented by att. the most secure os on the planet