The Cupertino company asked a California court in San Jose to issue a preliminary injunction to block sales of href=”http://www.samsung.com/” rel=”homepage” target=”_blank” title=”Samsung”>Samsung Electronics Co.’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone, arguing that it infringes on four Apple patents.
The preliminary injunction, filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, leverages the following four patents:
- U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647: “System and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data.” This patent was coined the “data tapping” patent by intellectual property analyst, Florian Mueller. At risk from this patent is any algorithm that scrapes unstructured data, including emails and calendars. This has once before been successful in convincing the href=”http://www.usitc.gov/” rel=”homepage” target=”_blank” title=”United States International Trade Commission”>U.S. International Trade Commission to ban the import of HTC Android phones starting April 19, 2012.
- U.S. Patent No. 8,086,604: “Universal interface for retrieval of information in a computer system.” This newly minted patent is Apple’s response to protect its mobile search engine, Siri, and a threat to Google’s own mobile search engine.
- U.S. Patent No. 8,046,721: “Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image.” The patent for the swiping motion to unlock a phone, once unique to Apple, was granted only recently to the Cupertino, California, company.
- U.S. Patent No. 8,074,172: “Method, system, and graphical user interface for providing word recommendations.” Some of you may recognize this as the infamous auto-correct that spawned entire blogs around the algorithm’s misappropriation of letters.
This seems to be a song that we have heard of before across the pond, although those lawsuits and injunctions touched more on the iPad 2′s greatest rival to date, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, where Samsung creatively modified said tablet enough to turn it into the Galaxy Tab 10.1N that is now available for sale in Germany.
Apple argues the Samsung device which uses the newest version of Android dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich poses a threat to both Apple’s product and market share.
Apple last year unsuccessfully tried to get a similar preliminary injunction issued in California to block sales of Samsung 4G smartphone and Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet computer. That case is scheduled to go to trial at the end of July.
Via: Reuters
