Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Work arounds on the latest Apple patent fiasco

Apple's latest victory concerns the idea that a use can tap on a string inside a text message, and the iPhone will decode that segment of string into a phone number, address, or something else. Once the form of the string is estimated, the proper methods can be selected, like make a phone call of show a map.

The broad claim concerns 1) Tapping on some text or bytes then 2) Decoding the pattern, then 3) looking up the method.

Identifying proper terms and forms in a text blob is not patentable. Using regex to stream through the text and identify phones and addresses is legal, still. Also, clicking on a term and having a drop down menu present all possible methods is not a patent, computers been doing that for years. Also, dropping a menu of all the items found in the current document, as a result of a search, it not patentable. Search text has been around, including complex searches that look for numeric patterns and proper names.

So, yes, Link/Unix/X Windows has enough unpatentable stuff to get what is needed.

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