Apple Sued for Camera Phone Patent Infringement, Again
Apple Sued for Camera Phone Patent Infringement, Again
Posted 12/04/2009 at 2:35pm
| by Bart Salisbury
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Is anyone other than lawyers making money these days? Apple is being sued, again. And again over alleged technology infringements that appear in the iPhone. This time it’s St. Clair Intellectual Property Consultants, which claims that Apple is infringing upon several of its digital camera patents.
St. Clair has pursued similar suits and won against Sony ($25 million) and Canon ($34 million). It presently is suing other major camera makers: Casio, Fuji, HP, Kodak, Kyocera, LG, Minolta, Motorola, Nikon, Nokia, Olympic, Palm, Panasonic, RIM and Samsung. Absent names have either gone unnoticed--for now--or have entered into licensing agreements. (This seems to fit this Wikipedia definition, doesn’t it?)
This lawsuit follows on suits against Apple by Shared Memory Graphics and Nokia. Makes you wonder if the iPhone is worth this much bother.
Image Credit: carolinabird/Flickr
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mesiah
December 05, 2009 at 3:10am
I did some research on the actual patents named in the suit. This company basically owns a patent on any camera that digitizes its images and stores them in memory for later download to an "IBM or APPLE compatible computer." The patent dates range from 1992 to 2001 originally awarded to a company called "Personal Computer Cameras, Inc" based in McLean, VA. I'm not sure how they managed to win these patents, Both kodak and sony had been working on digital cameras much earlier than this.
erolsipar
December 05, 2009 at 1:49am
If somebody tells someone to be a thief and becomes one,that makes both of them guilty. If I own a Iphone 3GS 16GB and use the camera with pantent infringment then they should sue me too. Come on guys get my ip idiots 88.230.243.103
B10H4Z4RD
December 04, 2009 at 5:38pm
I have to say, i hate apple with a passion [is there a word for oposite of fanboy?] however, this is rediculus... im definitly not siding with apple, but not with these guys either.
"Is anyone other than lawyers making money these days? " ya, apple
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mesiah
December 05, 2009 at 2:27am
Look at the list. Apparently this company has a patent on anything that creates a stationary digital image. I would be interested in seeing the actual patent information, because the fact that every single manufacturer that makes a device for taking digital pictures has apparently infringed on it.
Biceps
December 04, 2009 at 3:47pm
Does anyone else find it strange that a company that makes EVERYTHING proprietary is getting sued multiple times for stealing someone else's ideas? This is wonderful :)
I wonder how long it will be until Apple patents a camera with a square lens (or something equally stupid) so they don't have to pay royalties on cameras, and can then convince their brainwashed masses that it is 'unique' and 'intuitive' to have a proprietary square lens that only costs 15 times as much as a round one.
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