Apple alleges Andy Rubin got inspiration for Android while working at Apple

A substantial wrinkle has just been introduced in Apple's patent infringement case against HTC. According to recent briefs that Apple filed in that case, Android's genesis was not in the mid-1990s when Andy Rubin worked for General Magic or Danger. Instead, Apple alleges that Rubin drew inspiration for Android's frameworks from APIs he encountered while working for Apple itself in the early 90s.

Apple claims that Rubin was a "low-level engineer" who reported directly to the engineers who invented one of the patents it claims HTC infringes. Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents surmises this means Rubin may have "contributed to the implementation of the claimed invention." If true, this allegation would go a long way toward proving Apple's claim that Rubin derived some of Android's frameworks from work he did at Apple.

Mueller notes that this has "serious ramifications" should Apple ever decide to sue Google itself rather than suing it by proxy via Android handset manufacturers. "Google (or a Google subsidiary like [Motorola]) would almost certainly be found to infringe the relevant patent intentionally, and willful infringement would greatly increase Apple's chances of obtaining an injunction as well as triple damages."

Mueller points out that the judge presiding in Oracle's lawsuit against Google also suspects Rubin of willful patent infringement. If Google is found guilty of willful infringement in both the Oracle suit and an as yet theoretical suit from Apple, Google's future (and Android's) looks very rocky indeed.

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Source: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/09/apple-to-itc-andy-ru…

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A substantial wrinkle has just been introduced in Apple's patent infringement case against HTC. According to recent briefs that Apple...

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John Zabba McLean

bout ******* time.. **** android

September 03 2011 at 2:15 AM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply

BenE

Except the patent in question is ridiculously obvious.

"The '263 patent relates generally to providing programming abstraction layers for real-time processing applications. The '263 patent discloses the use of real-time application programming interfaces (APIs) interposed between application software or driver software and the real-time processing subsystem. These APIs provide an abstraction for the real-time processing subsystem (e.g., a digital signal processor) from the higher-level software that utilizes the real-time processing subsystem, allowing changes to the real-time processing subsystem without requiring changes to the higher-level software." (http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/07/these-tables-show-how-android-infringes.html)

It's the idea of using an API to access a "real-time processing subsystem". An 'API' in programming simply means you planned in advance and wrote down how pieces of code are going to be accessed so as to keep the code orderly. Programmers are constantly writing APIs. If you are going to have a special subsystem that has a non trivial amount of complexity, it is a given that you are going to access it through an API. There isn't really any other way.

This patent's obviousness is only surpassed by the previous one in the above link where they claim intellectual property on basic use of regular expressions. The patent states as an example: finding a phone number. This is a textbook example for regexes!

September 02 2011 at 10:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to BenE's comment

De Badd Ass

"If you are going to have a special subsystem that has a non trivial amount of complexity, it is a given that you are going to access it through an API. There isn't really any other way."

Except it wasn't always that way. I'm old enough to remember the times before abstraction layers. I'm old enough to remember when the cost of memory, the cost of storage, the cost of cpu cycles, and the slowness of each of the above precluded everything but tight code.

API's, Object programming, abstraction layers, etc. did not put men on the moon, automate book keeping, etc.; but they were a revelation that changed everything once they appeared.

The original Mac OS + MacWrite + MacPaint fit on one 400k floppy disk. and ran on a 4MHz system with 128k of RAM. That was possible because the toolbox was hand optimized assembler code. Mac OS System 6.07 was the last Mac OS that could boot from a floppy disk.

C was not the first programming language, and UNIX was not the first OS.

September 03 2011 at 12:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to De Badd Ass's comment

BenE

True, however even very low level systems had documented sets of registers that were meant to be used for interfacing while other addresses were meant for internal use and were not to be meddled with by outsiders. Maybe they were not called APIs back then but it was still the same concept applied to different languages. The idea of connecting to a system through well defined interface points is obvious and doing that with a programming language is called an API.

Besides, Unix and C may not have been the first OS or language but they were developed in the 1970s way before this patent was written.

September 03 2011 at 1:02 AM Report abuse Permalink +2 rate up rate down

Jim Witte

When is Apple claiming this patent was made? Are we talking back in the 1970's - or the 1990s? As far as I can tell from just reading the above description (but then, I Am Not A Lawyer..), this sounds like an example of the basic software engineering principle of abstraction, applied to a real-time OS.. Isn't this basically a pre-emptive OS, running on a fast enough processor? Software abstraction is learned at what year in a computer science undergrad sequence? Second year? Third year?

September 04 2011 at 8:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down