Apple, Google & Microsoft Sued

Category: Copyright Infringers
Posted: December 25, 2008 08:30PM
Author: ClayMeow

Cygnus Systems, a small Indiana company, decided to spread some holiday cheer this Christmas, delivering a lawsuit to Apple, Google and Microsoft. Cygnus claims that it holds the patent on a file preview feature used by the three companies in several products, including the web browsers for all three companies and the operating systems of Apple and Microsoft. Cygnus applied for its patent in June of 2001 and was granted the patent in March of this year. U.S. Patent 7346850 covers a "system and method for iconic software environment management." Though the products in question may have been released after 2001, the use of iconic previews occurred well before that, so we'll have to see how this one pans out. In the meantime, I heard rumors that Cygnus execs were spotted hanging out with the Grinch today.

I don't think anyone could get away with sueing those three. But this should turn out to be pretty interesting.

Yea, they'll get munched lol

well I believe there have been successful suits against Apple and MS (not sure about Google), but definitely not any against all three together that I know of. Regardless, though "seeing inside" word documents may be new to Vista, getting previews of images and PDF's has been a part of WinXP since launch. WinXP was released in Oct2001, and I'm sure it was in development way longer than 4 months (Cygnus' patent was filed in June 2001). Either the US Patent office didn't do it's homework when it granted the patent, or they saw something more specific in nature that MS (and the others) aren't using. I tried to read the patent, but it's all over the place, it's hard to figure out what the hell it's talking about.

Patents quite often are invalidated in courts, and this case seems one of those. Did not check the correspondence between applicant and USPTO, though, there may have been indicated as a prior art reference the WinXP. I did not see any patentable difference over it.