#15: Google vs Apple Regarding Patent 6,246,862

FOSS Patents recently posted about Google’s attempt to use Steve Job’s biography as a way to salvage a patent and win the iPhone import ban. Basically, U.S. Patent No. 6,246,862, known as a “sensor controlled user interface for portable communication device,” hinders actions made on a touch screen when a phone is held “in close proximity” to the head. This patent is a “high level idea” and therefore gives Google “some leverage” against Apple “if successfully enforced.” Judge Pender who first reviewed the case in 2012 determined that Apple did infringe a 3G patent but not the 6,246,862 patent, “which he deemed invalid for indefiniteness.” However, the U.S. trade agency reversed this indefiniteness and called for a reinvestigation. Now Google has to prove that the patent is valid and infringed an even narrower claim. Apple will win if the patent is still ruled as invalid or if it’s upheld only on the basis of a claim construction so narrow that Apple no longer infringes.

           Basically, the issue here lies in whether the invention has obviousness, meaning “that it was not known in its entirety but there was no inventive step involved that would justify the grant of a new patent” or anticipation, meaning “the invention as a whole was already known on the priority date.” In a 2002 decision the Federal Circuit said that "[a]ppreciation by contemporaries skilled in the field of the invention is a useful indicator of whether the invention would have been obvious to such persons at the time it was made".

          The biography ties into this story when “Apple's expert, Mr. Lanning, could not deny that Mr. Jobs himself characterized the incorporation of a proximity sensor into the iPhone as a 'breakthrough' to his biographer, Walter Isaacson: '[a]nother breakthrough was the sensor that figured out when you put the phone to your ear, so that your lobes didn't accidentally activate some function.' [...] The sensor described by Mr. Jobs is the very technology that the ALJ found to infringe. [...] And there can be no doubt that this passage refers to the technology of the '862 patent: it describes a sensor that prevents the inadvertent actuation of the phone when it is put to the user's ear. The recognition that the invention of the '862 patent was a 'breakthrough' weighs heavily against a finding of obviousness, particularly since it came from Apple itself.”

          “Assuming the quote is correct, Steve Jobs was impressed by the sensor that figured out when you put the phone to your ear. But Motorola's '862 patent is not a patent on a way to detect such proximity. The sensor that Google's (Motorola's) patent references is an "an infrared (IR) proximity detector" and "has an IR transmitting element [...] and an IR receiving element [for example, a photodiode] that are mounted side by side in the housing behind a lens". Motorola didn't invent such basic infrared technology.”
 
         “Steve Jobs was certainly knowledgeable about phones sold in the market, but he wasn't aware of all patent applications, granted patents and other publications relating to proximity detectors. Chances are that he had not read even one of the prior art references relevant to this case.”