July 20th, 2009 at 2:18 PM

I’m surprised this lawsuit has even gotten into the court. It sounds completely baseless, based on the facts as they are presented here. Here’s why:

1) Based on the basic description of the patent, provided in the article, it doesn’t sound like it really applies to any device which provides ‘immediate visual feedback’, as the patent specifically states, when the touch-sensitive controls are used. That includes iPods and (I would guess) pretty much any digital music player that includes a control mechanism that isn’t limited to just buttons.

2) The same description doesn’t really describe a method of control that matches the iPod, Zune, etc. It refers to patterns being traced on the touchpad. I’m not familiar with any iPod or other music player that requires that patterns be traced onto a touchpad.

3) The iPod (Classic and similar earlier models) doesn’t even have a ‘touchpad’, per se. It has a touch-sensitive virtual scroll wheel. If a touch surface is (for lack of a better term) doughnut-shaped, and the touch-related commands accepts include only ‘up or down’, that hardly constitutes tracing a patten or anything else that one would regularly do with a touchpad. The virtual scroll wheel is simply an evolutionary advance on the original, mechanical scroll wheel, with the same functions, but no moving parts.

4) If the company has any real claim to a patent for tracing patterns onto a touchpad, then why aren’t they suing Apple and others for their use of multi-touch trackpad commands? That seems a lot more similar to what is described in the patent, than the iPod’s interface. Besides, how long has the trackpad actually been around on laptop computers? Isn’t a trackpad pretty much always used by ‘tracing patterns’ onto it, to achieve some result? If anything, it sounds like Tsera should never have been granted this patent, since the only thing even vaguely original about how they describe it, is that it applies to handheld devices, rather than full-sized computers.

5) Apple actually holds a patent (U.S. Patent 7,348,967), for the touch-sensitive iPod scroll wheel. This patent was filed in August 2005 and granted in March 2008, so it doesn’t pre-date Tsera’s patent, but if Apple holds a legal patent for the technology that they are using, then wouldn’t that patent have to be thrown out before Apple could be sued for using said technology?

July 20th, 2009 at 10:44 PM

I’m surprised this lawsuit has even gotten into the court. It sounds completely baseless, based on the facts as they are presented here.

The article doesn’t say the case was in court.  It says, ”..a lawsuit was filed.”