[OSGeo-Discuss] About "Interactive Map" patent application by Apple Inc.

[Brent Wood]

Click on two points to display a route, touch two points to display a route - this is natural progression from mouse based hardware to touch screen mode. There should not be any patent there, it is just a generic change in pointing device.

Numerous web apps (& mapping portals) dim the background for popups & other "foreground" info - hopefully nothing new or patentable there.

My concern is not this has been applied for, but that someone presumeably believes such minor adaptations are patentable under US law. 

Hopefully not - coming from a country which recently legislated software as not patentable.



Shock, horror - could OSGEO join with ESRI to contest this? A comparable case a few years ago in New Zealand created a very unusual set of bedfellows - who successfully contested the patent, at a cost substantially cheaper than pursuing individual cases against it. See:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=3576578

Cheers,

  Brent Wood




________________________________
 From: Puneet Kishor <punk.kish at gmail.com>
To: Simon (SPDBA) Greener <simon at spatialdbadvisor.com> 
Cc: OSGeo Discussions <discuss at lists.osgeo.org>; OSGeo-Board <board at lists.osgeo.org> 
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2013 2:57 AM
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] About "Interactive Map" patent application by	Apple	Inc.
 

It was tl;dr, but the quick scan I did seems to have two things that I haven't seen yet --

1. multi-touch: touch two points on a map and the best route is displayed immediately;

2. dim everything else thereby highlighting only what one wants to look at.

There may be other new things in that long application.

Interestingly #2 above reminds me of line graphs that Manish Agarwala from Berkeley had invented a long time ago that MapBlast incorporated in its routing algorithms. Then MapBlast was bought out by MS maps outfit (I think it was called MSN) and the feature existed for a while; and then that morphed into Bing and it even existed in Bing Labs for a while and then seems to have vanished. I used to love that line drawing feature. You could ask for a route as a line drawing, and it would only highlight the most important thing, the route, along with associated land marks, and dim everything else.


On Dec 20, 2013, at 11:03 PM, Simon (SPDBA) Greener <simon at spatialdbadvisor.com> wrote:

> While I am not sure of the features in osgeo software to which Venkatesh refers, most of what appears in the patent application are natural improvements to existing map functionality that is common to any mapping software. I can't see Google letting this through without a fight. I agree with Venkatesh that an objection be lodged.
> Simon Greener
> 
> On 21 Dec 2013 17:05, Venkatesh Raghavan <raghavan at media.osaka-cu.ac.jp> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear All, 
>> 
>> I think the OSGeo should express strong objection to the "Interactive Map" 
>> patent filed by Apple on 17 Dec 2012 [1]. The contents of the patent [1] 
>> describe features that OSGeo software already provides for over a decade. 
>> 
>> Best 
>> 
>> Venka 
>> 
>> [1] 
>> http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=2&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=%28715%2F771.CCLS.+AND+20131219.PD.%29&OS=ccl/715/771+and+pd/12/19/2013&RS=%28CCL/715/771+AND+PD/20131219%29 ..


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