Apple experienced a reverse Wednesday in one of the many, many ongoing patent disputes between mobile device giants, when the High Court in the United Kingdom ruled that HTC's instance of "slide to unlock" was not infringing of Apple Inc's patent - specifically patent EP 1964022 (A1), which concerns "unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image".
Image via CrunchBase
The Court also ruled that HTC devices were not infringing two other patents under examination - one addressing the use of multilingual keyboards on mobile devices and one concerning the application of single and multiple touches on touchscreen photo galleries. A fourth patent - on having an image bounce back when dragged beyond its allowable limit on screen - was judged not relevant to the devices under contest.
Slide to unlock, in particular, has become emblematic of the patent wars currently keeping lawyers busy across the world. The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is currently subject a preliminary injunction in the US regarding its voice search functionality. German courts have this year both upheld one slide-to-unlock claim against the unlocking in two of Motorola's skinned phones, but not the Motorola Xoom (providing an easy fix), and threw out a similar claim against Samsung. HTC, meanwhile, found imports of their HTC One X superphone under threat in the vital US market after the International Trade Commission ruled that its operating system infringed a patent on "data tapping" - the ability to tap on a phone number in a document, web page or email and have it open in a phone dialer - and has undertaken to change its approach. The preliminary injunction on the Galaxy Nexus, it is worth noting, also covers slide to unlock and data tapping, along with the implementation of autocorrect on the default keyboard, but the Northern California District Court judge did not feel these necessarily affected purchasing decisions - a note that may have significance in future.
The UK High Court - an influential body in European law - was influenced by the existence of a feature resembling slide to unlock in the NeoNode N1m, a Swedish proto-smartphone running Windows Mobile which has had a far greater impact in legal pleadings than it did on the market.
The NeoNode N1m - unlocking takes place at 4:14. The video is reversed, or rather _not_ reversed, thus adding a touch of madness to proceedings
The Apple argument is that this is clearly a different process - in the NeoNode unlocking, one sees an image on screen, but does not touch it or drag it - instead sliding a finger along a touch-sensitive band at the bottom of the screen to unlock. The High Court was clearly influenced by the August 2011 judgement at the Hague (the Dutch court, rather than the international war crimes tribunal: European judgments at a national (or in the case of Germany regional) level do not directly affect each other, but national courts tend to refer to the judgements of other national courts.
The UK is generally a strong redoubt for patent defendants - as Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents notes, HTC began this litigation seeking a declaratory judgement - a clarification of an unclear point in law. Apple's appeal in the UK is inevitable, but the real conflict is in the German regional courts of Munich and Mannheim, rather than the handset-stuffed shelves of the United Kingdom. The "slide wars" will continue.
