Submission + - Apple Steals Intellisync Through Software Patents
Nuclear Elephant writes: "Apple appears to be taking ideas from commercial software already being sold and is attempting to patent the
concepts as their own. According to Apple Insider, Apple has recently filed a patent application for a notification screen on the iPhone [ screenshot ]. The only problem with this is that Intellisync has been using this concept in their popular iPhone notification screen software for over a year now, and It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that this is a clear rip-off of it [ screenshot ]. Apple recently became famous
(or infamous) for stealing other people's ideas when they rolled out their
Dashboard in Mac OS X, which had many similarities to a desktop widget program
named the Konfabulator, which later became Yahoo widgets. The case here isn't
a simple hijacking of an idea however — Apple is applying for a patent on Intelliscreen's concept, which could be detrimental to the original manufacturer of the software, who is actively selling it for Jailbroken iPhones. This raises some serious questions about whether Apple is being unlawfully anti-competitive: by policy, they have banned Intelliscreen from being sold on the AppStore, so the original manufacturer hast o sell it on their own. Add to this an attempt to patent it, as if the software did not exist, and you have some very suspicious anti-competitive behavior on Apple's part."
