Thursday, October 11, 2018

Apple Sued for Dual Camera Patent Infringement

AppleInsider: California residents Yanbin Yu and Zhongxuan Zhang filed a lawsuit alleging Apple infringed on their US6611289 patent in the company's dual-camera mobile phones, such as iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8 Plus, iPhone X, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max. The patent named "Digital cameras using multiple sensors with multiple lenses" has been filed in 1999 and granted in 2003.

Apple has filed its own patent for a multi-sensor camera system in 2008. A patent examiner issued an office action rejecting 11 claims of Apple patent application as anticipated, or not novel, in relation to Yu and Zhang's patent. That way, Apple became aware of Yu and Zhang's prior art, but has not attempted to license it.

From US6611289 patent

4 comments:

  1. Are they only suing Apple, what about all the other multi camera systems?

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    1. It depends how the others use their multi camera systems: in the cited prior art, the purpose of the second camera is to enhance the image captured by the first camera: e.g. claim 1 "resultant digital image from said first digital image enhanced with said second digital image". It's possible to design around this claim, or to use multi camera for other purpose than "enhance" the digital image.

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  2. How does a private person sue a billion dollar cooperation? I mean Apple can easily just push the lawsuit from one instance to the next one until the two of them are absolutely broke due to exploding expenses for lawyers and courtyard... anyone care to comment?

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    Replies
    1. Actually, it's not that difficult in this case. They just promised a nice success fee to their lawyer agency. There is no need to spend their own money.

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