Acacia is widely regarded as a patent troll, i.e. a company that does not sell any products or services itself and buys patents solely to monetise them through licensing or litigation. The lawsuit was launched in the Texas Eastern District Court - so no surprise there either.
Cue the normal spate of predictable anti-patent commentary. However the paidContent article itself seems a little unclear about what is being infringed and why. From the article:
U.S. Patent No. 6,956,562, for instance, seems to describe the act of tapping an icon in order to instruct the device to perform an action:
To me, this looks more like a method for controlling a smartphone, tablet, PDA etc by handwriting recognition. Not quite the same as tapping an icon.According to the method, a graphical feature having a surface area is displayed on a touch-sensitive screen. ..To control software executing on the processor, a user-supplied writing on the surface area is received and the software is controlled responsive to the writing.
So lets have a look at the actual patent. Published 18 October 2005 so fairly old and has a priority date of 16 May 2000, which isn't ridiculous either. This doesn't appear to be an ersatz submarine patent with umpteen continuations or continuations in part. Lets check the claims - 66 of them with only two independent claims. Again, not too ridiculous - I've seen far worse. Claim 1 reads:
A method for software control, comprising:
displaying a graphic representing a set of one or more computer functions on a portion of a touch-sensitive screen, wherein the touch-sensitive screen is coupled to at least one processor to detect and interpret contact with the screen;
detecting an object making a first sequence of one or more contacts that form a first drawing on the portion of the screen;
in response to detecting the object making the first sequence of one or more contacts that form the first drawing:
matching the first sequence to a particular action in a set of actions, and performing the particular action;
detecting an object making a second sequence of one or more contacts to form a second drawing on the portion of the screen;
in response to detecting the object making the second sequence of one or more contacts to form the second drawing:
matching the second sequence to a second action in a set of actions related
to said one or more computer functions, and
performing the second action;
wherein the visual appearance of the graphic is the same when the first sequence of contacts is commenced and when the second sequence of contacts is commenced.
Claim 47 is a claim to a computer controlled by the method of claim 1.
OK, displaying a graphic representing one or more computer functions on a portion of a touch sensitive screen. Yep, that sounds very much like an icon. Making a sequence of one or more contacts to form a first drawing - I'm not sure that this does encompass a simple button tap. You could argue that the claim encompasses a single contact - aka a tap but can a tap be reasonably considered to be a drawing? In my opinion no. However, writing a letter on the screen could be construed as a drawing. As for the one or more contacts - consider the difference between the letters 'o' and 'i'. The first can be drawn with a single contact, the second requires two separate contacts to make the line and the dot.
Furthermore, claim 1 is quite limited (presumably to avoid prior art) in that it stipulates a chain of two commands (both input via drawings as discussed above) and that the the appearance of the icon (or other part of the GUI) remains the same between both commands.
All in all, quite an odd little patent and certainly not a simplistic 'patent for tapping an icon on a smartphone'. Actually this reminds me more of Swype - where words are entered in e.g a text message by performing a gesture across a touchscreen keyboard. Entering a word into a text message could also be regarded as an 'action' in the context of the claim....
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