Apple claims Android has roots at Apple

Before you go all crazy and accuse me of fanboyism or Apple being ridiculous (or both), go read the piece from Florian Mueller. In one of Apple’s filing against HTC, it says that when Andy Rubin worked at Apple in the 90s, his superiors were the ones who came up with a patent that Rubin later used to create Android, which means he may have been a contributor to the patent that Apple owns. If the ITC judge holds up Apple’s argument, this clearly will not bode well for Android.

Rubin worked at Apple long before the iPhone – even long before the iPod. If Apple had just claimed without particularity that Android started at Apple, most people would dismiss such an allegation as complete nonsense. But Apple now asserts – in a filing with the ITC, which means Apple has a legal obligation to make truthful representations of fact – that Rubin’s superiors at Apple were the inventors of that realtime API patent and he worked for them at the very time they made that invention. He worked as a low-level engineer while the inventors were senior people. It’s possible that he then contributed to the implementation of the claimed invention.

Apple claims Android has roots at Apple