A company in New York City, Samsung and RIM sued for violating a patent relating to emoticons. The particular patent would primarily have to choose emoticons from a list.
According to Varia Holdings make Samsung and RIM with a large quantity of mobile phones for patent infringement. So would the Nexus S, Epic, and Galaxy Nexus from Samsung users emoticons from a menu, to select, while the Bold, Curve, Pearl and Storm, RIM’s infringement would create.
The patent, number 7,167,731 was in september 2005, requested by the company Wildseed and in January 2007 assigned. AOL took this company over. The ‘731’-patent later moved along with a spin-off of AOL, Varia Mobile. It is also likely that Varia Mobile and Varia Holdings close ties.
The lawsuit seems at first sight appear to have little chance of success. Samsung has a similar European patent invoked in a lawsuit against Apple. That patent is, however, already in 2001 requested and is also the original patent of Wildseed cited.
The addition of the Wildseed-patent seems to be out to exist that the last-selected emoticon to be remembered and that the current selected smiley will be entered automatically after a certain elapsed period of time.
