14 DAY TRIAL // The Federal Court of Appeals in Karlsruhe, Germany, has invalidated the patent that covers the iPhone's "Slide to Unlock" feature, one of the device's most distinctive features.
The lawsuit was initially brought to Apple by Motorola Mobility, a part of Google at that time, but as FOSS Patents reports, since Motorola was sold to Lenovo and Google seems to have reached a truce with Apple, Samsung has been leading the legal efforts in the past years.
The first court ruling in this lawsuit allowed Apple to keep its patent, but Samsung thought back and managed to get it overturned in 2013 by the Federal Patent Court in Munich.
The decision is valid in Germany only, for now
Today's Federal Court of Appeals decision reinforces the latter ruling, effectively invalidating the German version of Apple's "Slide to Unlock" European patent.
According to Reuters, the court reached this decision because of a similar feature used by a Swedish company in one of its phones in 2005, two years before the iPhone was released.
The phone in question is Neonode N1, which sold only 10,000 units, despite offering quite some ground-breaking features for its time.
Apple didn't invent "Slide to Unlock"
The phone didn't have a touchscreen like the iPhone, but it used a gesture module as a dialer, one that also had a "Slide to Unlock" function.
Since Europe is known to have a much simpler and straightforward patent management system, this decision is expected to trickle down to neighboring countries because, as the German court proved it: Apple didn't actually invent the "Slide to Unlock" feature, so it cannot have a patent for it.
While Apple didn't go out and aggressively try to push its "Slide to Unlock" patent on Android app makers, the patent along with many others have been the target of Google and Samsung in the past, all as part of a corporate war that's been silently raging between the mobile industry's top dogs.
So in the end, Apple didn't actually lose anything that important, the "Slide to Unlock" feature having already done its job back with the first versions of the iPhone, helping push the phone's innovative features in various marketing campaigns.
