{"id":1640,"date":"2013-02-26T10:26:36","date_gmt":"2013-02-26T15:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=1640"},"modified":"2013-02-26T10:26:36","modified_gmt":"2013-02-26T15:26:36","slug":"at-meets-international-patent-law-22813","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=1640","title":{"rendered":"AT Meets International Patent Law, 2\/28\/13"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Assistive Technology Meets International Patent Law<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>Contributed by Joel Zimba, Technology Outreach Specialist, MDTAP<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re lucky, the ongoing patent war between Apple and Samsung has not intruded upon your life in the last 3 years or so.\u00a0 The legal jockeying for intellectual property is yet another way in which corporate giants attempt to gain an edge on their competition.\u00a0 This is all well and good until consumers feel the fallout from these battles.<\/p>\n<p>One recent lawsuit in Germany claims that Apple violated Samsung\u2019s patent concerning speaking the contents of the screen aloud.\u00a0 This suit has been temporarily stayed pending the resolution of other lawsuits.\u00a0 If it has legs, this suit could cause problems for VoiceOver users.<\/p>\n<p>At the outset, it seems that \u201ctriple-clicking\u201d the \u201cHome\u201d button&#8211; that is, pressing the \u201chome\u201d button 3 times quickly in order to activate VoiceOver violates a specific Samsung patent. This is the downside of incorporating assistive technologies into commercial products natively.\u00a0 All aspects of mobile technology can be brought into the court room.<\/p>\n<p>For now, this case is on hold.\u00a0 Also, the media backlash and the attention from many disability groups will probably give the judges, if not Samsung themselves, pause.<\/p>\n<p>If VoiceOver became too difficult either financially or politically for Apple to maintain, disabled users would be greatly effected.\u00a0 While this is a small group, let\u2019s hope the public relations nightmare which would result will keep future accessibility feature patents off the table.<\/p>\n<div class=\"al2fb_like_button\"><div id=\"fb-root\"><\/div><script type=\"text\/javascript\">\n(function(d, s, id) {\n  var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];\n  if (d.getElementById(id)) return;\n  js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;\n  js.src = \"\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=149587675112835\";\n  fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);\n}(document, \"script\", \"facebook-jssdk\"));\n<\/script>\n<fb:like href=\"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=1640\" layout=\"standard\" show_faces=\"true\" share=\"false\" width=\"450\" action=\"like\" font=\"arial\" colorscheme=\"light\" ref=\"AL2FB\"><\/fb:like><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Assistive Technology Meets International Patent Law Contributed by Joel Zimba, Technology Outreach Specialist, MDTAP If you\u2019re lucky, the ongoing patent war between Apple and Samsung has not intruded upon your life in the last 3 years or so.\u00a0 The legal jockeying for intellectual property is yet another way in which corporate giants attempt to gain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1640"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1642,"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}