Seriously, unless they have Megatron-like legal counsel, I doubt they'll get anywhere with this. I'm sure Apple's legal department is trained to billy-club all those who dare try them.

Can't show up to a sword fight with a plastic butter knife.

This is NOT news!

Apple gets sued all the damned time for infringing on someone's patent or trademark or tresspassing on their land or whatever_

It would be bigger news if the headline read "Today Apple Did Not Spark Any lawsuits!!"

It should be whoever does something with the patent first. Not draw some shit up and hope someone copies it then sue. Plus why all of a sudden and not a few months ago? Bastards.

I call shenanigans on this.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there applications that perform similar, if not identical duties that predate Time Machine?

Wasn't Time Machine debuted like almost a year ago or more?

From Arstechnica:

"alleging that both Time Machine and iPods violate patents held by the company."

Apparently, they're also suing because iPods store podcasts in chronological order. Well fuck me, that's revolutionary!

Another Patent trawling company(Mirror Worlds), who just sits on a vague patent until someone come up with a similar product... Theh company is defunct, and never did anything with the idea to turn it into a REAL product.

That also sounds like something XP can do. Like when you change some settings that mess up the computer, you can "travel" back in time to earlier settings.

Don't forget Vista's Shadow copy.

Yeah Apple gets sued like every other day. I would rather hear about when Apple is actually in court discussing a settlement over a lawsuit.

I am sure nothing will come of this like most of their other lawsuits that have been issued against them.

You know what they say...

It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.

@Earthslide: @Kaiser-Machead: It can take a while for these cases to go to court and through the legal system, from what I've heard. They might've started working on it day 1 and now it finally made it past whatever barrier that I'm not entirely familiar with.

Has anyone successfully found a website for this "company"? All I found was some obscure web page that offered Ringtones and Russian women.....

MIRROR WORLDS FTW!

I love these patents conceived by people merely looking to sue someone after the fact. Patents which involve no tangible thing, but merely involve processes for things which already exist.

I think I will patent the concept of putting your pants on... first one leg and then the other. Then I will sue everyone who violates my patent for putting pants on.

I would bet Apple has a few of these patents themselves.

These douches actually got a patent on archiving files in chronological order? Man, our patent system sucks.

..when I read the headline, I immedaitely thought that it had something to do with this guy: [timetraveler.ytmnd.com]

Time Machine uses an interface that shows the chronological screens visually, which is also what their patent is vaguely for is it not? All other back-ups don't use that unnecessary flash, and therefore aren't potentially breaking the patent.

Probably filed in East Texas like all the other frivolous law suits. Gee I wonder why they like East Texas so much? I doubt it's the weather.

@keithhat:

Apparently the federal court in Marshall, Texas, is able to bring cases to trial faster than big-city courts, and the jury pool is plaintiff-friendly. It's also the home of the Fire Ant Festival, so y'all watch where you step.

Maybe they should sue CVS or SVN... or the getMyDropBox.com people...

Maybe they should sue CVS or SVN... or the getMyDropBox.com people...
This is why people hate lawyers... It's unscrupulous lawyers that tell these people to go ahead and sue... that they have a chance... that Apple will make a deal... all so they can make a buck either way.

Maybe they should sue CVS or SVN... or the getMyDropBox.com people...
This is why people hate lawyers... It's unscrupulous lawyers that tell these people to go ahead and sue... that they have a chance... that Apple will make a deal... all so they can make a buck either way. Warmongers!

Actually, source code control (which keeps documents in chronological order), has been around nearly from the beginning of UNIX computing - SCCS was one of the first code control systems, and was around in the mid-70s...

And I'm sure many companies store versions of contracts and such in code control as well (or the equivalent way of just renaming a new version of it).

Heck, Windows Server 2003 has versioning on files - you can save a file on a network share, then go back to a previous version quite easily.