Apple sued for its website design

A United States citizen has sued the tech giant, Apple, for allegedly violating a patent by using a “carousel” feature on its website.

Samuel Lit, based in the state of Pennsylvania, holds a patent related to the “carousel” feature built into Apple’s website. It was awarded to him in 2014 and defines a way to display rotating images in a way that resembles a real carousel. Today, most websites use it to rotate several images (on the homepage) after a pre-set time. Apple’s website too uses this feature to showcase its different products and their features.

Lit’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, claims that Apple allegedly violates his patent. He specifically says that the Cupertino-based company infringes on claim 16 of his patent (which describes the way these windows of content would be displayed on a website).

“Apple sells products and services through the website,” he says in the lawsuit.“That site includes a display carousel embedded in the site and contains five display windows configured to display content and revolve at a predetermined rate of speed.”

Apple is not unfamiliar with lawsuits and faces hundreds of them every year. Most of these are from patent trolls, looking to cash in from the company’s enormous cash reserves. However, this is probably the first time the company is being sued for its website and not for its range of iDevices (the usual suspects). Since the feature it is being sued for is used by thousands of other websites as well, this case is going to be quite interesting.

Source— Apple Insider Image— Technology Blogged