Breadth of claims in “I am driving/busy” automatic response system for mobile phones (US8364183)

Question

US8364183 is an auto-response texting app. (Title - “I am driving/busy” automatic response system for mobile phones)

The diagrams in this patent only show a Blackberry being used. Does this mean that someone can patent this same process for another phone? Also does how the code was written to accomplish this matter? Different programming language? Different way of completing it.

Does any mobile app that does this feature infringe on this patent?

Claim 1 is:

1. A conventional cell phone apparatus which has been modified to add a software application or which has had the operating system or other software installed by the manufacturer of said cell phone apparatus modified such that said software application which has been added or said operating system or other software installed by said manufacturer of said cell phone apparatus is structured to control said cell phone to respond to the touch or press by a user of said cell phone apparatus of one or more Busy keys in a predetermined sequence, each of said Busy keys being a key or switch which has been added to said cell phone or to a keypad of said cell phone or each of said one or more Busy keys being a touch sensitive area which has been added to an area of a screen or page displayed on a touchscreen display of said cell phone apparatus and displayed on said touchscreen display with an indication of the function which will be invoked if that area is touched, or a touch sensitive area which has been added to the visual depiction of a keypad on said touchscreen display of said cell phone apparatus, said software application which has been added to said cell phone apparatus or said operating system of said cell phone apparatus or said other software installed by said manufacture of said cell phone apparatus controlling said cell phone apparatus to automatically respond to the touch or press of a said one or more Busy keys in said predetermined sequence in response to an incoming text message so as to send a predetermined text message to the sender of said text message just received, via the Short Message Service Data Channel on which said incoming text message was received.

Claim 3, a method claim is:

1. A process carried out on a cell phone comprising the steps: A process carried out on a cell phone comprising the steps:

2. Receiving an incoming Short Message Service text message or an incoming cellular phone call;

3. Detecting a push of a Busy key on said cell phone and sending that event to an operating system of said cell phone with a request to send to a Busy application program on said cell phone the time of the Busy key push;

4. Sending a function call to a Busy application program on said cell phone with the time of the Busy key push;

5. Launching said Busy application program on said phone when said function call in step C is sent and starting a timer and incrementing a count of the number of pushes of said Busy key;

6. Determining if said Busy key was pushed X time in Y seconds;

7. If said Busy key was pushed X times in Y seconds, Determining if a text message was received just before said Busy key was pushed or was received while said Busy key was being pushed, and, if so, automatically selecting the text message received just before the Busy key was pushed or which was received while said Busy key was being pushed and automatically sending a pre-typed text message to the sender of said text message without any further interaction with said user of said cell phone; and

8. If said Busy key was pushed X times in Y seconds while an incoming cellular telephone call was ringing the ringtone of said cell phone, automatically Answering said incoming cell phone call and playing a pre-recorded audio message to said caller.

Answer 1

You have two questions. One is "can other people patent this with something other than a Blackberry?"

Well, a patent application that came after this would need to be non-obvious in light of this. I would guess doing the exact same thing with phone not mentioned or drawn in the application would be obvious.

The second question is what does it take to infringe this. To directly infringe any patent one needs to either make, sell, use, offer for sale a thing defined in a claim of a patent OR to carry out all of the steps of a method claim. It all comes down to the claim. That is easy. What is hard is determining what the words of a claim cover. One clear principle is the "all elements" principle. To directly infringe a claim one must have/do ALL of the elements of at least one claim