Apple Patents Dock, Methods Relating to Networking

Apple was granted four patents by the US Patent & Trademark Office, today. The patents cover four inventions that relate to Apple’s multipurpose dock stand, QuickTime’s transmission of differently formatted media, measuring network bandwidth between two computers, and a communication between media servers and media clients.

Stand invention (US Patent D567800) does not offer concise explanation as to why this dock is ‘drastically’ different than other docks on the market. Instead, Apple provided a one sentence explanation in the filing:

“The stand, which can be utilized as a dock, is used to support an electronic device, such as a media player, media storage device, cellular phone, PDA and/or the like.”

Method and Apparatus for Media Data Transmission invention (US Patent 7366788) relates to QuickTime’s processing of media data “transmitted in a data communication medium.” In simple terms, this invention provides methods for allowing the transmission of media data (for example - video, audio, or video and audio combined, etc.) over a communication media, such as in a computer network. The invention is not necessarily limited to QuickTime, but also to audio formats such as AIFF, video formats such as AVI, and streaming formats such as RealMedia.

Method and Apparatus Measuring Bandwidth invention (US Patent 7366199) relates to a method of determining and measuring network bandwidth between two computers. According to Apple, “the method measures a first time interval between when one of the computers (1) sends a first data set to the other computer and (2) receives a first response,” in two intervals. The method then identifies the network bandwidth from the two measured time intervals.

Method and Apparatus for Allowing a Media Client to Obtain Media Data from a Media Server invention (US Patent 7366975) relates to a method that allows one application (”media client”) to have access to the media items of another application (”media server”) without having any knowledge of the media server’s implementation, such as its project file format and rendering engine.