Comment by hn_decay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_decay | Hacker News Reader

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"They actually force competition-- and they give a leg up to all of your competitors by quickly bringing them up to speed on the state of the art."

Are you seriously arguing that competition uses software patent applications to get up to speed?

"If the patent system didn't exist, and Apple didn't reveal its inventions, android would be 7 years behind the iPhone."

Incredible.

"They'd still be at the drawing board trying to figure out how to make multi-touch work."

This is so wrong on so many levels that your argument is precisely what I criticized in my other post (that is, perhaps rightly, being moderated down to oblivion). Do you really think Apple invented multitouch? They neither invented the phsycial mechanism (they have nothing whatsoever to do with capacitive sensors), nor the concept itself. Aside from obvious examples like the movie Minority Report (and many that came before), which Apple apparently shamelessly ripped off, it has existed on industrial touchscreen for well over a decade.

The single and only reason Android avoided multitouch, despite the software and the hardware being capable, was that Apple won the race to the patent office. No one learned anything from their patent, nor did Apple invent anything beyond adding "on a mobile device" on their application.

That example alone demolishes your position on software patents.

This is extremely revisionist.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/12/a-visual-tour-of-androids...

Nobody is arguing that Apple invented every piece of technology that went into the iPhone, but it certainly wasn't the case that all their competitors were moving to multitouch based phones at the time.

The RIM thing was a giant lie. Remarkable that anyone ever thought it was true, much less would be referencing it now. The random message board commentator, seeking aggrandizement among their fellow fanboys, quickly disappeared and erased their history from the net, worried that their fiction would hold legal consequences.

As to Android, it is entirely possible that it went from being a Blackberry clone to instead being an iPaq clone. You know, the iPaq circa 2000 or even earlier. The one that was all screen. Sure it used a stylus, but that was courtesy of the limits of the resistive touchscreen technology.

But Android OS doesn't resemble an iPaq, it resembles iOS. You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.

>But Android OS doesn't resemble an iPaq, it resembles iOS.

Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc. The iPaq was a "PDA", however, which somehow differentiates it. I owned one. I know how they are similar.

>You keep inferring that everything presented in the original iPhone was an obvious extension of what we'd seen before, but it simply wasn't.

No, I'm not inferring that whatsoever. I am arguing whether its uniqueness is patentable. We've seen with various iterations of iOS that it is borrowing from its competitors as well. That's how the world works.

> Both have significant similarity to a year 2000 iPaq. Full screen mobile device using a touchscreen against an icon grid, onscreen keyboard, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(platform)

Perhaps, you've heard of the obscure little Taiwanese company that built the O2 XDA (the first device to merge a Pocket PC PDA (e.g. iPaq) and a mobile phone with Internet access)?

I believe they're called HTC. They've built tons of phones that resemble an iPaq, plenty of them before the iPhone was launched.

I'm not sure what point you're making. There were plenty of smartphones that existed before the iPhone. Many of them had icons and some had touch screens. None of them resembled the iPhone in 2007 any more than they resembled the Newton or Palm OS though.

You illustrate the root of the problem. You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art". (And FWIW, the stuff in minority report was conceptualized based on the research that was being done by what is now Apple.)

I've learned that you cannot argue facts with ideologues-- you will just make up your own facts, as you have done.

You can have the last word. I'm not going to debate this. I really, actually, don't care that you're anti-patent. I believe the anti-patent position is an ideological one that doesn't care about the facts... it is purely political. It is also anti-startup and anti-capitalist.

>You are not aware of what the multi-touch patents cover, what the inventions are, and you are not aware of what patents are and so you think the movie "minority report" and non-multi-touch touch screens are "prior art".

I know exactly what the multitouch patent covers, and yes the basic principals are almost entirely demonstrated in the movie Minority Report. Apple did not invent or have anything to do with multitouch sensors, nor were they close to the first to implement such a sensor.

But you're sure that Android "stole it" (or apparently that they learned great insights from Apple's patent application), which is PERVERSELY wrong on so many levels.

When people say "I'm not going to debate this", it's because they have nothing to debate. You've said nothing of value beyond alluding to a laughable patent example while making absurd claims about the insights gained from patents.

In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world.

That Stephen Spielburg was able to do it with computer graphics has no bearing on the validity of someone making it exist in the real world.

The reason I am hesitant to debate this issue is because, as you have amply demonstrated, the anti-patent people often don't even understand what a patent IS, let alone what is relevant as "prior art", and are so exceedingly hostile, and often, quite frankly dishonest (e.g.: you'd have to understand what a patent is in order to understand the multi-touch patents.) that it is just a waste of time.

Literally, I am tired offending the trolls. There is nothing to debate, because I've made my case, and you're just going to object and object and object and find another movie to reference and be proud (rather than humiliated!) at doing so!

>Literally, I am tired offending the trolls.

You spend a good 90% of each of your posts saying nothing of value but instead offending me and pandering to the crowd, desperately trying to drag yourself to some higher ground where your complete lack of facts is overlooked. I hope no one falls for it.

>That Stephen Spielburg was able to do it with computer graphics has no bearing on the validity of someone making it exist in the real world.

Again, what did Apple invent? The concept of multitouch? No, not at all. The screen itself? No, not at all. The interface rudiments? I will say it again that most of them were demonstrated in Minority Report. Specific algorithms to detect movement?

You are the one claiming that Android stole this grand invention, so I ask again - what did Android steal? We know it wasn't the idea, or the physical sensor...and I highly doubt they stole the algorithm...so what?

Maybe go look at the actual patent lawsuits against HTC, Samsung et al., they aren't hard to find.

Maybe you can submit a copy of Minority Report on DVD as an amicus brief and the judges in those cases will say "oh shit, hn_decay's brilliance hath shone a light where before therewith was only shadow" and declare Android "free and open forever[1]"

[1] exceptions apply

>Maybe go look at the actual patent lawsuits against HTC, Samsung et al., they aren't hard to find.

You say so much while saying so little.

Apple's assault on HTC is a perfect demonstration of the failure of the patent system. Dozens of trivial, laughable patents such as "recognize an email address in a string of text", patented decades after such techniques were commonplace. Do you want to show one with actual value, instead of alluding to some great argument foundation that you don't actually have?

Oh, hey, look, Android isn't actually open. Yuk yuk. What relevance does that have, beyond just partisan posturing? Who cares?

You know thousands of patent holders are realizing the potential value of their patents, looking longingly at Apple's $75 billion dollar cash pile (poor guys. Everyone is stealing their stuff). It will be interesting to see how positions change after Apple comes under constant, unrelenting assault. I already see people like Gruber trying to differentiate patents by their holders, which is so ignorant and fanboy-driven that it should embarrass him.

Any patent can be made to look obvious by quoting half a sentence. Clearly you have no idea what that patent covers, I've only skimmed over it but iirc it was recognizing certain things then giving you a pop up list of choices based on what to do with them. There may have been more to it. And that patent may in fact be stupid and obvious, or it may not, IANA patent attorney.

And you clearly aren't either, even though you can dismiss every possible patent Google might be accused of infringing on while accusing everyone else of being a fanboy...

....

"Oh, hey, look, Android isn't actually open... What relevance does that have"

I was referencing the iceberg of irony that your good ol' ship (the HMS Zealotry) keeps crashing into.

>Any patent can be made to look obvious by quoting half a sentence

Apple themselves distilled their own patent into the specific infringement. Their reading was identical to mine.

>the HMS Zealotry

You are in the wrong place. Every one of your tactics is bog standard on borefests like Engadget comments.

I did.

Do you really think Apple invented this? http://www.google.com (turning a URL or other recognizable text into a clickable link).

That's one of the patents being asserted against HTC (which has made it past the first round of the process that leads to an import ban).

My understanding is that there are several perpetual motion machines patented so while ideally you do have to fulfill your requirement:

"In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world."

In reality you do not, otherwise there would be not patents for perpetual motion.

"Literally, I am tired offending the trolls."

I do not think you are dealing with trolls in this thread. Believing so will probably only block you from understanding and possibly convincing your the person on the other side.

> In order to patent something, you have to reduce it to practice. That is to say, you have to actually make it work, in the real world.

This is false. I could patent the idea of using, say, a camera's sensor to recognize the species of a plant based on a leaf without any idea of how I would actually build such a thing (what algorithms would be required, etc). I could similarly patent the idea of tracking a user's eye movement to control a user interface, without the slightest clue of how to track a user's eye movement in realtime.

To take one small example - if you were to pull up patents related to virtual reality, the claims (which tend to be written in the mid-1980s) are all ridiculous, the dreamy technology simply didn't exist to build the proposed ideas (i.e. computers small enough to stick on people's heads), but they were still patented anyway.

Minority report was released in 2002. What about interfaces in Lawnmower Man (1992) or Johnny Mnemonic (1995)? Or endless other sci-fi?

Sit a UI designer and an engineer down for a couple of sessions to talk about a touch screen (x,y coordinates coming into software from human hands) anytime in the last fifty years and they will come up with the concept of gestures in at most a few hours. What about Douglas Engelbart's work or the work at Xerox in relation to Apple's later ridiculous attempts to claim the windowed GUI as their own?

You accuse others of making up facts but you are ignorant of quite a few.

The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go. You have to actually be able to demonstrate how it works.

If someone develops warp drive or the transporter, does star trek count as "prior art"? That would be ludicrous.

(trying to figure out what comment you're replying to is exactly why whitespace-as-blocks is a brain-dead idea in python/coffeescript)

>The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go

While the discussion was targeted more at the actual value of software patents (i.e. what specifically Apple 'invented' with their multitouch patents), in actual practice yes such a movie is prior art if the novelty of the patent is the application of multifinger gestures. The idea that you need to show a working implementation is nonsense, and has never been a requirement of the patent system.

Regarding warp drive, the novelty of multitouch is the mere concept of using multifinger gestures on an interface. The novelty of a warp drive is the mechanism of achieving warp drive, not the concept of it.

To put it another way, if you patent a method (or system) of making a car fly, maybe that's an invention. Patenting the concept of flying cars, however, is not.

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