Apple wins over Motorola in 'slide-to-unlock' ruling | Hacker News Reader

Apple wins over Motorola in 'slide-to-unlock' ruling

bbc.co.uk

23 pointskschua16 comments

> Mr Mueller, a patent expert who has in the past consulted for Microsoft, described the ruling as a "very significant win for Apple against Android".

How did this guy come to be known as a patent expert? Everything I'm reading in Wikipedia suggests a rather checkered past with regards to reporting on patents.

Who's predictions are often at odds with other commentators and ends up looking misguided (a lot of his commentary on Oracle vs Google).

He has some strange axes to grind. I just can't work out why (or exactly what his precise angle is)

This is complete conjecture on my part and could well be completely wrong.

His connection with Microsoft may not be completely severed. It's in Microsoft's interest to ensure that there is continuing doubt over whether or not Android is patent-free so they can continue their shakedown of handset manufacturers, so having some "expert" out there sowing the seeds of doubt every time some little claim of infringement appears would obviously be beneficial to them.

As far as I can tell, his predictions on Oracle vs Google have been pretty accurate, despite being at odds with other commentators. Shouldn't we be looking at how predictions match reality, rather than how they match other predictions?

His predictions on damages have been at odds with the Judge's comments which seems quite important.

The only dispute I can recall about damages was many people claiming that Oracle had lowered its damages claims, and Mueller saying they hadn't. When the full damages report was released, it turned out Mueller was right - they changed methodology, but the overall figure did not go down.

It's true that the judge has been hard on Oracle's damages report, but I don't recall Mueller ever saying otherwise. He's always said that they key issue is Oracle's ability to get a permanent injunction rather than money damages for past infringement.

At least journalists have (mostly) stopped using him to get the "open source" view on patents, just because he's got "FOSS" in his blog's name.

Hm, I thought the prior art argument was pretty convincing the last time Apple tried this.

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/dutch-judge-consider... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0&t=4m10s

Yeah in the Netherlands the patent was discarded because of this. It just absurd that they can use this patent in the US.

Next they'll go after the zipper manufacturers.

Because slide to unlock wasn't invented hundreds of years ago for doors.

good riddance. all i need is slide keyboard to unlock.

...of course that that would require keyboards to be back. Hate apple and the touchscreen fad. I was happy with my crappy nokia, were it not for the speed. or lack of.

grumble grumble

The bright side is that Android won't be infected with the user-unfriendly finger-straining slide-to-unlock gimmick.

Is it really that user 'unfriendly'? It seems sort of obvious, you have this button that looks raised above a track with the guide to slide to unlock. From what we've seen of toddlers and babies grabbing iPads and iPhones and unlocking them on first use I think Apple has created a pretty friendly unlock interface.

I wouldn't call it a gimmick either, because it works. I've never had an iPhone pocket dial on me.

I have. The home button has become pressed down long enough to trigger Voice Control, which has then interpreted background noise as a command to call somebody random.

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