The pull-to-refresh patent
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
Read Ben Franklin [1] on the subject.
Everyone should familiarize with the nascent days of the aviation industry when the Wright brothers' patent on the three-axis control method used in planes left the United States completely unable to produce planes when it entered World War One [2], ultimately forcing Congress to intervene [3].
"Intellectual property" is an oxymoron.
[1]: http://movingtofreedom.org/2006/08/31/ben-franklin-on-patent...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war#...
There's that idea in software development that it doesn't matter who came up with the idea first, but who executed it better. I actually think this is how the world should work. Who cares if you came up with an idea if you never acted on it? Why should you have the right to hold up innovation in that field?
Just get rid of "intellectual property" (at least patents) and let the people decide with their wallets.
Do you also disagree with the other types of intellectual property rights such as trademarks & copyrights, or are you just talking in the context of patents?
There is legal recourse if the trademark enters the common lexicon (as happened to aspirin [1]).
Basically I have no problem with trademarks except when people decide to trademark what is the generally accepted phrase, as happened with the ugg boot [2], which has long since been a generic term in Australia.
Copyright is a little greyer but basically OK. It just needs to be protected from copyright trolls like Righthaven [3]. The danger here is that lots of low-quality or automatically generated text will be used as the basis of copyright violation lawsuits. Generally speaking, it's extremely difficult to independently come up with the same exact text as someone else for anything nontrivial in length.
The problem with patents is that two people can (and do) come up with the same idea completely independently and that many of those ideas are completely obvious (eg I remember seeing an early GPU trademark that related to applying 2 or more textures to a pixel in a cycle instead of 1).
I can write a computer program and it will quite possibly violate any number of patents. I can write a book and it almost certainly won't (randonmly) violate anyone else's copyright. If I want to trademark something it's easy enough to find out if it's already been trademarked and to trademark it myself.
Software patents are beyond moronic.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirin#Trademark
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugg_boots#Trademark_disputes
A couple of examples:
1. Trademarks - Facebook recently insisted on owning trademark of word "book". Although not 100% successfully, but some companies settled. What next - trademark "luck", "suck" and "fuck"?
2. If I recall correctly copyright is 75 years + life of descendants. So if I (and say 1000 more people) would like to buy/read a book, that was published 15 years ago and was since abandoned by the author, there is no practical way to do so even if people would be eager to pay royalty. The path/copyright ownership for hits is clear, but what about long tail?
Your right to drive as indicated by a driving licence is not 'property', your planning permission for a building is not 'property', your FCC permission to use a particular part of the EM spectrum is not 'property'. And your right to make copies of a particular piece of information isn't 'property' either. These are all abstract legal rights/privileges.
If you drive without a licence, broadcast in a band reserved for someone else, or copy a copyrighted work, then you are 'driving without a licence', 'breaking FCC regulations', and 'infringing copyright', respectively. Calling any of those things stealing is inaccurate, which is the kind of mistake you end up making if you think of them as property.
On a side-note, is it ironic that this post is from a guy who was recently upset when someone else appropriated his own innovative UI?
So, what you do is take all know actions, and all known events, and put them on a big table so you can cross reference them. See which ones you like, and there you go!
In fact, that's so ingenious, (a mechanism to develop knew UI concepts), I could probably patent it under our own system!
The book is here: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html
Which brings us to argue subjectivity. Is this example trivial or not? There's no scientific way to point that, each one of us will have different opinion. I personally think this patent is ridiculously trivial, but a judge might disagree, and it's their argument from authority that matters.
The best argument against software patents, imho, is that it's too impractical to clearly define what is and isn't trivial in software without causing more harm than good.
Pull to refresh is exactly the same thing.
You cannot take the use of such words alone as an indication. That just makes no sense. Stealing and theft aren’t legal terms, not first and foremost. They only happen to also refer to legal concepts.
No irony nowhere.
In this case it seems obvious, to me, that this is not promoting innovation at all. Would this technique never have been developed were it not for the fact that it could be patented? Would other people copying the technique in any way dilute its benefit to Twitter?
I don't know. Do you? I personally don't. If your software's differentiating factors are your UI innovations you might feel differently.
If it was appropriated into a competitive application I can understand being upset, but as long as the app the UI innovation is used in isn't competing with your app, who cares? You came up with a good paradigm and people liked it and used it elsewhere. Isn't that enough?
Apparently, yes. http://www.archdaily.com/197061/architectural-patents-on-wha...
now... about patent enforcement today that's another issue.
Main goal of patents WAS to promote innovation. it started in a time when everyone had trade secrets. So if you wanted to fix your fridge yourself, thought luck. it's a trade secret. you could even go to jail if you are found with schematics to fix it.
instead, patents. you publish your trade secret, everyone can read and learn from it. Then if someone want to use it for making money, they pay you a fee to cover your research and move on to invent new things
what happen today? patents crush hobbyists. everyone spend 10x R&D to invent the same thing in a way not covered by some patent. companies avoid useful stuff because they are afraid of being hostage of the patent holder (as is the case here, apple could pay a license fee to twitter, it's not the royalties that are game here).
Today you release something open source that is covered in a patent you never saw (hey, it's so obvious monkeys could came up with the same solution) you go to jail, just the sort of thing patents were supposed to PREVENT!
anyway, patents good. way it's enforced bad.
Yeah. So the guy who implemented the "pull to refresh" totally did it because he wanted a goddamn patent.
On a side note, I pity the non-innovative free loaders who roamed this planet before patents. It's not like they invented or innovated. How could they, we didn't have patents.
I don't think this can be stated as fact.
Maybe it's time to take a step back and realize that the decades or centuries of patent legislation can be proof enough that they are not necessary to promote innovation, and in fact it has stifled it. In any market where patents have been disregarded, and heavy copying was done, innovation has increased (by wanting to stay a step ahead of competition), prices have dropped, and the quality of the products have increased.
The bigger the patent enforcement, and copying restrictions, the bigger the monopolies, higher prices, less quality products. And what is "competition" anyway? When you say a competing product or service for X, aren't you really thinking about a similar product or service; a product that copies a good portion of what X has? Or are you thinking about something that is completely unique and has no relation to X? At that point it's already in an entirely different product category.
Consider this. Company X develops an interaction. They use it in all their software which commands 30% of the market and they prevent others using using the threat of patent litigation.
The rest of the industry settles on an alternative which is patent-free.
Which is the better interaction? You can argue that it's the second one simply by virtue of being used in 70% of cases. Even if it is initially less familiar or in general less efficient - it's eventual familiarity outweighs both concerns.
The filing date (and priority date in this case) is April 8, 2010. i.e. that's the date someone would need to find prior art that reads on the claims of the patent. (Unless Twitter can establish an earlier invention date -- which would likely occur in the course of an actual lawsuit about the patent; e.g. a Git checkin of the first implementation, or a drawing in a notebook with a date on it).
As for the claims, the two independent claims are:
A method claim: 1. A method, comprising: displaying a content area; receiving input associated with a first command, the first command including a request to scroll the content area; and based on the first command, performing a second command, the second command being independent of the first command.
And a device claim: 20. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions stored thereon that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform a method, comprising: displaying a scrollable list of content items, the scrollable list of content items including a plurality of discrete content items arranged chronologically; receiving input associated with a scroll command, the input representing touch-based user input; based on the scroll command, displaying a scrollable refresh trigger configured to scroll with the scrollable list of content items; in response to determining that the scrollable refresh trigger is fully displayed, providing an instruction associated with activating the scrollable refresh trigger; in response to determining that the scroll command was completed while the scrollable refresh trigger was fully displayed, refreshing the scrollable list of content items; and in response to determining that the scrollable list of content items has been refreshed, automatically scrolling the scrollable list of content items such that the scrollable refresh trigger is not displayed.
Are you looking at the proper case number, because this application (20100199180 or 12/756,574) says it has not even been looked at yet: "Status: Docketed New Case - Ready for Examination"
The Examiner hasn't even looked at the application yet.
Regardless of where you stand on patents, this is certainly not the same as infinite scrolling.
specifically, the patent covers updating what's on the screen depending on what portion of the screen is displayed. that's exactly infinite scrolling.
(That said, as commenters below correctly point out, Twitter, not Loren, owns the patent and gets to decide whom to enforce it against).
If something is patented, then no one else can patent it -- that's pretty clear and the patent office enforces it fairly well. If something is "obvious" (to one of ordinary skill) or if something has already been done, then it SHOULD not be patentable... but it is quite common for such things to be patented anyway. To be fair, it is unreasonable for the patent office to know about every thing which has ever been done, but still these things get patented.
Once a patent is issued, there is a presumption by the courts that it is valid. You can contest this, and use prior art to invalidate the patent but it will require litigation and will be VERY EXPENSIVE. You can "use it without fear" as long as you don't mind paying a trivial $100,000 or more in litigation costs.
I would be very pleased if someone knowledgeable about the practice of patent law would write in to correct me -- I really wish it didn't work like this -- but from what I have seen I believe that there IS a real danger that things which have been "released" wind up patented later.
I wish that were also true. In reality patents overlap hugely, and a line of trolls can form for the same feature. You have to spend the same 100k to show that another patent, issued earlier, also covered this idea, even if that patent was yours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_invention_registratio...
The Android Facebook app has this pull-to-refresh on its news feed - has for the last handful of updates. Pulse News also has used this same behavior for quite some time... It would seem that either these (and others) have been overlooked or the patent is indeed not being enforced at this time.
It's quite an obvious strategy. You don't load all the data, but only what the user can actually see, with a bit of buffer space in both directions. When the user moves the scrollbar you go and fetch more data.
Not surprised that (1) somebody filed a patent on it and (2) it actually got accepted.
Also maybe someone can show me where this "apparatus" cited in the in patent is to be found.
But this broad construction? It attempts to patent any interaction where you start out scrolling then trigger something else: http://cl.ly/0U3t391I3n1O2p2g0r2a
The inventor obviously thought very deeply about the problem, and implemented an elegant, intuitive solution to solve it.
What I don't agree with is that the patent is valid FOR 14 YEARS. Patents are meant to reward inventors for the behaviour I outlined above, but 14 years is a lifetime for a software patent.
If the patent period was reduced to 1 or maybe 2 years, that should be more than enough time to capitalize on a novel refresh method.
As to when this is patent worthy, I would argue no. Pull-down is as basic an action as you can do. The patent is equivalent to patenting the concept (as opposed to the engineering implementation) of selecting an item on a screen that a user points to with their hand. Or the concept of performing an action when you click on an item on your desktop (since clicking is as basic on a mouse as swiping is on a touch screen).
To be fair, it is difficult to argue where to draw the line for patents and some people would probably argue that my examples should be patentable (regardless of whether they are - I don't actually know). It just strikes me that rewarding people for these "innovations" does exactly nothing to increase people's effort to figure out a good UX for their product.
However, claiming that this patent is ridiculous is ridiculous, at least if you take a look at how it is similar to patents in other fields. This patent is every bit as valid as the patent that describes a water sprinkler that uses water flow as a timer.
If a patent is ever granted from this application, I guarantee you those claims will be nowhere near as broad as they are now.
This is a patent application.
It has not been granted. It hasn't even been reviewed by an Examiner yet. All that's happened thus far is that the application has been submitted to the Patent Office and published. That's it.
It is one of the patents Apple has been pummeling Samsung with in Europe, since they implemented spring-back scrolling in a few places. I remember the photo gallery, but I think there might have been another patent involved there. This patent is also the reason that stock Android (and most non-Samsung skins, I believe) flash a light when you hit a scrolling boundary instead of springing back.
Twitter presumably has some sort of license (via the iOS SDK or whatever) to use spring-back scrolling in the iOS Twitter app. However, there is also spring-back scrolling in the Android Twitter app. I wonder if Twitter has a license for that or if Apple is merely letting it go because of their current friendly relations.
Software patents deter innovation in general and are a scourge, however I think it's odd that of all the trivial patents that are being enforced, this is the one chosen for ridicule.
It is clearly a novel implementation. People want to copy it, and want to see it copied, because it has value. Isn't that the purpose of patents?
I would compare it with multitasking gestures in iOS. I love them on the iPad. Yet I could trivialize them and say that they should also be on my Android tablet because it's just doing things with your finger so why not?
Well, . . . The purpose of patents is to get things invented that would not otherwise be invented -- if something costs significant time/effort/etc. to invent and those costs would be difficult to recover by selling copies of implementations, patents increase the profit margin of sales and hence help cover costs. (That is the theoretical proposition anyway: it is not really proven by evidence.)
So would this particular invention have been made without patent support? (assuming the standard theoretical model) That is the question.
The purpose of patents is to advance public knowledge. It was understood that people would invent regardless (as people always had). But without patents inventors obfuscated, sealed devices, etc. And when they died, chunks of knowledge often died with them.
But inventors were reluctant to make their secrets publicly available for everyone to see and possibly copy. Hence the temporary monopoly was extended, not to make their job in the market easier, but as payment for sharing their knowledge with the public.
IIRC, the primary purpose of patents, since they were invented in 15th century Venice, has been to eliminate the monopoly of trade guilds. This was an issue well into the 20th century. But has software ever had this problem?
Exactly. By making their knowledge public.
> "But has software ever had this problem?"
While the history of software looks nothing like Renaissance Italy, the future may -- particularly in a hypothetical world without software patents.
Historically, the root of even arguably-patentable software is expressly unpatentable math that has largely been developed by publicly-funded institutions. So that even when, say, the Fraunhofer Institute was granted patents over parts of the mp3 codec, even absent the patent disclosure, it drew attention to the root math and gave rise to alternatives.
But looking forward the situation is more worrisome. As public funding has failed to keep pace, only the potential to patent research has brought in the private funds that have continued to drive innovation. Without that patent potential, there'd be little reason for anything beyond the hint of promising research to be shared publicly. It would be pursued privately, without published articles, without any public disclosure on the other end.
And given the trend for modern software research to manifest as internet-accessible services, it doesn't seem like there would even be an opportunity to reverse-engineer or decompile the ultimate products that such research generated. To say nothing of the rapidly increasing complexity of modern software and the increasing rate at which it's tied to custom silicon.
Consider an example: How in the world would someone be able to reverse engineer Siri in a world without software patents or the potential to patent publicly-funded core research?
The public has no access to the server-side source. We have very limited access to the client-side source. We have even less access to the client-side custom silicon [1]. Even if it were plausible for a not-for-profit effort to untangle a project of that magnitude, they simply do not have the access necessary.
[1] Though client side silicon is less integral in the current implementation, it's no stretch to imagine that Apple will continue to refine and accelerate its algorithms through heavier use of custom DSPs. Nor is it news to say that it approaches the implausible for not-for-profit efforts to reverse engineer modern silicon. And the relentless pace of fabrication promises to only make things more difficult going forward.
Scrolling to the left of the iOS home screen to bring up the search interface runs afoul of that claim as written.
As does scrolling in the built-in Google Maps app.
This kind of patent is bad for the industry because it is absurdly broad. Whether patents on UI are a good idea, or whether this is truly novel and not just an extension of the 'infinite scroll' of things like Google Maps, is almost irrelevant in comparison.
This is common among most patents -- overly broad claims that then specialize down to specific implementations. Most patent holders know not to claim infringement on the broad claims because it has a 100% chance of being invalidated.
Assuming the patent holder chooses to license it at all. Perceived competitors may not get the chance.
(I'm assuming this is a design patent. If not, it's 20 years, not 14.)
I feel very strongly against software patents. My only comment is choosing this to complain about. As far as software behaviors go, it is more novel than most.
I didn't mean to imply to imply you were for them, though I see now that's what my wording did. Sorry about that!
That isn't infinite scroll, and it's pretty clear that the sudden awareness of this interface technique rose quite quickly.
After looking around a bit, it seems like the non-obvious use people are employing is applying the concept even where the content isn't a list which will expand at the top when you refresh, but rather some other form of content that will be replaced with the up-to-date version when you refresh.
Rotate 90 degrees and this concept is novel? Egads.
Further it's interesting how people could claim the obviousness of this despite the fact that there isn't a single known use before twitter started doing it (where it was then picked up by others). That's a pretty remarkably clear indication that it isn't obvious.
99% of software patents are bullshit that should never have been granted, with this patent being among them. However this patent is no worse, and is arguably better, than most that so many actually defend on here (hyperlinking phone numbers, for instance).
This isn't an example for why we need patent reform, I see it as making a case for why patents can be useful. Now that some have the fear of being sued for using this technique hopefully we'll see more, even more innovative ways implementing refresh behavior. Constraints breed innovation while lack of constraints breeds a lot of copycat technology.
Now, if you want to talk about how long the patent lasts then that's a different story but I see no reason for this patent not to exist.
Also, I wasn't aware that the patent expires in 20 years. That does seem like a long time but compared to the perpetual copyright we have it's not as bad. I'll agree that the term patents are given is too long but I'm one of the few around here that is in favor of them. Not absolutely but to a reasonable degree. The patent system has flaws (major ones) but the idea of patents is something I support. I truly believe that it really does foster innovation. It's an incentive to innovate.
If Twitter let's others use it and collects royalties then it's not like Twitter alone is able to implement it and when the patent expires others can for free. Facebook on iOS has had this behavior for a while now.
I think people much like yourself are thinking of patents in absolute terms like they're all good or all bad. It's more complicated than that. They're a good thing that can be abused like prescription medication or guns. If we could just be sane about what gets to be patented, how long, and just generally use patents sanely we'd have no problem. So let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.