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.
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.
I don't think this can be stated as fact.
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.