Saying things are obvious after someone already invented a dead simple and good solution for a problem we had for years is always easy.
EDIT: Grammer.
If the answer is not only "No," but "Are you joking?", then the patent should never have been issued.
Many things are easy to implement but are difficult to conceptualize.
Patents are a bargain with society: I, the inventor, will publish the details of my invention, instead of keeping it locked away forever as a trade secret. In return, you, the government, will grant me a limited monopoly on the invention.
But if the patent's teachings aren't even remotely necessary or helpful to those who implement my invention in the future, what exactly is society getting in exchange for the monopoly grant?
IMO, patents shouldn't be granted on anything that wouldn't otherwise be a candidate for trade secret protection. "Slide to unlock" certainly would never meet that bar. There is a 0% chance that anyone who is infringing on this patent needed to read it first.
Now in this case, the analogy would be I, Apple Computer, will experiment with thousands of touchscreen UIs to find the one most suitable for unlocking the device, and you, the government, will grant me a 20 year monopoly on whatever I come up with. I think the sane response is, "eh, no deal." We're just not getting enough out of the bargain. But "easy to reimplement once explained" isn't the problem there -- "easy to implement in the first place" or "no additional incentive required to encourage innovation" is.
If inventors are to be rewarded by monopoly grants, it should be for doing genuinely challenging, innovative research, not for winning a foot race to the patent office, as happened with popular technologies like the telephone, or for trying random stuff until you hit the lottery, like Edison did with the light bulb. We, the public, would not have had to wait much longer for electric lighting if patent protection had been unavailable. We didn't get anything special in return for our monopoly grant to Edison.
An appropriate quote that I saved from an earlier HN thread: "It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later." -Aubrey de Grey
You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of it. E.g., I can't patent a flying carpet until I actually know how to make it and prove that I can (by making it or being very specific in technical instructions on how to make it).
An patent is obvious if you can explain the idea, i.e. what you want the machine to do, to a graduate engineer/scientist, and have him implement it. As for the famous doubly-linked list patent: if I tell a programmer: "I have a number of items {A, B, C, D, E}, and sometimes I need to access them in the [A -> B -> C -> D -> E] sequence, and othertimes I need to access them in the [B -> C -> E -> A -> D] sequence. Make an efficient/working implementation of it!", then any programmer could come up with the doubly-linked list implementation. Ergo, it is obvious.
You are right that obviousness changes over time, and it's important to consider it from the perspective of the time of the invention.
But some things genuinely were obvious at the time of their 'invention'.
Palm Treo: http://blog.treonauts.com/picKeyGuard01.jpg
Palm Windows Mobile: http://www.hpc.ru/lib/arts/2364/palm-treo-750v-keylock.gif
Windows Mobile: http://cdn.pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DeviceLo...
Once you define your UI around a capacitive touchscreen "slide to unlock" becomes trivial.
Technology moves forward enabling new behaviors that were never possible before, and much of the "innovation" that people declare is nothing more than a land-rush (see the "on a computer" that was the invention of countless patents). The iPhone stood on the backs of the GPS industry, for instance, that pushed much of the innovations in mobile chips, GPUs (OpenGL ES and mobile GPUs were made for the in-car GPS industry), screen and touchscreen technology. Suddenly the technology was there to do things that couldn't be done before and the land grab was afoot. Is a land grab innovation?
I don't discount that Apple invented and refined a lot, or that some companies seem to be addicted to simply cloning (Samsung is particularly guilty of this), but a lot of what Apple is credited with isn't much more evolved than "on a computer". And now that we have all sorts of innovations in battery technology, chipsets, etc, things like Google's glasses are possible, but only a fool would imagine that they created them out of the ether, instead of simply moved to where technology had brought them.
All I've seen in this thread is the Neonode. The video games and hardware locks are ridiculous because a patent is NOT a general idea it is a specific implementation of a concept.
It only takes one, and there is no requirement that that one be from a shipped product from a "major OEM". A sufficiently descriptive Usenet post is sufficient. Patents have been rejected because the described object was previously described in science fiction novels.
Still, for all that I love Apple and their products, swipe to unlock is a pitifully small thing to waste a patent on. To my mind, patents are needed but should be:
* non-transferable to a new owner -- no buying and selling, and lost altogether when the owning company is itself acquired.
* only applicable to actual products -- invalid if none of the company's products use it within, say, one or two years of application.
* short term -- two or three years from initial product release ought to be enough, while still allowing some competition down the line.
* very low base cost, but with a small cost per product model and maybe even a tiny cost for each device sold.
Those four changes could probably bring the patent system back to its original intent, in my opinion.
Also, it was the judge who said the neonode made it obvious, which seems wrong to me given the lack of mainstream implementations.
But none of this changes the fact that this patent is ludicrously trivial -- even if not obvious -- and should never have seen the light of day.
except for, you know, the numerous examples of prior art given throughout this thread.
Except for those Neonode N1m engineers, as the video clearly shows that they did.
But I guess they though the idea was so obvious they didn't apply for a patent.
http://m2.sourcingmap.com/smapimg/en/n/11b/hardware-door-loc...