Apple granted 'the mother of all smartphone software patents'
tech.fortune.cnn.com
tech.fortune.cnn.com
We have to realize that every time some patent is awarded, someone has just robbed the collective human knowledge pool, some patent office has just made money off selling something it doesn't own by taking it away from anyone else who could have come up with it now, or in the future.
Kickstarter's model is the way to go. An idea is only worth so much, you ask what you want to be paid and make it if it matches your price. But given how deeply ingrained the inflated value of an idea and the repeatability of charging for it is in our being, a lot of us think 'But, but he deserves the patent! I mean he was the first one to think about such a complex system.'
How to have a sustainable business model you ask? Charge for your idea upfront and do your repeat business on manufacturing, maintenance, innovation and service. This model inherently tends to promote innovation and forces competition in terms of manufacturing, pushing for the improved and more efficient ways of doing anything. This is how humanity collectively progresses much faster than what we see right now.
Even the smartest people get stuck at the thought of software patents not making any sense but somehow non-software patents seeming fine. The problem is in the idea that someone can be arbitrarily given the right to something that someone else can come up with freely completely independently.
If all you got out of my post was 'the patent system is a way for the patent office to make money,' then with all due respect, I request you to look through it again.
I've really enjoyed being a part of their ecosystem but I will not support any more toxic patent warfare.
I've been working on an iOS version in parallel but if this happens I'll just abandon it.
- Nokia sued Apple
- Apple counter-sued Nokia
- Apple sued HTC
- HTC counter-sued Apple
- HTC agreed to pay Microsoft royalties
- Oracle sued Google
- Microsoft sued Motorola (alleges Motorola breaking FRAND obligations)
- Motorola counter-sued Microsoft
- Motorola sued Apple
- Apple counter-sued Motorola
... getting ever more complicated in 2011, 2012, ...
I suppose depending on your tribal biases you can find good and bad guys in that mess, and cheer on your team. Good luck with that.
If I've had any tribal bias up to this point it would have to be due to the fact that, at the moment, every single device I own with a processor was made by Apple and the food I eat is paid for by writing Obj-C code.
You're pretty much saying if I steal all your proprietary business information and use it to start a rival company, and you try to sue me, then I'm perfectly justified in claiming you attacked first.
Apple is abusing a broken patent system to hobble a legitimate competitor while basically sitting on their ass for the last two years in the phone market.
The iPad vastly outsells Android tablets because it's a better device. Android phones outsell the iPhone because they're better devices in many ways.
Every time I hear Apple and patent in the same sentence, Gargamel kills a baby smurf.
This one is just ridiculous and clearly does not have any kind of an inventive step. Also, from filing the application, it only took 4 months to being awarded. FOUR MONTHS?! March 5, 2012 was the filing date... The USPTO couldn't load up Apple's legal-Bazooka fast enough if they tried.. To be honest, you would naive to think that this wasn't pushed through anyway. It will almost surely be used immediately to defend Apple's initiative it shows by coming up with such "worthy" patents.
Edit: (As pointed out below, the March 2012 date is a continuation.. not the initial filing date. My mistake.)
It actually dates back to Jan. 7, 2007. This latest "continuation" was what was just filed March 5, 2012.
I wonder though if it will work against Apple. Reading through it, the claims seem to reflect a lot of what folks 'skilled in the art' might equally have done. Since it will no doubt be brought to the frontlines right away and put into the battle we should be able to see how well it holds up.
A patent like this was pretty foreseeable, given that Apple's had the described technology on the market for five years. Nobody's going to be taken by surprise here.
How did you get through a 30k word patent in 30 minutes in order to determine that? That rate is two or three times faster than I can do something easy, like light fiction.
Your understanding is correct. This doesn't mean squat. It just means they filed their application correctly and it passed the most minimal levels required. If this stands up in court, that would be a different and truly unfortunate matter.
If the average American began with the axiom "patents are merely forms that have been filed correctly" instead of "patents are something only granted when someone has invented something truly novel and reduced it to practice" then patents wouldn't be nearly as dangerous.
The problem is typically trial by jury in an east Texas courtroom where the jurors assume that patents are granted by a clerk with expertise in the area the patent was filed.
Patents are one area where a trial by jury fails badly because the average person is far more likely than practitioners to think a patent is non-obvious.
Instead we should have trials by qualified juries, where the jurors are peers in the area in which the patent was filed. i.e. a software patent should be reviewed by a jury composed of software developers since they are the only ones competent enough to rule on obviousness.
* EDTX judges move cases faster than most other districts, which makes legal threats by NPEs (small companies for which presumably all revenues come from judgements and settlements) more credible.
* EDTX judges have well-defined rules for handling patent cases, unlike venues that see far fewer patent cases, which again makes filing there easier.
* EDTX is among the more plaintiff-friendly districts in the country; across the board in all cases, plaintiffs tend to win there.
* EDTX judges grant fewer injunctions, dismiss fewer cases, and issue fewer summary judgements, which are again things you might want if you were a huge company trying to stomp an NPE's frivolous patent claim.
* And, sure, there aren't any big companies there and patent troll defendants are often unsympathetic to residents (although one voir dire consultancy I found wrote a blog post about finding an unexpectedly high number of IT pros in panels in the district.)
Also, before we point the finger at EDTX as the root of the problem, know:
* The America Invents Act made forum shopping to EDTX harder; plaintiffs can no longer join a whole bunch of different defendants in different locales into a single venue, but rather have to go defendant-by-defendant doing small cases, each time making an argument for why the proper venue is EDTX.
* Appeals Courts have apparently taken to reversing EDTX denials of venue change, so when EDTX judges refuse to allow defendants to have their case heard in SFBA or Seattle, there's apparently a decent shot at getting that overturned.
I think it's possible that to enforce your "qualified jury" standard, you'd have to amend the US Constitution. In any case, that standard doesn't make much sense, because patents are transferrable; the party "harmed" by willful infringement could very well be (in fact, almost certainly is) not a "peer" to a panel of technologists. And think it through some more: sure, as technologists, we'd sure like our biggest hot-button legal issue to be determined solely by our direct peers, but should that really be the rule in general? What happens in complex technical cases in the extractive industries like oil & gas?
It would make more sense to simply say that software can't be patented. There's no Constitutional can of worms there: Congress has the power to pass a law saying exactly that.
The problem is, merely presenting the patent and asking "Is this obvious" will lead to many affirmatives due to hindsight bias.
It could be done differently though. Before presenting the jury with the patent itself, ask them to imagine ways of solving the problem. If many come up with the same answer, then it's very likely the obvious solution.
If you're talking about the `134 patent, it was in the USPTO's Track One program for expedited processing. Basically you pay a fee and get a much quicker examination.
("First to file" is a term that has a lot of baggage, so I wanted to be clear.)
Agreed, there is a lot of baggage around this, making it hard to talk about. Does "first to file" really mean "first to have examined"?
portable multifunction device, comprising: a touch screen display
Compared to inventing the light bulb, it's a paltry invention. But it may well have been a big deal at the time, to customers who maybe couldn't use regular bulbs and had to resort to, I dunno, more durable acetylene lamps or something.
And of course it might have been tricky, figuring out just how to make an economical thicker filament, or finding an appropriate coating that didn't block too much light, and finding a way of applying it to lightbulbs in a mass-production context.
Care to provide an example of prior art ?
The language used suggests that disappearing scrollbars aren't completely novel but the prior ones used a full length scroll bar (on desktops, etc.)
The iOS scrollbar does seem both novel and innovative. It also seems fairly minor and the kind of thing I'd be easy to program around.
The minimal and smaller but proportional bar that moves and then fades out does seem novel to me in total regardless of prior bars that were minimal (windows has had a setting that allowed 1 pixel bars since xp or vista at least), smaller (my understanding is that smalltalk's original bar was not full length), gave a sense of proportion (pretty sure BeOS had a setting for this) or disappeared (I'm sure there's something).
Analogously there could already be robots that ride horses, robots that chew bubble gum and robots that do the macarena but we can still patent a new robot that did all three of those at the same time.
Which I fail to see how is applicable for a touchscreen device which has no concept of focus.
"You know there isn't much screen real estate here, so lets get rid of the bar, and only show the scroll head when you are scrolling. Good idea!" Why should someone be allowed to patent that?
It's like the first website ever to say, "We really have a lot of menu items here... I know, let's group them into sub-menus that 'drop-down' when you mouse over them?" Boom, drop-down menus are now patented, pay up if you want to use them in your website. Sure there were drop-down file menus on computers before this, but I'm the first one ever to do it on a website.
Can someone explain why the two are nothing alike and I'm an idiot for feeling this way?
Forget the world of patents for a second. In what aspect of life is copying good ideas not a good idea? I do have some sympathy for the idea of protection in cases where the ratio of R&D to duplication costs is very high. A scroll bar doesn't pass that test.
It's always a good idea, that's why it's so popular.
In this profit-driven society we live in, we've decided to make blatant copying of good ideas illegal so the original party with the good idea can reap all the profit from it.
Let's face it, if you, or I, or anyone of us came up with a phenomenal idea worth billions, and some company produced exactly the same thing in 6 months, we'd be pretty pissed about that.
(Note: I'm not saying that people are copying Apple exactly, or that Apple are justified in doing what they're doing, I'm just pointing out the reasoning behind what's going on)
> A scroll bar doesn't pass that test.
Interesting you should say that. You have no idea how much effort went into thinking up, then implementing the first scroll bar. Just because it's common-place now, doesn't mean it wasn't an example of the "good idea" we're talking about above.
Let's use the example that you invent a technique for 100% efficient solar panels. 5 years from now when every tom, dick and harry company has ripped off you idea and is selling it, there will be tons of people saying "but those things are so common, you can't patent that" exactly as you are with scroll bars, etc.
Only since we're conditioned to the current environment where patents play a role. If I know very well that anyone could copy the idea readily, then perhaps it wasn't ever worth billions to me. But maybe it is a little hard to copy, or at least takes some time to implement well. Then I have a first-mover advantage that's worth something. And of course the really tough-to-copy items can possibly net me those billions.
I think removing patents from the equation would result in everything settling to a new norm. Maybe that results in some ideas/investments not being pursued because they are then considered too risky. But you've also just removed a huge tax across the entire R&D process--for everyone. Perhaps that offsets the abandoned inventions.
It probably won't happen in my lifetime to that degree, but I think we'd be better off the further we move in that direction.
I don't disagree. But the only way we, and Apple, and anyone else can operate right now, is under the current system. If you're not willing to work within the current system, you're not going to do well.
Of course, that's not to say we all shouldn't be investing energy into a new system, but you have to use what you've got when you've got it.
Apple first improved on the Xerox Star scroll bar with the Macintosh (the Star's scroll bar didn't have a position knob). With iPhone OS, Apple improved on the scroll bar by removing the buttons, and by implementing 'rubber banding' and auto hide.
Every elegant solution seems obvious after it has been thought up.
- Steve Jobs Jan 2007
My Mac 128K has a frowny face most of the time these days and not because of geriatric ailments.
Firstly, Apple didn't invent IP ownership, pioneer it or is the leader of it by any stretch. That award most likely goes to IBM.
Secondly, it is a myth that Microsoft's 'investment' in Apple is what it kept it alive. That money was in effect a settlement with Apple to drop the UI lawsuits. What kept Apple alive was the iMac.
Not to mention that there are plenty of tech giants out there who have not been whalin' on every competitor that moves with their tech patents.
Some companies seem to be staying true to the "defensive only" patent policy, Apple is one of the few that are weaponizing theirs to large degree.
If Apple ever ends up in a situation where iOS is the only mobile smartphone OS left, USDOJ antitrust will probably obliterate them. No more facebook integration, no more app store, no more curtailing customer choice, and all of the other shenanigans Apple does under the curtain of "freedom of choice".
Microsoft's pledge to continue making Office and IE for Mac was way more significant, as Apple's share price had been going rapidly at the time. Microsoft showing faith in the platform put a temporary hold on that.
That gave Jobs the time he needed for rigorous reorganization. Gil Amelio had already fired thousands of employees. However, Jobs replaced the entire board of directors, most of the VPs and other high up execs. He discontinued most products, including the Newton MessagePad and eMate. He terminated the deals his predecessors made with Mac clone makers. And then he worked hard with the very best of the best within the company to create one or two new products a year, slowly building a strong lineup of profitable products.
It's weird that people keep refuting the importance of Microsoft's investment when the actual Apple people involved herald it as critical.
Originally these patent portfolios were considered defensive like nuclear stockpiles. Everyone assumed that mutually assured destruction would prevent the war from starting.
I'm not sure who is responsible for the current state but I do remember what every phone I ever saw looked like the month before the iPhone was released.
Long story short: NO.
The scope of protection of patents is supposed to be described and defined very precisely. And unless one fully understands that scope of protection it is meaningless to say how important or crucial any particular patent is. In my experience, most journalists and bloggers do not show such understanding (with the exception of a couple of patent attorney bloggers).
I only gave this one a cursory look, but it does not seem to be that big of a deal. It seems like it would not be too difficult to engineer around it.
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/07/apple-wi...
These are the ones I'm randomly speculating that look most likely to be seen in future court cases:
8,225,121 Forced idle of a data processing system
8,225,079 Accelerating system boot using a set of control data recorded by operating system during a first OS boot
8,225,061 Method and apparatus for protected content data processing
You can file prior art for applications now, too: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120717/00232219721/
Please someone explain
Great reporting...
... that's what I thought.
However their point is, it seems, that once Apple tries to leverage this it will be forced into re-examinations. Apple has forfeited a number of patents when they've used them, a re-examination occurs, and most or all of the claims are tossed. This will likely be another of the same.
In some ways I think Apple is a bit naive in this: Microsoft tries its hardest not to actually go to the courts, and they'd rather extort with blanket patent threats, thereby keeping the actual stockpile somewhat safe. Apple just keeps blowing their patent load, losing a bunch in the process.
> There's enough prior art to demolish this easily. It won't even remotely hold up under legal scrutiny if it's ever used by Apple in a lawsuit. I think this is a complete non-issue.
It's just a summary dismissal, with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. My comment was tongue-in-cheek.
Provide an example of disappearing scrollbars on a touchscreen device prior to the iPhone.
Older machines mainly, I haven't seen any recently.