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Comment by mibbitier | Hacker News Reader

The issue is, you should never be granted obvious patents like "swipe to unlock".

Mobile phones / tablets are fairly trivial by now. Computer, touchscreen, software. It's not rocket science. Nothing there should really be patentable IMHO.

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Truth to be said, the things that are obvious now were not obvious at all in 2007.

That's exactly it.

Any of us could write a program to calculate E=MC2 in a minute. These anti-patent types think this means they're all Einsteins.

Your example is very apt. Isn't it great that you can't patent mathematics? Software and hardware should not be patentable like it currently is.

Sorry, but since I can remember, (20 years ago say), the idea of a touchscreen tablet/smartphone was obvious. It was absolutely inevitable, and it was boring waiting for the technology to appear to allow it to happen. Absolutely nothing on any smartphone, tablet, etc is innovative to the point where a patent should be granted.

The devil is always in the details. Since the first internal combustion engine, the car was an obvious development. But it turns out that there is more subtlety to making a car than simply swapping a horse for a motor on a carriage. Would you say that absolutely nothing in any car or truck is innovative to the point where a patent should be granted?

Tablets are an interesting case study because we've been down this road before (google for Windows XP Tablet Edition, 2001). Anything in a modern tablet that wasn't in XP Tablet, or the Apple Newton, you can say required innovation to do.

Personally, I think patents do far more harm than they do good. They reward complacency. They reward laziness. They stifle innovation.

Then I hope you never need to do anything more complex than copying something someone's already done, least of all invest your own money in risky research that may yield no results.

FWIW I'm listed as inventor on around 10 patents.

The only area I think patents do make some sense is for medicine, where the R&D costs are astronomically high. But most other fields, R&D isn't that big a cost.

The thing is that it just isn't that obvious. Not one cell before Apple's iPhone had swipe to unlock. Not one cell had touchscreen that works without stylus.

Same thing with tablets. Sure, Microsoft started making them long time ago but using styluses on the same GUI was not that practical. That's why they never entered mainstream market. iPhones and then iPads brought new GUI for whom you didn't have to use styluses and you didn't have tiny unclickable icons. Everything is made for touching from the ground up.

Sorry for going off topic.

  Not one cell had touchscreen that works without stylus.

Incorrect: LG Prada.

For me, pointing to one or two features of the iPhone as proof of it being innovative misses the target. I regard Apple products as innovative and successful principally because they are consistently usable, designed well, marketed well and technically innovative at the same time. Apple's competitors rarely hit all those targets in a given product.

(Likewise, sorry for off-topicness!)

Neonode N1 had swipe to unlock before iphone.

>> Mobile phones / tablets are fairly trivial by now.

"Trivial" would imply that bootstrapped companies would be turning them out by the millions. Maybe they are a little harder than trivial?

In any case, I think you mean "trivial" in the sense that an answer to a test question is always "trivial" when you're looking at the answer.

There's quite a ton of different android smartphones, which all look and function basically the same - same with tablets.

They're likely all made by the same few factories in China for a few dollars each.

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