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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

I think this is actually bad news. Since the guy has a patent to his name, that means he understood what patents are. (EG: protection for unique inventions, not monopolies on features or ideas.)

If the jury had been completely non-technical, and subjected to the nonsense propaganda you see so much these days (that patents are "trivial" and that they cover ideas) and still found in Apple's favor, then this would bolster the trust one can have in the court system.

Further, it is kinda funny that the foreman of the jury has more technical knowledge than many of the posters on "Hacker News", who seem to have no patents and little understanding of what patents are.

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Hi, I'm a poster on Hacker News and I can read.

Here is the core claim from the '915 patent:

  A machine implemented method for scrolling on a touch-sensitive display of a device
  comprising:

  1. receiving a user input, the user input is one or more input points applied to
  the touch-sensitive display that is integrated with the device;

  2. creating an event object in response to the user input;

  3. determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by
  distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display
  that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to
  the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation;

  4. issuing at least one scroll or gesture call based on invoking the scroll or
  gesture operation;

  5. responding to at least one scroll call, if issued, by scrolling a window having
  a view associated with the event object based on an amount of a scroll with the
  scroll stopped at a predetermined position in relation to the user input; and

  6. responding to at least one gesture call, if issued, by scaling the view
  associated with the event object based on receiving the two or more input points in
  the form of the user input.

Here is text from the paper (http://www.sonycsl.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/chi02.pdf) that accompanied this 2002 video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waSXkJBKT1s#t=2m20s) of this exact same behavior:

  Figure 12 shows a map browsing system. The user scrolls the map by sliding a ﬁnger
  along the sensor surface. If the user touches the surface with two or more ﬁngers,
  by changing the distance from the ﬁngers to the surface, he/she can control the map
  scale. Simultaneous control of scrolling and zooming is intuitive, because the user
  feels as if his or her ﬁngers are ﬁxed to the map’s surface.

It is true that I don't understand patents very well. But, those are the same thing.

Since you seem to understand the patent system well enough to drop generalizations about the HN population, would you please explain how this can be and also why it should be.

IANAL either, but I would certainly not presume that your example describes the same thing from an IP standpoint.

For example, you could start with the first sentence in Apple's claim: it applies to a "touch-sensitive display." What you cited incorporates a touch-sensitive sensor without a display that responds similarly. It's not unreasonable to say that a projector screen is not the same as a display.

I don't buy that. A projector is a display, right? Otherwise this sentence would be possible: "I showed my powerpoint the the executive board without using a display".

Either way it doesn't seem relevant since it is capacitive and display-covering transparent capacitive panels have been in existence since at least 1983. (Bob Boie, Bell Labs)

If it was relevant, shouldn't Samsung be in the clear for their AMOLED displays since the patent only mentions LCDs? (elsewhere in the doc)

You realize you are making the OP's point?

He alluded to HN posters who make broad IP statements without the experience or training to back them up. I'm not arguing the other side -- I was just trying to point out that the issue may be more complex than you assume. Take of that what you want.

I haven't made any IP statements, broad or otherwise.

I agree that the issue is surely complex. It does seem fair to assume that I can use logic and literacy to at least isolate the items I don't understand. If you look a few comments down, we seem to have reached that point.

Wow, and downvoted too?

Sigh, I quit. I'm done posting to HN. The graybeards are right, it's just not the same. Snark and dogma get upvoted, and there's no point trying to fight it.

This isn't meant as a reply so much as a final comment so that anyone who stumbles upon my profile knows why I never post.

Edit: Hate to edit my last post but I replied to the wrong comment and meant to post it here.

This Apple expert purports to rebut the SmartSkin as prior art: it notes the "touch-sensitive display" thing plus claims that SmartSkin might not use an "event object" or "scroll or gesture call" to achieve the effect. Make of thy what you will...

http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califor...

Awesome find. It's a shame that several of the relevant pages are not included in the document. I assume for trade secret reasons? Either way, the ONLY two Apple refutations are:

1. The display is not integrated in the device

2. The video does not conclusively prove the manner in which the software was programmed. i.e. We don't know from the video if it is event based.

If this is acceptable refutation of prior art, it seems like there would be a lot of money to be made by exploiting this. Attend every CS conference and patent everything displayed using a particular programming model and display type.

I suspect, however, this would not normally be considered acceptable or the patent world would be more messed up than it already is.

The guy's patent is for a device that simply saves streaming media to a hard-drive and plays it back. Basically a PVR/set-top or video iPod. Is this non-obvious? If anything, this indicates to me someone who's mentality is pro aggressive IP ownership and enforcement. Like having someone who works for the RIAA/MPAA as a juror in a BitTorrent downloading case.

I wonder how the case would have went if it the jury had been assembled from 9 people who have been working on touch interfaces for the last 20 years.

You seem to imply you've read the patent. Could you find the specific claims and then show us some prior art for them?

Many things become "obvious" after they have entered commercial production, but are not obvious at the time they are invented. The car is obvious now, for instance.

Your comment about the jury assumes there were touch interfaces 20 years ago (of a type relevant to this case.) Apple started in the 1990s, but even Jeff Han is using a completely different method.

This seems to imply that you're confusing patents for a "right to sell a feature". On this site I've seen many claims that Apple's patents are covered by "prior art" but the "art" cited is generally nonsensical (eg: 2001: a space odessy having square tablets) and indicate that people think patents cover ideas or features, rather than inventions used to bring them to life.

Just because the TiVo exists, does not mean that I can't, today, invent a novel method of solving similar problems to the TiVo that is legitimately patentable.

TiVo's existence doesn't make patentable inventions in the same space impossible.

The rotary engine was patentable even though other internal combustion engines were already on the market.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

Perused the patent. As far as I can tell, this guy is a patent troll, plain and simple.

The patent basically describes every DVR that geeks were building 10 years before it was filed. True, it's fancied up in exactly the sort of language that would make it sound novel to a clerk, but I can't find any particular provisions that aren't normal software/hardware operation.

I have renewed hope that this could force an end result where the whole software patent system is torn apart.

> Many things become "obvious" after they have entered commercial production, but are not obvious at the time they are invented.

I totally disagree. Most things are obvious to many practitioners in a field at the time they were invented and if they weren't invented by one person would be invented by another within a very short time period. This is a natural consequence of the progression of technology and "standing on the shoulders of giants". History is absolutely littered with simultanous invention of ideas by multiple people simply as a consequence of the state of knowledge when they were actively working, with things like the calculus being obvious examples.

Of course, there are VERY rarely inventions where the leap made was well further than average, but those are very rare and certainly not the realm of patents like "bounce scrolling" which is obvious once you have a highly responsive touchscreen.

> The car is obvious now, for instance.

Who "invented" the car? Cugnot? Anderson? Benz? Daimler? Maybach? Marcus? Selden? Duryea?

Basically all of the above and around the same time (at least relative to the day when the Internet didn't broadcast news instantly around the globe), because the invention of various motors small enough to be mobile made a powered transportation vehicle an obvious goal. That doesn't mean there wasn't technical invention in everyone's different methods, but "the car" was totally obvious, just like "bounce scrolling" is, except "bounce scrolling" is a worse thing to allow to be patented because there are a very limited number of mathematical ways in which you would want to model that and so now you're basically patenting a very obvious idea plus a tiny bit of math (which shouldn't be allowed).

From the patent number link:

""" Method and apparatus for recording and storing video information

April 1, 2008

A personal video recording/storage apparatus for downloading streaming video and data contents from a number of sources and storing the video files to an internal storage device, such as a disk drive. ... """

Would a video cassette recorder (VCR) fit the bill for prior art? The source in this case would be a television signal and the storage device a VHS tape. I believe the VCR predates April 1, 2008.

You need to look at the Claims to figure out what the patent covers. The title and abstract have no legal force.

And since the claims include such things as the compression algorithm being user-selectable, it's trivially obvious that a VCR is not covered.

But VCRs did allow one to select SP, EP, and SLP modes, arguably a user selectable 'analog compression' setting to trade off quality for storage space.

It's the idea that adding a drop down menu to select installed compression codecs constitutes the ability to differentiate something enough to make it patentable that really irritates people.

Almost any modern operating system sports abstract interfaces or services which have a number of pluggable providers: compression codecs, cryptography algorithms, database drivers, input and output drivers. The idea that anytime there's more than one choice, if you simply add a user selectable feature as a claim, you can then obtain a new patent, is a very annoying feature of software patents.

If every software patent currently not-expired on record was maximally enforced, the courts would meltdown, and everyone would go bankrupt from legal fees. The only way the industry has been able to avoid gridlock and continue innovation is by essentially ignoring 99.99% of all software patents. The fact that no one pays attention to them, until one is losing in the marketplace or attempting to blockade competitors indicates that the system is broken.

I'm not arguing for patents, merely attempting to explain to the OP how to evaluate what they cover. You're ranting to the choir.

And EP, SP, SLP aren't compression algorithms in the sense that any court would recognize. Let's not engage in sloppy thinking merely because we dislike software patents. There are plenty of rigorous reasons to oppose them.

A codec is only mentioned in claim 2, having more than one codec in claim 3 and letting the user choose in claim 4.

I'm no patent expert, but doesn't that mean he's claiming things without codecs (e.g. the VCR) too? The first claim is generally the broadest and people seem to just laugh it off that these are often so ridiculously broad. But as far as I'm aware these are legally binding until someone overturns them with a presumption of legitimacy due to the USPTO seal of approval.

> On this site I've seen many claims that Apple's patents are covered by "prior art" but the "art" cited is generally nonsensical (eg: 2001: a space odessy having square tablets)

I'm curious, why is the Space Odyssey tablet "obviously nonsensical"?

See for instance the Waterbed patent denied because of Henlein's writings: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/geek-trivia-strange-wate...

I like Groklaw's comment (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2012082510525390)

" If it would take a lawyer three days to make sure he understood the terms in the form, how did the jury not need the time to do the same? There were 700 questions, remember, and one thing is plain, that the jury didn't take the time to avoid inconsistencies, one of which resulted in the jury casually throwing numbers around, like $2 million dollars for a nonfringement.

Come on. This is farce. "

The jury had 14 days of hearing evidence. It is quite possible that the case was so compelling that it didn't take them very long to decide the points.

I've yet to see any argument that the verdict is wrong, based on an understanding of the patents in question.

They found that the nexus s infringed the bounce back patent. But this is impossible as it use vanilla android which has never implemented this behaviour.

So it looks like kinda rushed for _some_ decisions.

There is what looks like bounce back at around 0:36 onwards in this video review:

http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/samsung-nexus-s-at/4505-...

It's some sort of app list screen though and happens between what looks like screens of icons, so I'm not sure if it counts. For lists it looks like an orange glow effect, possibly with some small bounce, but that may be an optical illusion.

This might be enough to confuse a jury? I haven't checked the patent to see if it actually infringes or not.

Are you saying that the apple patents are unique inventions? I ask for clarity because that is not a common position on hackernews.

It is common for android fans on hacker news to assert that the patents are invalid because the same features exist in android phones, but this is not only a temporal error, but implied a lack of understanding of what patents even are.

I've not seen any arguments on hacker news that the patents are invalid. Period. Full Stop. I've seen this assertion many times and the claim that it is "obvious" but it is clear to me that the people making the assertion have never read the patent and don't know the first thing about patents.

I find it difficult to believe that you've never seen an argument that the patents are invalid. You may not agree, but the argument has been made many times. The usual argument is that the patents are obvious. Bouncy scrolling, double tap to zoom, pinch to zoom and one fingered scrolling. Do you find these non-trivial and non-obvious? You mentioned that ideas are not patentable, but in practice that is exactly what is protected - the fact that a machine implementing them is technically what is patented makes little practical difference.

Jurors don't have to be ignorant of a subject to be objective. Further, it's up to the lawyers on both sides to dismiss a juror during selection if they think they'll be biased. They didn't, probably because both sides -- believing they were in the right -- thought that someone with knowledge of patents would ultimately see things their way.

Can you explain how patents don't grant a type of legal monopoly? This seems non-obvious to me, and poking around on Wikipedia has only served to reinforce my suspicion that they are.

They do grant a type of legal monopoly... but on an invention, not on a feature. So, in my example, Jeff Han demonstrated pinch to zoom using cameras photographing your hans, while Apple has a patent on an invention that lets a screen figure out where your fingers are. They both could be patented and have a legal monopoly on their inventions even though they are the "same thing".

If your objection is to there being a monopoly at all, I can understand that. But please then consider several things- for instance, if this system were abolished then companies like Apple would be obscuring their methods to prevent copying, and their platforms would be more locked down. I think if we lived in a world without patents, many of the anti-IP people would be advocating for a requirement that companies like Apple publish the nature of their inventions.

I don't have a categorical opposition to patents, so the monopoly aspect of them does not particularly concern me.

To what extent do these patents actually benefit the technical community though? As you seem to know, a technically inclined person that actually reads other peoples patents seems to be a rare animal.

I'm sure they are rare among startup founders, but not rare in the wider realm. But it is not the fault of the patent system that people don't read them.

I already mentioned one benefit that doesn't require reading the patents, and that is there is less incentive to obfuscate designs or lock down products.

Secondly, for situations where there is a major break thru, patents give companies caught flat footed a chance to come up to speed by reading the details of the invention so that they can then extend it.

I don't, for a second, doubt that many engineers in Google and Samsung have read these Apple patents, for instance. Of course the official policy is that they don't, and they will never admit it in court (they'll never let the people who did read them testify) but the level of industrial espionage that these companies engage in is such that it seems exceedingly unlikely they wouldn't read freely available publications designed to reveal these inventions.

But that is also the purpose of the patent system.

Where things are broken here is that Google feels they can get away with infringing because in the past court cases have been long time coming and relatively weak in their impact. So, google made the calculated decisions to simply violate the patents.

Would you say that you suspect Google/Samsung employees read Apple patents to figure out what Apple is planning on doing, or if they read Apple patents to figure out how Apple has done things?

I am an engineer at Google. No, we don't read through patents to figure out how to do something. We are not idiots. If I wanted to implement a pinch/zoom system, I would just do it. It's not rocket science. In fact, I believe I did do it, before I worked at Google. I was writing code for an iPhone app on a version of IOS that did not have the gesture recognizers available in the public API. It's not that hard to recognize two points moving away from each other.

> To what extent do these patents actually benefit the technical community though? As you seem to know, a technically inclined person that actually reads other peoples patents seems to be a rare animal.

I like to get paid for my technical work. Patents have some effect in that area.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean that patents benefit the technical community because they grant legal monopolies and allow companies sell licensing?

Do you really think that selling licensing is the only financial benefit to a legal monopoly?

In all of the industries I'm familiar with, I just don't see it happening that someone says "Hey, I wonder how they did that. I'll go check out their patent filing!" Certainly not in software. And the concept of willful infringement gives even less incentive to do so.

I think if we lived in a world without patents, many of the anti-IP people would be advocating for a requirement that companies like Apple publish the nature of their inventions.

It need not be one or the other. In the specific patents under discussion, I hardly think competitors could not figure out how to implement multi-finger touching, or pinch-to-zoom. An idea that is easy to re-implement (or has a means of implementation obvious to industry workers) once made public simply shouldn't be protected by patent. By and large, companies can work around patented implementations, but not when they are so broad as to essentially encompass the whole idea (e.g. unified search, or multi-touch sensing). In the first place, patents are granted for specific implementations, not ideas.

It's clear to me that the standards and enforcement of the obviousness principle need to be raised.

if this system were abolished then companies like Apple would be obscuring their methods to prevent copying, and their platforms would be more locked down.

Excuse me?

How could Apple possibly lock their platform down even more?

I'm having trouble with this concept because Apple already seems locked down to me. Would you provide some plausible and probable examples of how you think Apple would be more locked down in a world without patents?

Do you honestly believe that people couldn't figure out how to implement bounce-back without reading a patent?

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