Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?
litigationandtrial.com
litigationandtrial.com
One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past technologies to produce newer, better ones.
Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process. None of these parties want touchscreen smartphones to become cheap commodities available to everybody - there's a lot less money to be made this way. Android is Google's attempt to commoditize the smartphone and is probably responsible for erasing tens of billions from the market caps of other companies, the flipside of which is that today tens of millions of people all over the world have access to technology that would otherwise not have.
This is why I think Android is ultimately a force for good and I hope it's simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle and that this verdict won't have a lasting impact.
Unfortunately, that process has been turned on its head, so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized or simply don't work patent protection. The iPhone's design is undeniably visually appealing and user-friendly, but it is by no means an "invention." It is a form of user interface, something that has already been held to not be patentable, and it is a form of branding, something that is protected, but through trademark law, not patent law.
I find this situation disturbing for the same reason I find it disturbing that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research and the belt. Consumer electronics companies should not be investing the bulk of their resources playing legal games with one another over non-disruptive "inventions" like the idea to use asynchronous processing to make sure video and audio lines up. They should be using their resources making phones that are better and more alluring than one another.
Too often this is obscured, and/or all patents are lumped together as being generally awful. I personally do not ascribe to the notion that all patents should be outright abolished.
Design patents, however, should simply not exist. Rounded corners, rectangles and UI elements in rows of 4 are simply not inventions.
Software, being a fundamentally creative enterprise, should be included. It doesn't fit into the patent system for the same reason that granting a monopoly on a plot twist makes no sense.
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this seem a bit strange?
You are confusing utility patents and design patents. They are very different things, and design patents are intended for "designs" and the designs of devices. This is not a perversion, this is just you not understanding what patents are!
Secondly you guys constantly claim that these things are not novel, yet you are never able to provide good prior art. Yes, here, 11 years later, this stuff is commoditized. Mostly because android ripped off the work Apple demoed in January 2007 and brought it to market.
That doesn't mean in January 2007 it wasn't novel. I have constantly seen you guys claim that other people did this before, but I've never seen a single instance of genuine prior art. You guys cite movies (not understanding what prior art is, or what patents are) and you cite demos of completely different technologies (like microsoft's surface which uses cameras.)
So, you're projecting a completely false characterization of the situation and then saying its "bad" or has been perverted.
This feels like political propaganda to me. I notice that the anti-Patent movement started with google's lawyers letter and in defense of android which is a blatent ripoff of Apple technology.
So, lets see google donate Pagerank to the public domain, eh? They only have 6 years or so left on it anyway.... why haven't they?
And don't give me that crap about "it's not about the idea, it's about the implementation". Apple's pinch to zoom patent, for example, covers implementations on ANY kind of touch surface. It claims are vague like "That gesture adjusts an image in some way", covering not just zoom, scale, and rotation, but any transform of the image.
When someone makes such an absolute claim, that they've never seen any genuine prior art, even though tens of thousands of engineers in forums are pointing to research and devices that are at least arguably prior art and cast Apple's patents in a grey area, to have such an absolutist assertion indicates to me that that person is not interested in fairness, or truth, but on banging the drums of tribalism.
There are for sure, people in the Android camp that are rooting for Android in this case because they like Android devices. I'm not one of them. For me, the issue is about software programming freedom.
Whether it is SOPA/PIPA, or patents being used against open source, attacks on computing freedom in general are more important than Samsung, Android, or Apple. We should not assign away the future of software or networking by granting monopoly power to the largest corporations in the world.
Not when the whole edifice was started by Homebrew hackers to begin with.
The light bulb was invented over 120 years ago and they still hand out patents for light bulbs, imagine that.
Even in the worst case, they hint at the possibility of independent invention; imagine that.
Look at it this way, there were definitely people doing pinch-to-zoom that looks absolutely identical to the way Apple is doing it from the user's point of view. Jeff Han's demo is a perfect example of it. For years, many people have been doing demos like this, but they've been doing it on big bulky setups like projected-desks, or in Han's example, using total internal reflection.
Apple just made a different implementation, using the same interaction gestures, on a capacitive screen. From a software point of view, the implementations are rather trivial and don't differ much except via how you obtain the input (e.g. capacitive, FTIR, cameras, etc) The main difference is shrinking down the whole thing so it fits on a phone.
The reason why this was possible in 2007 had nothing to do with Apple's software and everything to do with the ability to manufacture a capacitive screen that has the right sensitivity, accuracy, cost, weight, and power to fit into a phone.
Apple deserves engineering props for this. But they do not get credit for inventing pinch-to-zoom nor the capacitive screen. Both of these inventions came prior.
If Apple invents an entirely new kind of touch screen and an entirely new way of manufacturing it, you could argue they deserve a patent.
But taking what existed before, pinch-to-zoom on projection displays, and implementing it on a different screen does not deserve patent protection, anymore than taking an existing business method (e.g. 'selling flower bouquets by phone', adding the text 'via web site' or 'via mobile app') and slightly tweaking the medium in which the business is done to obtain another monopoly.
Should 'internet shopping cart' be allowed a patent when real world shopping carts already existed? It's crazy absurd.
If Apple's patent had even been more specific like "pinch to zoom, but on this particular kind of screen" I'd even have more sympathy for the argument, because at least other people could do the same thing Apple did: copy an existing idea and apply it to a new circumstance. Samsung and others could innovate by creating new types of displays, maybe using microscopic cameras to track your hands like minority report or something.
But granting a patent to Apple for pinch to zoom on any kind of screen? Sorry, it goes too far.
The simple workaround to apple's patent: allow two-finger drag. One or Two fingers close together (or moving in parallelt) is a drag. Two or more fingers far apart is a zoom. As long as there's no line of code that goes "if one finger down then it's a drag else if two fingers down it's a zoom" then the code doesn't infringe the apple patent. Easy peasy.
Pagerank is a great example of something that's not supposed to be patentable. It's an algorithm. The claims are "computer implemented method of (description of some algorithm)" and "computer-readable medium that stores instructions (that implement some algorithm)". Absurd. I'd be in favor of someone trying to invalidate that patent. Google's algorithm incorporates so many more signals now than what is identified in the pagerank patent (#6285999). Putting that patent into the public domain wouldn't have any direct impact on Google's market share.
I'd like to know how duckduckgo or any other smaller search engine avoids getting sued. Is it possible to be in the search engine space and avoid infringing on any of the [invalid but granted anyway] patents in that space? The pagerank patent has a massive list of newer, mostly search related, patents in its "referenced by" list (which takes up the vast majority of the page). [1]
I think a lot of people most infuriated by Apple's patent suit against Samsung also think the Pagerank patent is not valid. If you're looking for bias, good luck with your search. I'm against all horrible patents even if they're owned by patent non-aggressors, and even if they're owned by companies I depend on for technology.
China is one of those places where you can't patent design, and I suppose it kind of works in a strange free-market-way. The winners are those who can copy the fastest, and have enough money to bribe politicians to shutdown the competition.
What people object to is Apple asserting dubious patents with broad claims to block competition. Mating a general purpose computer and an algorithm to produce a "new" "machine" is a stupid loophole. Patents are supposed to be an exchange where an inventor gets a temporary monopoly while the public gets instructions for implementing a new and non-obvious "process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter". You can't seriously argue that the world needed the bounce-back, data detector, or universal search patents to figure out how to accomplish those things. Patents shouldn't cover things that are, at best, features!
You might respond by pointing to Windows Phone as an example of a mobile OS that's different and NOT getting litigated over, but that's because Apple and Microsoft have cross-licensing agreements that have been in place since the last time Apple tried to pull this look-and-feel bullshit and lost.
Since you insist on using loaded language like "Android ripped off ... Apple", what evidence do you have to back that up? Also, what makes you say that the "anti-patent movement started with [Google]"? You're aware that people have had concerns about software patents long before this, right? Take Amazon's one-click patent as an example of something that stirred up a similar amount of nerd rage. It's not propaganda, just other people arriving at a pretty reasonable conclusion and stating it.
Yeah. They do. Patented inventions become a commodity in 14-20 years, depending on the kind of patent.
"Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process."
Call me crazy, but I think we're seeing Apple using the process to defend their inventions, which is exactly what the system was set up to do.
Patents aren't intended to ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest consumer gadgets; they're intended to provide inventors with incentives to produce non-trivial inventions, by granting them temporary monopolies on their ideas. To argue that Apple (and Microsoft, et al.) are wrong because they're artificially inflating prices on their patented products is to miss the entire point of the debate.
More broadly, I often see people decrying that the poor have access to LCD TVs, ACs or decent smartphones, with the point being that they should stop being so demanding. But this is exactly what technological progress looks like - innovations which are expensive and exclusive are useful demos, but they don't become world-changers until they become widespread.
So yes, the patent system should ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest gadgets, and any other technology. Otherwise, it is simply stifling innnovation.
The patent system does not grant patents "willy nilly". Whether you agree with the outcome or not, there is a (rather lengthy) review process, and it was followed. And if the verdict is consistent with the patent laws, then your objection to the case is irrelevant -- your proper complaint is with the system, not the actor.
"I find it very hard to believe that had Apple not been granted these patents, or if the patents had a much more appropriate 12-18month validity period, they would not have shipped the iPhone and forgone the massive revenue and profit stream."
Again, you have complaints about the patent system, and I empathize. I don't like many aspects of the system, either. But I also don't begrudge Apple for acting rationally within the rules established by the system.
In this case, in particular, I believe that the patent system is being used in a legitimate way, to protect a company that has made some true marketplace innovations. It's decidedly sub-optimal that Apple has to resort to patents on rubber-band scrolling to protect something as core to their business model as "look and feel", but that's the system that we have. I don't think it's fair to make Apple a villain (and Samsung a hero) just because the laws are flawed.
Said another way: don't hate the player, hate the game.
It's just like the Cold war: nuclear weapons were a reality, so everyone got lots of it and mutual assured destruction ensured nothing too bad could happen.
Now Apple decided to play an all-in against its main competitor to establish monopoly by using its abusive patent against someone they knew could counter-sue. And now, instead of discouraging that kind of practice and realizing the perversion of the patent system, the jury decided to encourage them.
In other words: this player chose to play a disgusting game. I think we can hate both the player and the game.
The verdict will lead to more innovation and R&D from Samsung, instead of just copying from Apple.
What exactly are they defending their "inventions" from? Other companies making competing products seems to be the biggest thing.
Patents aren't intended to ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest consumer gadgets; they're intended to provide inventors with incentives to produce non-trivial inventions, by granting them temporary monopolies on their ideas.
Apple is an extremely successful business. What other incentives are necessary for companies like Apple to want to innovate?
If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.
The iPhone is outstanding design. And that is the extent of their work: with enough computing power, they made the first smartphone that didn't suck. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
We need to focus on patent abuse, and Apple most certainly is abusing the recent flaws in the patent system, by patenting things which do not deserve patent protection (because patent protection for these things does not benefit society at large, discourages innovation, and is contra to the original intent of the patent system). The problem, fundamentally, is the system, not Apple, but because they are benefiting from its flaws, it's very likely they will defend them.
Unfortunately this will be quite hard, because Apple (along with other abusers) is also extremely, extremely, rich, and the rich tend to get their way...
> On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display,” the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2
For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.
Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non-novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.
Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:
US5844547 May 9, 1995 Dec 1, 1998 Fujitsu Limited Apparatus for manipulating an object displayed on a display device by using a touch screen
US6567102 Nov 25, 2001 May 20, 2003 Compal Electronics Inc. Touch screen using pressure to control the zoom ratio
US20050168488 Jan 31, 2005 Combination tool that zooms in, zooms out, pans, rotates, draws, or manipulates during a drag
All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding into some arguably-new form, and, viola, they had a patent for something everybody was doing.
I doubt you really contend that, in late 2007, Apple invented scrolling and zooming with your fingers, or that you contend that Apple's implementation was substantially different (and both novel and useful) from those prior forms. If you don't contend either of those, then why, exactly, should Apple have a patent over their implementation, which was at best modestly different from prior implementations?
I am contending that you can't patent a user interface you see in a sci-fi movie, which is what Apple did here. What they patented is no different from patenting the way the command module looks on the Enterprise. Do you think that Apple should be able to patent, say, the use of oval icons?
Disclaimer: I'm completely against patenting UI elements. I'm of the opinion that once they come into existence they're language and patenting language is anti-social behavior.
You disputed said references by claiming that other products copied Apple.
I pointed out that just because it was Apple who made these features popular, leading to other products copying them, doesn't mean that the features could not have been independently invented prior to Apple. I refer you to the original comment for the prior-art examples.
Since the patent itself cites prior art, obviously the patent isn't patenting the same thing as the prior art.
>All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding .... was at best modestly different from prior implementations
You have provided no evidence or reason to believe this. In fact, I've seen this claim hundreds of times, and never seen anyone even attempt to provide a defense for this assertion.
Yet the evidence at hand shows the opposite- the patent was reviewed for a significant period of time by the patent office. Further, this isn't Apple's rodeo. After the Microsoft loss, Apple has a great deal of incentive to make sure that their patents are solid.
So despite evidence to the contrary, you just repeatedly assert this position because it helps your ideological position. But we need more than mere assertion.
In fact, your assertion isn't really consistent with history. To make this obvious lets change the context. Imagine it is motorola being sued by Bell:
Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones".
The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface means that apple didn't invent nothing for the iPhone.
You're relying on the ubiquity of copies of Apples devices to make an emotional appeal claiming these things were obvious.... yet this is post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Before 2007, Android was working on a blackberry ripoff, not a touch UI.
And your argument fundamentally misrepresents what patents are.
I've seen you mention this a couple of times now. I know you mean it to be ridiculous, but it's actually a true statement: once you have a telephone, and a radio, then the concept of a cellphone in itself is an obvious step. There are scads of patentable details in the implementation, but nothing to say that the concept of a cellphone itself should be protected. Perhaps you should find an alternative example?
> The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface
None of the prior art listed above claims anything to do with cameras.
So the question is this: Do you think that for the next 20 years Apple should be the only company with large rectangular multi-touch phones with minimal buttons, grid based icons, and pinch-to-zoom?
It should be easy for you, if you are correct, to simply state what is new and novel and patentworthy that Apple did, that is not covered by the prior art mentioned.
The primary improvement for most PCs has always been the work of Microsoft or Intel, not Dell, HP, et al. Yet Apple has worked to actually improve the design and technology of the PC itself.
The truth is, genuine innovation is exceedingly rare. Nobody was working to revolutionize the cellphone industry except Apple. Apple was the only one who cared, and that's why they caught everyone flat footed.
Anyway, patents don't require that nobody else be working on the same thing you are, quite the opposite: patents are designed to get everyone working on this new invention, by publishing it.
Two people who happen to come up with the same method at the same time is so rare I cannot think of a single example... and if they did, there would still likely be differences that result in both getting patents (even if one of them gets the patent on part of the solution because he files first.)
If samsung had been doing the fundamental research that would allow them to release an iPhone type device in 2008, Apple being to the patent office first would not have been a problem for them--- because the phone they produce in 2008 would have been so different because they would have had 5-7 years of working in isolation with the priorities of a korean company and sensibility of korean culture.
They would have produced very different solutions to these same problems if they had been working on them.
Instead Samsung was not working on a touch UI, not even trying to do novel work, and simply decided to copy apple thinking the litigation risk was worth it.
They seem extremely poorly designed for this goal.
Edit: Just as an example. Our company had one of the lawyers come in and talk about patents in our office for a couple hours one day. They wanted to encourage us to file them for any work we might be doing. One of the first things he told us was to not ever search through existing patents for any reason whatsoever.
The vast majority of times, there is nothing in the patent that can't be learned from just interacting with the patented object.
But, let me make a few others:
1. It's not apple that put a PC on every desk, but microsoft. It's not apple that put a smartphone in every pocket, but google.
2. If genuine innovation is exceedingly rare, why is there almost one patent granted per US citizen per year?
3. Nobody working in software looks at patents. The whole idea that software patents are published to spread ideas is absolutely laughable to a programmer.
4. Two people arriving at the same idea independently and then arguing over who stole whose idea is a constant throughout history. Many inventions are misattributed. See newton v leibniz, edison v tesla, bell v gray, and many incidents along the same vein.
5. Samsung has always spent more than apple on R&D. That's why the iphone is filled with samsung hardware. Much of what the iphone is wouldn't have been possible without businesses like samsung ensuring the hardware existed in the first place.
But yeah, samsung did rip off the icons and bezel, and for that you're right to blame them. I don't consider that issue related though to apple's heavy-handed claim on multitouch utility patents. Apple isn't just going after samsung, they're going after everyone. They started with samsung to get a precedent.
Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that.
Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal.
In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly.
Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with:
"Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept."
[1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html [2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Cl...
Star Trek has the warp drive. So, if someone invents the technology to give us a warp drive, you think that it isn't novel because we've seen it on TV going back to the 1960s!
See, not all patents are of the exact same kind, and there's a lot of things to patent about any thing. That's the problem... nowadays things that shouldn't be patented, like designs and user interfaces (even algorithms), are.
Therefore, they effectively have a patent on the feature pinch-to-zoom on smartphones.
It is also obvious. Had I been working on the iPhone and decided I wanted to implement the pinch-to-zoom feature from minority report, I would have done it exactly as described in Apple's patent--there is no other logical way to do it--using a touchscreen.
I can't use a different underlying algorithm, or even a different kind of touchscreen. If I implement pinch-to-zoom on a touchscreen I am violating their patent.
The later is what has plenty of prior art and the former is exceedingly trivial and really should not be patentable.
Quoting from this link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl...
> "He had experience. He owned patents himself...so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art." "In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."
I doubt that in the appeal Apple will be so lucky.
Unfortunately, I don't have a good go-to source explaining what computer science is, but I assure you that computer science does not involve writing science fiction novels.
It is. Patents can't be issued for something available to the public; this is called "public disclosure" and has bitten lots of researchers who publish before applying for their patent.
That's how it's supposed to work, which is a large part of why people are up in arms about the broken patent system. A patent on an idea and a patent on any possible implementation of that idea are effectively the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807
> It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.
That supposed specificity is nothing but a way of describing an aspect of the general idea in terms of generic implementation details. Any implementation will have some part that can be construed as similar ("they're just generating the 'area' on demand", etc)
Isn't selling iPhones enough of an incentive?
So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?
If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?
I've just read claim 19 about 5 times. I also studied Figure 5, which seems to lay out the process in a way that's a little easier to understand.
I have absolutely no idea how what is described in claim 19 is not the "idea" of inertial/bounce-back scrolling.
As far as I can understand, the layperson's explanation of claim 19 goes something like this: drag some content on a touchscreen at the speed that the dragging finger is moving, once you hit the end of the scrollable range, start slowing down the speed at which the item moves, and show a different background to make it clear you've reached the end of the list, once the finger releases move the list back into place.
I'm trying sentence by sentence to translate the words in the patent claim to english that I can understand. And it sounds to me like this is the general idea of this method of scrolling. There are no specifics, no specific easing algorithms, no specific method of tracking the finger's movement, no method of actually implementing this at all.
This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. Star Trek is not prior art.
Practical is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.
Answer: not hard at all. In fact, it has been trivial for years. The hard part is implementing it in a cost-effective, reliable manner — something that Apple did with industry-leading industrial design/manufacturing efforts, not through patented technologies. But that's not what this case was about.
If this case involved Samsung bribing Apple employees to reveal the secrets at the Foxconn plants in China, then I would completely agree with you that that is wrong and that Samsung has broken the law by stealing a competitive technology. But that's not what's happening here; ironically, Apple is deriving part of its competitive advantage from using Samsung!
What's happening here is that Apple is suing Samsung over silly, trivial, and peripheral issues that played a modest (if any) role in the iPhone's success, silly, trivial, and peripheral matters that, unfortunately, have been granted the strongest property right in American law, which is a monopoly of their direct or indirect use by anybody.
So surely there were dozens of devices with these features (I assume you mean inertial scrolling) prior to the patents being granted?
This stuff is not trivial: Only a handful of multitouch devices even existed prior to the iPhone, and exploiting that technology, along with improvements in mobile hardware generally, was hard, or smartphones prior to 2007 wouldn't have sucked so very badly.
Read the file wrapper and the notice of allowability. Here is Apple's great triumph in claiming an invention as compared to prior art:
"The following is an examiner's statement of reasons for allowance: In regards to the independent claims 1, 19 and 20, the prior art found does not teach in response to an edge of the electronic document being reached while translating the electronic document in the first direction while the object is still detected on or near the touch screen display: displaying an area beyond the edge of the document, and displaying a third portion of the electronic document, wherein the third portion is smaller than the first portion; and in response to detecting that the object is no longer detected on or near the touch screen display, translating the electronic document in a second direction until the area beyond the edge of the electronic document is no longer displayed to display a fourth portion of the electronic document, wherein the fourth portion is different from the first portion; in combination with all of the other claim limitations."
Do you consider that extremely narrow tweak to a user interface a novel and useful invention worthy of patent protection?
But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a design patent. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.
You can read a time machine patent here: http://www.google.com/patents?id=hNHIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
If you ever happen to develop this machine, this person who just imagined it can ban you from selling. So tell me, who do you think worked harder on this invention? And why would this paper (the patent) be worth more than the real invention?
That's certainly the supposed goal, but it clearly does not match reality. What actually happens is a company implements a long thought-of idea using modern technology, and then writes a trolling-ready patent which claims the entire idea by way of obvious and extraneous details.
This is a major reason why nobody bothers to read the patent claims when discussing bad patents - they're basically the synopsis of the patent combined over and over with straightforward technical 'chum' to make them seem specific and complex.
Was it a good idea? Yes. Should it be protected by a patent? No. I'm sorry, but no (and I say this as a UX designer).
Patents exist to incentivize effort. I would really like to hear someone argue that, without UI patent protection, Apple would have never bothered to implement rubberbanding scrolling. Even typing it sounds ridiculous.
"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"
Now, I don't know how patents works, but on my Galaxy Nexus, you can scroll with two fingers, so this part about determining whether its a scroll or "gesture" by the number of touch points seems to work differently to what is described in the patent.
Does that mean the implementation in the Galaxy Nexus is non-infringing? I mean, if patents are supposed to protect the implementation of an idea, and the implementation is actually different then surely its not infringing?
Now admittedly I only tested a Galaxy Nexus, which is stock Android, so maybe Samsung made their version in TouchWiz different. Or maybe the implementation changed in later versions of Android, I'm not sure...
What I don't understand about this 'bounce back' feature is that here in Australia we have software based poker machines (Vegas style slot machines to the yanks out there) and they have had this bounce feature for decades.
Edit: To help people visualise, what I mean is the reels of the poker machine spin in one direction and when they finally stop spinning they do a very short bounce back in the other direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.
Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.
Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.
So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.
This article is thus nonsense.
Special effects can be prior art, if they are sufficiently descriptive. Just like drawings, sketches, and textual descriptions can be prior art.