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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

...with a patent application granted after a year-long review by the patent office that apparently didn’t include watching this scene from 2002’s Minority Report, where Tom Cruise does all of those things and more with a spiffy 3D interface.

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.

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How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen?

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.

How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen? Answer: not hard at all.

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.

Look at the prior art cited by the patent: http://www.google.com/patents/US7469381

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?

If it's so narrow, why is it a problem for Samsung? You can't have it both ways. Either it's just an obvious, trivial idea, or it's a specific implementation that's a useful but not necessary extension of the art.

> Patents protect the implementation, not the idea

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.

The depiction of a holodeck would not stop someone from getting a utility patent for a holodeck.

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.

I'm fairly certain most of the posting's examples center around the utility patents under dispute.

In fact, Paramount has been awarded design patents for Star Trek phasers, uniforms, and starships: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek_design_patents

You don't need to develop neither have a pratical thing to have a patent over it on USA.

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?

If you ever really developed a time machine, you could go back in time and either pay off (with money made from placing bets on events you know the outcome of) or in some other way prevent the original filer from submitting his claim.

Unless the original filer happened to be your grandfather

It's an application, not a patent. Anyone can apply for a patent, but they're not always granted.

They shouldn't be able to patent the idea of a holodeck, which I thought was the main argument in this article. The mechanics of using force fields (or whatever) would still be the subject of the patents if they were novel.

But not nearly as silly as the patents themselves...

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