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!
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.
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.
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.