Simple does not mean obvious. UX designers need to protect their work and creativity.
Nothing is ever truly innovative. Nearly everything, quite literally everything, is built on something else.
Apple, at its core, is actually the BEST IN THE WORLD at not innovating, but perfecting someone else's design. And that is my problem with this whole farce. Apple isn't an innovative company, at all. Apple is, however, excellent at seeing what others are doing and out doing them at their own game. They don't 'invent', they never have. They tweak, they massage and they simplify (some could argue that this is innovative, but I'm going to use the term like it is being used in court...is they are actually inventing a concept that didn't exist before).
Someone commented on that blog about the TED talk that did a demo on "the pinch": http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...
I guarantee you, if you invent a matter/energy transporter you will be able to patent it despite Star Trek having put it on screen almost 50 years ago.
Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different technical implementation of it right...
Your first statement is being contradicted by your second statement which is almost the exact definition of the word innovation.
If the execute well on that idea, they do get credit, in the form of business. If you come up with Korean tacos first, and they're good, you get lots of business. We don't have to start shutting down your competition and guaranteeing you're the only Korean taco stand in town in order for you to benefit from your work.
>> UX designers need to protect their work and creativity.
I don't know if you're in the U.S., but this is precisely the opposite of the rationale for intellectual property according to the US Constitution. It grants Congress power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
The goal is to promote progress; exclusive rights are a sacrifice, for a limited time only, made in order to benefit the public.
If the public begins to lose out because of these monopolies, the Constitution would not support their existence.
Invention and innovation cost a lot of money. The taco example won't work but if you invest a ton of money to develop something, you deserve a temporary monopoly on the innovation/invention so you could get a return on your investment.
If anyone would be allowed to copy you, the margins go way down and you'll never profit on the investment.
The goal is to promote progress; exclusive rights are a sacrifice, for a limited time only, made in order to benefit the public.
I don't see the conflict here. The public gets to enjoy your innovation/invention after a period of time which is designed to give you incentive to innovate/invent.
Without that temporary monopoly, no one would invest in major R&D.
Patents are in fact an exchange; something for something. Society gives you a temporary monopoly, that means society incurs a certain loss. However in exchange you reveal all your secrets about how you did it. On the balance of things both you and society are better off. This was one of the things that made guilds obsolete (which existed to protect trade secrets) and so gave us a much more open, fast paced, modern world.
Now here's the problem. There is nothing secret about pinch-to-zoom! It makes sense to patent novel innovations in how a specific implementation of pinch-to-zoom works. But patenting a gesture that is so obvious you don't even need a scrap of expertise in the field to see? Ridiculous.
This is why a lot of people are beginning to question just what society is getting in exchange for the types of patents being issued today.
You consider it obvious, the courts do not. Simple is not the same as obvious.
The problem with the secret guilds wasn't that they didn't create publicly available products. Of course they did. The point was that even upon seeing what they had created, the average expert would have a hard time figuring out how they did it. Patents made that knowledge available to everyone.
There is no need for the disclosure of any secrets with something like pinch-to-zoom. You pinch. It zooms. Even a child can grasp that. This is why I said it might make sense to patent a specific implementation of pinch-to-zoom, but not the concept.
Additionally, granting a patent here in no way even protects innovation. The patent holder would have implemented pinch-to-zoom whether they could monopolise it or not because it would sell their products.
Society gains nothing it wouldn't anyway, and is forced to waste time enforcing stupid monopolies.
Patents should not be granted willy-nilly, and especially not on broad 'implementations' that essentially cover the whole concept, because then it just turns into a huge land grab.
I'm already wondering if I should attempt to patent any half-cool idea I implement on my site, even though the idea of it stinks to me. With the way doubtful patents appear to be less spurious than expected, I'd be remiss not to grab my share of the land where I could. That's a crappy state of affairs, to have to attempt to patent everything that moves.
A 25 year monopoly with legally-enforceable rent? No.
1) Yes there is prior art
but Samsung lost because
2) It was shown that Samsung was willfully trying to make its products similar to Apple's.
There are some further murky corners to the verdict, one aspect which seems will be contested is the size of the damages. The Jury foreman stated that they valued the damages to be "more than a slap on the wrist".
Whereas the instructions given clearly state that the jury is not to levy punitive damages, but to recoup losses incurred by the infringed.
Edit: Going to double check just to be sure.
Update:
Iirc the groklaw point was that
1) Yes there is prior art
but Samsung lost because
2) It was shown that Samsung was willfully trying to make its products similar to Apple's.
There are some further murky corners to the verdict, one aspect which seems will be contested is the size of the damages. The Jury foreman stated that they valued the damages to be "more than a slap on the wrist".
Whereas the instructions given clearly state that the jury is not to levy punitive damages, but to recoup losses incurred by the infringed.
Edit: Going to double check just to be sure.
Update: From the verdict:
Patent invalidity, Samsung had to prove apple invalid - No, across the board for all patents brought up.
Apple contested that 3 feature related patents and 4 design patents were infringed
a) '381 - rubber band - valid / Samsung infringed
b) ’915 - pinch to zoom or scroll - valid / Samsung infringed
c) ’163 - multi-tap to zoom - valid / Samsung infringed
d) '667 - iPhone front design - valid / infringed /willful
e) '087 - iPhone back design - valid / infringed /willful
f) '305 - iPhone home screen - valid / infringed /willful
g) '889 - iPad design - no infringement
This is a pretty broad sweep of the verdict, a lot of the verdict breaks down onto whether Samsung Telecom America (STA), Samsung Electronics (SEC) and Samsung Engineering America (SEA). This is further broken down over each product which is found to be infringing.
Sources:
http://live.theverge.com/apple-samsung-verdict-live/
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/301948/apple-patent-bre...
http://www.bgr.in/manufacturers/samsung/samsungs-patent-tria...
yet another edit: Also to be noted is that none of Samsung's claims against Apple were found valid.
IANAL, sadly; interpreting this thing would take a lot of time and effort for a lay man.
I can understand them getting hit on willful infringement, but the way the verdict was read out, they got hit for infringement first, and then willful infringement.
I'm confused too.
This is the patent in question: http://www.google.com/patents/US7469381
This patent is more limited: http://www.google.com/patents/US7812826 as discussed here: http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/13/apple-awarded-limited-pat...
However - it was granted after the first patent (2010 vs 2008)
You're obviously not familiar with the spirit behind Intellectual Property. IP is supposed to protect consumers, not inventors. Protecting inventors is just a means to an end. When you say we should protect designers just out of protecting designers' sake. Then you're inverting the logic. We should only protect designers when doing so is in the best interest of users (meaning it will bring more innovation to the market). This is obviously not the case here. So no, designers do not need to protect their work, if that means abusing consumers.
To achieve that goal, investors need time to make their R&D investment back, plus enough profit to make the venture/risk worthwhile.
Pinch to zoom is there since multitouch technology in the 1980s. Once you start experimenting with multitouch, pinch to zoom is obvious in 5 min. It was very common in the industry. I was using it for transforming(amplifying an rotating) and moving vertex of an "elastic"(tesselated) vector shape in the early 2000s, late 90s, and we were not the first to do it with wacom multitouch. The same with "bouncing effect" that is just adding elasticity force to elements.
The problem is that someone could take what already exist in the desktop and patent it "on a mobile device", or "in the browser" and have a monopoly for 20 years.
This is as simple as the US gov selling monopolies to the highest bidder.
Also, when you mention that UX designers need to "protect" their designs, it sounds like you are arguing from an artist's perspective that all creative work "deserves" some kind of legal protection. That is what copyrights are for. However, this problem must be approached from an engineering perspective, as it deals with machines that serve a purpose, and can only be implemented in a very limited set of ways.
Our work may need to be protected, but when it comes to gestures, I'd want my work to be copied and become standardized. If I had invented pinch to zoom, becoming a standard would be the ultimate validation of my work, as I'd want to improve everyone's experience. That's just my personal philosophy, however.
Or should any new idea be protected with a patent? Comedians come out with new funny ideas every day, should they get patents on them?