Apple granted Patent for their Page Turn Animation
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For example, what stops someone from taking a pharmaceutical that they do not own the patent to and getting a patent for that same drug but the patent is for a digital model of the molecular structure? Then litigate against the pharmaceutical company if the pharmaceutical company chooses to store the structure digitally.
I'm generally curious about this. If anyone can help me understand what I'm missing here, I would appreciate it.
1) Is is possible to take a known, existing invention and simply change the context a little and repatent?
The answer is yes, if the original existing invention had never been documented to be used in this new context.
This is a highly contentious area of patent law and I personally disagree with it.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/patently-obvious...
2) Design patents are not the same as regular patents.
This Apple patent is a design patent, not a normal patent. It protects a very specific visual design in a specific use case. Design patents are very narrow in scope. The same design in a different context is not protected by this patent nor does it affect the patentability (it might affect the obviousness but obviousness is a frustratingly rare objection in patent reviews).
It is ferociously hard to read patents (for everyone: lawyers and inventors included) and people get confused by the patent titles (which are deliberately vague and have no legal meaning). Since these titles are ridiculously broad, people think the patent is trying to clamp down on everything the title describes (which is never the case).
However, non-design patents play a game of making the claims as broad as possible (even when the described embodiments are quite narrow). The claims often become a game of starting unenforceably broad and only subsequently narrowing to something reasonable. Of course, it is the broadest claims that get tested in court.
Why are design patents different? They don't really have claims in the same way. A design patent can be flawed (by having prior art or by failing the novelty test) but can't greedily try to expand its claims to cover everything in the world.
Of course, many patent lawyers think design patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on precisely because they can't expand to cover everything in the whole field.
As for Apple's situation... they write software. The questions: how novel is it? How much protection does that novelty earn? These are subjective questions. Of course, Apple will always think the answers are "Very novel and lots of protection". Their competitors will always disagree. And there is no way of saying who's correct expect dragging the whole affair through the court system for years.
I don't think Apple's patents are of worse quality than most patents. But the patent system never has a clear "this is protected and this isn't". It's always contentious because everything has a precedent of some kind -- but does that count as prior art? Who the fuck knows.
It's not an argument, it's a fact. Design patents are not utility patents. Utility patents are not design patents. They work differently, and the objections people have to "questionable" utility patents do not apply equally to design patents.
It comes up a lot because the press seems to be willfully ignorant of the distinction, and the people arguing about the reports tend to be universally clueless.
In fact, here's a post from 2003 describing exactly this. http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-Brandon...
A nice live demo of one of the other tutorials. That one dating from 2006.
http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459
Over a decade ago I was a moderator on the FlashKit forums[1], and this page turning effect was all over the place.
[1] I'm surprised this is still here (in all its cringeworth glory) after 12 years: http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?243303-NETbre...
As for touch related, I think they both have iOS / mobile web apps as do others.
They have all been around since before iBooks.
The first time I saw a finger following page turn on iOS was pre iPad via Pixelmags. I am not sure when it make it to market though, but I'm sure it was before the iPad launched.
CLAIM The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described.
Reading this, I wonder: How did "design patents" even come to be? I'm tired of saying it, but this is a real aberration.
[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
BS. see fashion - strongly enforced trademarks, no design patents.
I disagree with the concept of design patents. I believe that determining the novelty of a design is mostly subjective.
Now If I watch a film on TV on a digital screen and in that film somebody turns a page of a book, then would I also technicaly be violating this digital patent.
Patents like this are fine, as long as there are in a common-sence pool of free use for all, anything else is well, just wrong.
I fail to see how this is in any way a unique feature warranting a patent, what a fucking joke.
"The animation responds to a simple swiping motion with the finger, which turns the page over just as it happens on a paper book. A different swiping motion will flip the pages quickly, and a vertical finger movement will flip the page just enough to reveal what’s on the next page."
Talking of which - does anyone find the iBooks animation to be slow and annoying? On my iPad 3 it lags for a split second and generally feels a bit rough. It sounds picky but it's quite annoying and judging by a quick search on Google, others are annoyed by it too. Has it always been this way or is this a bug that will be fixed?
I don't understand. I saw this effect on dozens of web pages over the last decade. Do patent examiners just live in a little box?
The validity of any patent then has to be established by a judge in court.
By your standard, patents are never meaningful, because a higher court (or the same court) could always invalidate the patent.
P.S. I've seen plenty of page turning effects like there's in advertising catalogs built in Flash. But in this case, let Apple have their way.
They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy) page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"
We invented books and page-turning 500 years ago. This is just an animation.
I'm having a hard to time understanding how this comparison makes any kind of sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral roll control.
The concept of lateral control was basic to all aircraft designs; without it they could not be easily or safely controlled in flight.[7]
The broad protection intended by this patent succeeded when the Wrights won patent infringement lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators who devised ailerons to emulate lateral control described in the patent and demonstrated by the Wrights in their 1908 public flights. U.S. courts decided that ailerons were also covered by the patent.
[...]
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[10] Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in favor of the Wrights against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties through legal tactics.
[...]
The patent pool solution
In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.[11][12][13]
I'm going to go with, "there were so many inventors, its invention was inevitable" as my interpretation, which I believe is the most correct rendition of the story of flight as I know it.
Apple was certainly aware of it. Very popular app, and was in an Apple tv commercial too.
Edit: Here's the Apple ad with it: http://youtu.be/HhGnS4YvWKA?t=14s
> If the skilled person would have been prompted to modify the closest prior art in such a way as to arrive at something falling within the terms of the claims, then the invention does not involve an inventive step.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... )
It needs to be more than novel, it needs to be a reasonable leap over the existing state of the art. You shouldn't grant someone a 20+ year monopoly over an idea just because they were first to encounter a particular problem and come up with an obvious solution.