Pinch to zoom absolutely should have been rejected.
Watch the 2002 movie Minority Report for what I consider prior art on the 2007 patent filing at http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915.
Watch the 2002 movie Minority Report for what I consider prior art on the 2007 patent filing at http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915.
Yes, it literally covers something as specific as creating "event objects" out of touch inputs and interpreting them as either zooming or scrolling gestures.
Minority Report is not sufficient prior art because:
1) It does not include a touch-sensitive display,
2) its user input is not "points applied to the touch-sensitive display" that it does not have,
3) it is wholly non-enabled (at least in the movie) which is why it does not teach, as far as we can tell, create "event objects" in response to user input,
4) and though it may depict scrolling gestures and pinching gestures in various scenes, it does not teach how to determine whether an input is a scroll or a pinch (which this patent proposes doing by differentiating the number of points in the touch input).
But why even worry about fictional, non-enabled prior art when people have found specific prior art to (temporarily) invalidate these claims?
I think you’d have a point if it pertained to a design patent. If some movie used a tablet that looked exactly like an iPad, 10 years before Apple produced it, then surely Apple’s design patent for it would be worth zilch. However, the pinch-to-zoom patent describes an implementation in minute detail.
IANAL though, perhaps someone with proper credentials will be so kind to enlighten us.
Good.
In theory, patents grant the inventor exclusivity for a limited time so that they can recoup their investment, in exchange for sharing the secret with the world.
I have, in fact, seen a potential design for a time machine which violates no known laws of physics and could take you back in time only as far as the point where the machine itself was built. This would prevent the "patent filing leapfrog" that you are talking about.
Before anyone wonders why this machine has not been built, it requires a rapidly rotating rod, several light years long, about the diameter of the Sun. To travel in time you need to orbit the rod at extremely high speed, and your direction relative to the spin of the rod determines which direction you travel through time.
In theory it should work. But reducing theory to practice is somewhat beyond our current means. :-)
As he described it to me then, the paper presented an exact solution with an infinite bar, and then heuristic arguments that a very long but finite bar would demonstrate the same effects. The underlying mechanism is, of course, the result of a form of frame dragging.
The professor who showed it to me said that he was convinced that the math in the infinite model was correct, and was still deciding if he was convinced by the heuristic argument.
Googling quickly, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Mallett describes a similar scheme, which might even be the same one. Whether or not it is the same, the 1992 paper from Hawking that was discussed would show that the heuristic argument is wrong. However since I was shown this paper while I was in undergrad, Hawking's paper would not have come out yet, and the professor who showed it to me can not be faulted for not having found the necessary flaw.
Patents on functioning time machines are likely to be problematic, anyway, since the natural response to such a patent [1] is to copy the machine, go back in time to before the patent was filed, and file a patent on it. It doesn't take many repetitions of this loop before the original patent on the device is expiring just about the time the device was actually invented.
[1] Ignoring all the other problems with causality and paradox inherent in time travel.