Apple Awarded Patent For iPhone Interface

Toe, The writes "Apple's 358-page patent application for their iPhone interface entitled Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics has been approved after more than two years of review by the US Patent Office. Apple's claims include: 'A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.' As Apple seems eager to defend their intellectual property, what will this mean to other touch developers?"

Comments

Waiting..

[adonoman]

It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.

Re:Waiting..

[zappepcs]

Sadly, I think you are right. Since I loathe iWTFever, I suppose I'll not be using any touchscreen devices anytime soon. Shame. This will be much like getting a patent on a brake pedal, IMO.

Sometimes a patent is not such a good thing for the public. I hope that this doesn't turn out to be one of those times.

Re:Waiting..

[Corpuscavernosa]

Dude it's only EIGHTEEN years (20 years from the filing date). See, doncha feel better now?

Re:Waiting..

[Sentry21]

Right, because Apple's been well-known lately to rest on its laurels.

The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation. I don't recall having seen anything like the iPhone until the iPhone came out; all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.

The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface - unless, of course, no one else out there is up to the task of innovating.

Re:Waiting..

[Miamicanes]

> It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.

No, it means Google Android will be the only viable alternative to an iPhone -- in America, at least. Apple can stop HTC from cloning their UI, and they can stop American cell companies from distributing Android phones with an infringing UI pre-installed, but they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.

Ditto, for allegedly-infringing open-source extensions for WinMo. Apple wants to sue someone who makes a free shell extension to let HTC phones look like an iPhone? Great... they're awarded 100% of the money he's ever made by selling his infringing product. Oh, wait a minute...

Re:Waiting..

[Dupple]

It's a real problem, there will be varying implementations of touch interfaces unless apple licenses it. And apple don't license

Re:Waiting..

[Arethan]

Nope! Go get a BlackBerry Storm. Touch screen device that is improved via mechanism to detect difference between touching a widget and pushing a widget. I used to have one of those other touch screen phones, and navigation was a complete pain in the ass. My new phone with the clicky screen is much better, and it still uses multi-touch for on-screen text selection purposes. Interface improved, patent improved, life goes on.

What we really need is some patent reform to keep up with modern engineering and manufacturing speeds. A 20 year patent is a little long these days since time to market from prototype is often well under 2 years. Maybe 5-8 year patents are in order. Long patent durations encourage competitors to embrace/extend. Short patents encourage the original patent holder to continue making improvements, rather than sitting on their duff.

Re:Waiting..

[fabs64]

Considering the rapid movement of the tech industry, doesn't 18 YEARS seem like a fairly significant time to stop anyone else from using your innovation as a foundation for further innovation?

Also "innovate their way around" is one of the craziest phrases I've ever read. We're happy to waste creative energy on getting around artificial restrictions now rather than simply creating?

Re:Waiting..

[DigiShaman]

If Apple is willing to license the use of the patent for a royalty fee; sure, it can be advanced by other companies.

Re:Waiting..

[supernova_hq]

Actually, they could sue for damages. This could be in the thousands or even millions depending on popularity and what kind of mood Apple's lawyers are in.

Re:Waiting..

[Fallen Seraph]

Right, because Apple's been well-known lately to rest on its laurels.

Yeah! Apple's multi-touch tablet notebook is totally the best thing on the market!
What's that? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm being told that they don't even have so much as a traditional tablet with a digitizer, let alone one with multi-touch.

Here's what you're not getting: From the looks of it, this patent basically gives them exclusive rights to a multi-touch gesture system. Now I ask you, how exactly are you going to make an alternative UI for a touch screen that does not use gestures? Or even different kinds of gestures for that matter. Gestures work because of innate instincts and preconceptions about the physical world, as well as our own assumptions. The law cannot change what works and what doesn't as a gesture. Do you really want to have, let's say 3 multi-touch devices, each of which are forced to use 3 different gestures for the same damn action just because they're from different companies?

In theory, patents are great, but in reality, they've never really worked the way they were supposed to. In the beginning, it was almost impossible to enforce a patent (see Evan's Mill, or the Cotton Gin), and now, it's too easy to do so. 20 years is a long damn time, and the end result is either going to be companies completely ignoring the patent, or Apple setting back any significant developments with this particular technology by DECADES. Think about it, decades.

You might not realize this, but multi-touch has been around since the early 80s, and one of the reasons no one's cared is because of the patent on it. The reality is that the person/group who invents an innovation is not always the person/group that can best bring it to market, or make the most out of it technologically. Hell, Apple's the one that bought out FingerWorks, the original patent holder for lots of other multi-touch tech, but wasn't really getting anywhere in their implementation. Now imagine for a moment that it was the other way around. A small company named Fingerworks wants to build the iPhone in the mid-00's, but can't because a giant company, Apple, holds the patent, but it kind of floundering in its use. Yeah, that's totally spurring innovation right there.


To be honest, I hope that Apple's just doing this to collect royalties.

Re:Waiting..

[Anonymous Coward]

the other possibility is that with this type of patent, there will be swifter reform that rejects it

Re:Waiting..

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I don't recall having seen anything like the iPhone until the iPhone came out

Well! That's enough for me! If zappepcs has no knowledge of Prior Art, then it can't exist!

Thanks for clearing that up for us. Everyone debating the merits of this patent can stop commenting & get back to work now.

Re:Waiting..

[TooMuchToDo]

Which only works against people with stuff to take.

Re:Waiting..

[Sheen]

As i understand, europe has different laws regarding patents not all countries in europe do even agree on how patents should be handled. An example is that a patent cannot be a obvious solution or evolution that everyone knew was going to be one day. Like, you cant patent the idea of wireless internet on airplanes, as its going to be a natural evolution of technology. Just like multitouch.

Re:Waiting..

[Z00L00K]

Unless the patent is dismissed in court.

Soon the one-finger and two-finger salute will be patented.

Re:Waiting..

[ceoyoyo]

Perhaps it will encourage more user modifiable, open designs then. Nah.

Re:Waiting..

[holt]

Nope! Go get a BlackBerry Storm. Touch screen device that is improved via mechanism to detect difference between touching a widget and pushing a widget. I used to have one of those other touch screen phones, and navigation was a complete pain in the ass. My new phone with the clicky screen is much better, and it still uses multi-touch for on-screen text selection purposes. Interface improved, patent improved, life goes on.

You know, it's interesting. I have an iPod Touch and find its interface to be vastly superior to the Storm, which I have borrowed a few times from friends and thus had an opportunity to try out. However, I asked someone who was obviously not familiar with touch screens to type in their address on my iPod Touch the other day, and they had a very difficult time working out how to use the thing. They kept trying to push down on the "keys" and were frustrated when it wouldn't click. The idea that they just had to tap was apparently very difficult to comprehend.

On the other hand, to me (having used touch screen technology in general, and the iPod Touch / iPhone interface specifically), the "clicking" that the Storm implements seems forced and hokey. I thought it missed the point of the, "But there are no buttons!" complaint, since one still can't type without looking at the screen (i.e., one can't feel their way around the keyboard). I had not previously considered that it might be a more intuitive interface for someone who had never encountered touch screen technology before.

Re:Waiting..

[michaelhood]

Once a judgment is collected in a lawsuit, garnishment of wages or liens against assets is generally a viable option for the plaintiff.

IANAL

Re:Waiting..

[Bu11etmagnet]

The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation.

What you say might once been true, but today the whole point of patents is to stifle competition.

"Protect the little man" is nothing more than propaganda. Companies accumulate patents in the same way that the US and the Soviet Union accumulated nuclear weapons: to make sure any patent attack can be retaliated. What chance does an individual inventor have ?

http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Sometimes a patent is not such a good thing for the public.

I'm curious if a patent ever is a good thing for the public. it really only ever seems to do exactly this.

I mean, look at this. It's clearly Apple's IP. It's clearly a new invention.

It's also clear that Apple has already gained the competitive advantage a patent is supposed to provide, without the patent.

Which means that all the patent does, in this case, is retard progress for twenty years by preventing anyone else from beginning to compete with the iPhone. It's the difference between building new and exciting interfaces that start with the iPhone and expand beyond it, and instead having everyone else have to build ugly hacks to avoid infringing on that patent even when the iPhone is a horribly obsolete product.

Patents should last the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market. That's a year, maybe two or three. Not fifteen or twenty.

Re:Waiting..

[TooMuchToDo]

As I said before, "Which only works against people with stuff to take." If you have nothing, and don't plan on every making anything, you're fairly judgment-proof. Also, if you don't intend on continuing to live in the US, there are a host of countries out there that are pleasant to live in that won't honor a US civil judgment.

Re:Waiting..

[Tablizer]

This will be much like getting a patent on a brake pedal

Could be worse: collecting royalty on *every* tree grown. They are "emergency brakes".
       

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.

Except provide the iPhone as an alternative which doesn't force you to do those things.

And users don't particularly want to know or care about patent law. They'll just assume Apple is better or smarter than these other phones, and that the iPhone is better.

Re:Waiting..

[beelsebob]

We're happy to waste creative energy on getting around artificial restrictions now rather than simply creating?
Where by "creating", we mean "copying the thing apple created for us"?

Re:Waiting..

[mysidia]

Truly.

Where would we be if the creator of the first spider patented the concept of a spider building a searchable index of web sites, and a web form being utilized to query said database?

Google, Yahoo, etc could have never been born, due to the inevitable litigation that would kill those portals before they got started.

Re:Waiting..

[Shikaku]

Technology is pretty fast. 18 years in terms of technology, especially computers, is almost like an eternity. If we can't develop new touchscreens or other COMMON things because of patents, then patents are not very helpful. If it were up to me, I would make patents expire in 2 years concerning all things technological, including and especially software.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation.

And they have failed miserably at that.

Do you suppose Apple would not have built the iPhone if they couldn't patent its multitouch? Of course not. They'd still have first mover, it'd still have that Apple gleam, and everyone would still want one. And they'd still have carved a large chunk out of the smartphone market -- and expanded it into a large number of people who never wanted a smartphone before -- before anyone else even had a shot.

What this does is prevent other people from building on that work, without Apple's permission.

all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.

Gee, I wonder why? It couldn't have anything to do with Apple patenting so much of the iPhone that no one else can legally compete with it?

The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface

Let's pretend, for a moment, that Xerox had been smart, and patented the GUI. So now everyone has to innovate their way around the mouse?

Let's not forget: This is about promoting the general welfare, not the welfare of specific companies. And when someone locks some new development up for 18 years, consumers are the ones who suffer.

Just as an example: I'll bet Apple patented the magnetic cord of the MacBook. That means I won't be able to buy any laptop other than a Macbook for the better part of two decades which has that feature. And they also have iPhone-style multitouch in the touchpad -- probably won't be able to get that anywhere else, either.

Which means I've lost a significant amount of choice. Because I don't want a Macbook -- Linux doesn't run well on them, they have a single-button touchpad instead of two or three, the keyboard is an Apple keyboard -- great for OS X, sucks for anything else...

I think, we should just drop patents altogether. They cause more harm than good. It's still possible to exercise first mover's advantage, or compete on quality or price -- unless, of course, no one out there is up to the task of innovating in their business model.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

If Apple is willing to license the use of the patent for a royalty fee; sure, it can be advanced by other companies.

Apple isn't even willing to allow an interpreted language on the iPhone. What makes you think they would be willing to relinquish control here?

Re:Waiting..

[Tablizer]

The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'.

Hey Apple, patent THIS gesture: ,,|,,
     

Re:Waiting..

[Kensai7]

The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface - unless, of course, no one else out there is up to the task of innovating.

I wonder how Nokia will implement "gestures" in its new N97... IF it does!

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's worth mentioning that this trend is not only in software. It's easiest to see here, because software moves so much faster, and it's so completely misunderstood by the patent office. But it's not just in software, and it's not recent.

I'm sure someone less lazy than me will find the appropriate paper -- it discussed the development of the first steam engines, often used as an example of the patent system working -- but it illustrates just how clearly the patent system did not work here. Specifically, two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements, so they had to work out less effective, more wasteful workarounds just to avoid being sued.

I often sit and wonder about the cases where this truly causes harm -- suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent. Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.

I know I'm talking to myself, but I think I might also be talking myself into releasing my open source projects as public domain.

Re:Waiting..

[Anonymous Coward]

I am against patents that span 20 years because inventions are inevitable. The stepping stone to the next best thing is almost guaranteed to happen and what the patent system does is cripple that inevitability 20 years or stifle small inventors from enhancing an invention due to whatever arbitrary royalties may be imposed. If there was some sort of reasonable royalty put in place for any group that seeks to commercialize on a patented invention or a enhanced version piggybacking on that patent I would be all for it. On one hand, I think an inventor should be able to have a temporary monopoly on an invention as a marketing reward for coming up with it first but afterward, everyone should be able to enjoy it and unlike copyrighted works, inventions in any given field will almost certainly come about and has by companies/individuals independent of each other. Patents shouldn't be used to clog the courts and prevent progress of others. In other words if I patent an invention I should be able to stop everyone from using the invention because I don't want anyone to use it. There needs to be some sort of compulsory royalty process. Sue guys who don't pay the royalties but don't allow people to hinder the world's progress on something because they only want their company to produce something.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Also I use a Mac keyboard in windows all the time. What the problem.

I suppose I'll have to try out a Macbook to see how I like it. So far, the problems with my Aluminum keyboard:

Command/option instead of alt/win. I know, these can be remapped, but it's still annoying.

Just about every symbol on the numpad has been shifted to make room for =.

F13 through F19. Cool, but I'd much rather have printscreen, scroll lock, and pause. I can remap them, but these aren't the kind of keys I know by muscle memory. I suppose I could write on them...

No Insert key. WTF. No, it's not "help" -- instead, that key has been turned into "fn", and is interpreted either in hardware or in firmware. I'm hoping firmware, and one day I'll learn enough to dig into that with a disassembler and set it right.

Of course, I'll need OS X to flash that firmware. No documentation I know of with which to write a driver for another OS.

Now, it's possible I'm completely wrong, and none of this applies to the laptop keyboards. I wouldn't know from actual usage, though. My Powerbook died (and Apple refused to repair it) long before I ever got Linux working on it.

I think apple should get maybe a 3-5 year patent.

Better than what we have now, but consider how fast technology moves in that time. 3-5 years is a long time to wait.

Re:Waiting..

[WalksOnDirt]

Patents should last the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market. That's a year, maybe two or three. Not fifteen or twenty.

The only competitors that would then have a problem with the patent is those who were already in development of an infringing device when the patent takes effect. True innovators would get hurt by these short patents occasionally, but copyists never would. I don't see the point.

Re:Waiting..

[Mattsson]

I mean, look at this. It's clearly Apple's IP. It's clearly a new invention.

What is the new invention?
The interface itself? Hmm. Maybe, but an idea of how to arrange graphical objects on a screen shouldn't be patentable.

The actual touchscreen? Well... I haven't seen many solid glass touchscreens before, but I have seen them, only bigger. It might be an evolution or adaption of an old invention. If it's a new way of designing touchscreens, that exact design is indeed something that should be patentable.

The act of registering more than one finger at once on a touchscreen? Might be a new idea, but hardly a new invention and it should definitely not be patentable.

Re:Waiting..

[Mattsson]

Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.

This is happening all the time.

Re:Waiting..

[Carewolf]

More interesting the phone that inspired the iPhone (or that the iPhone ripped off) the Prada phone now has to be taken off market or pay royalties. How ironic.

Re:Waiting..

[Mattsson]

Where by "creating", we mean "copying the thing apple created for us"?

Exactly. Apple, who have never copied what others created.

By the way, I was being sarcastic. ^_^

Re:Waiting..

[amRadioHed]

How were they able to patent gestures? Isn't that something that Microsoft Surface, among others, had first? I love the iPhone interface, but is there really anything brand new there?

Re:Waiting..

[Lars T.]

Considering the rapid movement of the tech industry, doesn't 18 YEARS seem like a fairly significant time to stop anyone else from using your innovation as a foundation for further innovation?

Also "innovate their way around" is one of the craziest phrases I've ever read. We're happy to waste creative energy on getting around artificial restrictions now rather than simply creating?

Errm, "innovating around" means innovating, copying means not innovating. Anyway, patents don't stop you from using somebody else's innovation as a foundation for further innovation, only from commercially exploiting your innovation without consent from the patent holder - but then, if you patent your innovation on the innovation, neither can anybody else, probably leading to a deal of cross-licensing.

Re:Waiting..

[Lars T.]

Well, if WMF knows no prior art, that must be proof prior art exists. And since he knows nothing...

Re:Waiting..

[Kalriath]

Just as an example: I'll bet Apple patented the magnetic cord of the MacBook

US patent application number 11/876,733 filed October 22 2007.

Re:Waiting..

[alexandre_ganso]

Just as an example: I'll bet Apple patented the magnetic cord of the MacBook.

You bet they did. Ever noticed that you can't even buy alternative brands' rechargers even for the Macs? And now you see Sony doing those crap short round power connectors because Apple made they notice that stepping into a cable thus throwing your $1.2K notebook on the ground is not a good idea...

Re:Waiting..

[alexandre_ganso]

And users don't particularly want to know or care about patent law. They'll just assume Apple is better or smarter than these other phones, and that the iPhone is better.

That's actually true. The iPhone raised the bar of what a mobile can do. 99% of the phones available in the market today just seems 20th century rubbish stuff, compared to it. And the ones who aren't, are iPhone copies.

They didn't need the patents until today to grow from nothing to be the most important smartphone ever, exactly because it was so much better.

But as it costs you an arm to have one, especially outside u.s., I'll have a crap sony ericsson instead...

Re:Waiting..

[mosb1000]

In this instance, Apple certainly didn't need the patent rights to get the phone out the door. They were given a large sum up-front by ATT to develop the phone in return for an exclusive (5-year???) contract. But that's only because they already had an established, nearly spotless reputation in the consumer electronics industry (iPod).

So in this case, the patent wasn't helpful, but when smaller companies bring new technologies to market, they can leverage a patent to get venture capitol or loans. So it is more useful in that case. And you can't grant patents to some and not to others.

I'd say that if we want to do away with patents (and I think we should), we're going to need to learn to be more open to risk investing in new technologies.

Re:Waiting..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked for a company that does nothing but research into engines, and their sole motivation for doing that research is that they can sell their findings to engine manufacturers using the patent system as protection.

In this instance, it's doing some good - discoveries are found, the findings are licensed at reasonable rates, and because the research is done in one place it's theoretically more efficient than engine manufacturers doing the relevant research separately.

So while I do tend to agree that the patent system is crap, it does still come up with the occasional beneficial case.

Re:Waiting..

[howlingmadhowie]

The problem with charging to license a patent is that in some areas the money needed to license a patent would be the only expenditure. Patenting a physical thing that takes a large amount of money to create anyway is not a problem---if Sony develops a new technology for flatscreen tvs, then anybody who wants to use this technology to make a product will have to be rich enough to make the product anyway.

patenting software techniques is a whole different thing because the patent is the only thing stopping others from implementing this technique. instead of being an intellectual field where you get rewarded for the quality of your work, software development becomes a game for the very rich where you can buy certain must-have technologies.

Re:Waiting..

[SnowZero]

The sad thing is that those have been on water heaters from Asia for many years, including one I had six years ago. Innovation is cool and all, but taking a plug from a water heater and putting it on a computer isn't beyond what someone "skilled in the field" would come up with. An Apple hardware engineer probably just visited Japan and came up with:

(1) MAGNETIC CONNECTOR FOR WATER HEATER
(2) s/WATER HEATER/ELECTRONIC DEVICE/
(3) profit!

Someday I hope to see a patent system based on the expected time it would take an engineer to develop something (with the current time as an upper bound). That way some revolutionary Fusion powerplant that takes 30 years to develop can get a long 20-year patent, wheras putting 1+1 together for a magnetic plug for electronics can get a year or two (generous), and the one-click Amazon patent can get the 2-3 months it deserves. Instead, we have a system where if you meet a fairly low bar you get the same 20 years and true breakthroughs in the field.

Re:Waiting..

[akaariai]

Maybe they need patents from other companies. Making a 3G phone without infringing any other company's patents is near impossible.

Re:Waiting..

[Lachlan Hunt]

Patents should last the amount of time it takes to bring a product to market. That's a year, maybe two or three. Not fifteen or twenty.

I agree. But given that it can take 2 years, or more in some cases, for patents to be granted, the whole process is a waste of time. The advantage of having a patent system is so that techniques are revealed rather than kept as trade secrets. But that advantage is largely lost by having an excessive term. The trick is finding the right balance between what is patentable, how long the patenting process takes an how long the patent lasts.

Re:Waiting..

[itsthebin]

how many fingers do they call "multi-touch"

I think I will patent using 4 fingers and my cock as an interface - or have they got prior art to wanking

Re:Waiting..

[dredwerker]

Nope! Go get a BlackBerry Storm. Touch screen device that is improved via mechanism to detect difference between touching a widget and pushing a widget. I used to have one of those other touch screen phones, and navigation was a complete pain in the ass. My new phone with the clicky screen is much better, and it still uses multi-touch for on-screen text selection purposes. Interface improved, patent improved, life goes on.

You know, it's interesting. I have an iPod Touch and find its interface to be vastly superior to the Storm, which I have borrowed a few times from friends and thus had an opportunity to try out. However, I asked someone who was obviously not familiar with touch screens to type in their address on my iPod Touch the other day, and they had a very difficult time working out how to use the thing. They kept trying to push down on the "keys" and were frustrated when it wouldn't click. The idea that they just had to tap was apparently very difficult to comprehend.

On the other hand, to me (having used touch screen technology in general, and the iPod Touch / iPhone interface specifically), the "clicking" that the Storm implements seems forced and hokey. I thought it missed the point of the, "But there are no buttons!" complaint, since one still can't type without looking at the screen (i.e., one can't feel their way around the keyboard). I had not previously considered that it might be a more intuitive interface for someone who had never encountered touch screen technology before.

I have an ipod Touch,Storm and an HTC tytn 2. The apple stuff works wonderfully for the two finger zooming on the web browsing and photos, but the storm is nice when you want to enter something as you can hover over it and click - it is better as a blackberry email device(on a touch screen). The Storm is not fast but I get a lot of incorrect presses on the IPOD.
The tytn2 works well because it has a keyboard when you get bored of touch ;) It makes it a fair bit heavier. I think the storm is the best overall for portable email but I saw how it was constructed on hackaday. Hackaday Blackberry and that had me worried as to longevity.

Re:Waiting..

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Well, if WMF knows no prior art, that must be proof prior art exists. And since he knows nothing...

The obliviousness-in-the-face-of-sarcasm is strong in this one.

Watch - (s)he will post again, proving me right.

Re:Waiting..

[DerekLyons]

I'm sure someone less lazy than me will find the appropriate paper -- it discussed the development of the first steam engines, often used as an example of the patent system working -- but it illustrates just how clearly the patent system did not work here. Specifically, two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements, so they had to work out less effective, more wasteful workarounds just to avoid being sued.

Sure, if you look you can find instances like that where the patent system failed. I bet if you looked equally hard, you'd find example where the competing companies developed more effective and more efficient workarounds.

Re:Waiting..

[Kalriath]

If it helps any, Apple has also patented the Amazon Mechanical Turk (11/729,170), Interactive Blu Ray discs (11/940,297), eCommerce shopping carts (11/898,337), anything which happens to be double shot injection molded (11/782,175), AMD PowerNow technology (11/715,092), Greeting cards with gift cards in them (11/601,292), Microsoft PlaysForSure DRM (11/550,701), ALL Heatsinks (with IBM - 11/344,657), USB battery charging (11/216,321), doing stuff in response to events (11/877,618) and Citrix MetaFrame and every other network bootable OS (10/763,581).

Usually I like to think that patents do serve a useful purpose. Unfortunately I can no longer hold that opinion after seeing that Apple has patented (or applied to patent) at least seven other companies' products.

I'd hardly call that innovation. (Even if I did have to oversimplify some of those a bit, it can't be argued that Apple is applying for patents on absolutely obvious crap).

Re:Waiting..

[montyzooooma]

It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.

In the US. Probably Europe eventually and almost certainly Australia. Meanwhile in Asia they will be using phones we can only dream of.

Re:Waiting..

[Richard_at_work]

Would the research get done if the investment was not protected?

Re:Waiting..

[Marcos Eliziario]

Or maybe other companies could license this engine. Conceivable, you could even have small engine motor shops, that would invest on designing innovative engines, only to license them to big manufacturing companies.
Without patents, such a small company would never had a chance against giants like Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen or Peugeot-Citroen* because they would steal the idea and come to market first.
This is not the case with this patent. But it's not like all patents should be eliminated, there are clearly cases where a patent is useful for the society as a whole

Re:Waiting..

[Just because I'm an]

Perhaps, and I throw this out as a piece of conjecture without having fully formed an opinion, there is also a case for allowing other companies to licence their patents. And by allow I mean force.

Mainly the fear is "we can't do the same thing because some relatively obvious part of that is patented and we'll get sued". Usually, I guess, the legit avenue would be to ask company X for a licence to use the patent and put some litigation lawyers out of work to the benefit of contract lawyers.

Problem is I don't think company X is obliged to licence the patent and even if they did they will ask some stupendous amount of money for it which is effectively the same thing as not offering it at all. Maybe if there was a mechanism whereby the granting of a patent to bust copycats in court also came with a way to allow licencees of said patent at a reasonable rate for those who actually wanted to advance the state of the art in a meaningful way. Maybe with some timeframes about when the licencing must start.

Perhaps they would have to demonstrate some significant advance...

I know. Words like "reasonable" and "significant" would need defining... more lawyers I guess.

Re:Waiting..

[MrCrassic]

It's clearly a new invention.

iPhone is not a new invention. In fact, LG had problems with Apple for a while because on their Prada phone, which uses a very similar design. The most inventive element is probably the UI, and I'm sure that this was inspired by some other design as well.

It's definitely an innovation, and a very good one at that.

Re:Waiting..

[plasmacutter]

its not a new invention.

Touch screens have been operating in this manner for upwards of 15 years (at least when I started noticing them)

Re:Waiting..

[peragrin]

yes.

Wilbur and orville wright waited a couple of years before they announced they could fly so the patents would clear. At that same time dozens of hobbists were working out how to fly repeatably around the world.

Most inventions are a product of their time. Necessity drove them to be created. More than one person was trying to figure it out anyways, as they saw money from selling said product.

Patents should exist, but should depend on the market. Software patents shouldn't last 3 years as then they are out of date. medications 5-7, and if you actually build something maybe 10.

Re:Waiting..

[Mascot]

That disgusting guy that eats stuff off of his own feet while lecturing made a point about this once.

That patents on life saving drugs in poor countries is tantamount to mass murder.

Re:Waiting..

[beelsebob]

What this does is prevent other people from building on that work, without Apple's permission.
And this is different from (for example) the GPL, how?

So now everyone has to innovate their way around the mouse?
Yeh, and then maybe we'd all be using something better, like graphics tablets, or multi-touch, or ....

That means I won't be able to buy any laptop other than a Macbook for the better part of two decades which has that feature. And they also have iPhone-style multitouch in the touchpad -- probably won't be able to get that anywhere else, either.
While I do have rather a problem with the time scale here, why is this bad? Apple is the one that spent a cock load of time and money developing the hardware and software designs to make this work after all!

Re:Waiting..

[m0s3m8n]

Developing new drugs costs LOTS of money. I work for a group of Eye docs (Retina specialists) who take part in a lot of new drug trials. Just on our end alone we employ three full time staff to administer these programs (1 RN, 1 Tech, 1 sec). Beyond that we also have reviewers from the drug companies coming on site to review our charts and records. AND THIS IS JUST FOR THE END STAGE OF THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS at one small doctor's office. I can't fathom how much money gets spent before this.

Re:Waiting..

[Wingsy]

You're assuming that Apple will just sit on it and do nothing else with it. If you recall, Apple even canned their top selling iPod at one time and replaced it with a new model, so I doubt if they will be content to simply use this patent to prevent progress. They will make the progress even if no one else does.

Re:Waiting..

[Wingsy]

"They were given a large sum up-front by ATT to develop the phone in return for an exclusive (5-year???) contract." You wouldn't want to quote a source for that statement would you? Sounds just like something Enderle would say.

Re:Waiting..

[PIBM]

Don't worry, it won't even be that long.

Wait until any of the big companies that want to build this see http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html ;)

Re:Waiting..

[jellomizer]

Or just pay/negotiate with Apple for the rights to use the patents. You think everyone will horde patents, Oh lets invest into getting a patent only to use it for our own single product line, or collect revenue from other people using our patent in addition to our product line.

It is much cheaper (for both sides) for you to negotiate with Apple for patent rights then have them sue you in a year or two. Don't have upfront cash negotiate a profit sharing method. Not trying to make money off of this, work on an agreement that allows you to use the patent. But remember part of negotiating is that you don't get everything you want. Sure you can use the patent but it can't be GPL and used for products that do the following.

It is life, you cant get everything for free. You can't write GPL code and put restrictions saying the military can't use your code, or prevent forking of it into a competing application. You will need to use a different licenses for that.

Yea the world sucks, it is unfair because you can't get everything you want. But suck it up, learn how to deal with the world, know how the world flows and bends use this to your advantage. Crying Boo Hoo innovation will stop because it has a patent on it, that emotion is preventing innovation more then anything. If you go "I want to innovate but I need this technology to work off of first" then you should focus on getting this technology. Or are you going to cry because you need to pay for hardware, electricity, parts, and your working so long on the project that that you are missing your favorite TV show. I am sorry nothing is truly free, at least when it costs direct money you value it more.

Re:Waiting..

[Junta]

I mean, look at this. It's clearly Apple's IP. It's clearly a new invention.

Except for those pesky people who did it before dating back to 1984.

Seriously, Apple's patent is an instance of "something-already-done . . . on a phone!" As ridiculous as the large number of "on the internet" patents.

I do agree with you that the duration of phases of patents are fubar. For instance, the time between application and granting of a patent is absurdly long. This means a potential small business owner that wants more assurances than "patent pending" may avoid committing to that endeavor. Then after bing granted, there is a conundrum. For a product like the iPhone and generally large companies, the protection is much longer than required to let the originator benefit. On the other hand, for a small business, a three year term may not be enough for them to barely get off the ground.

Re:Waiting..

[psnyder]

Perhaps some investments take 20 years of net profits to make paying for the R & D worthwhile.

Perhaps if there was no possibility to patent steam engine developments, the producers wouldn't have started selling them until they were sure they could make a product that wouldn't be reverse engineered immediately. If it could, someone else may start producing and push them out of business almost immediately.

It's like the Wright brothers waiting on the patent (a couple of comments above) before they announced they could fly. They'd have little incentive to show the world, if any company with more capital could push them out of business immediately.

20 years is too long for a lot of things, especially today when innovation in some technologies goes so quickly. But perhaps it would be better to 'revise' the system to be up-to-date with current technologies and not 'obliterate' the entire thing.

Re:Waiting..

[maxwell demon]

And this is different from (for example) the GPL, how?

It's different from software licensing, because with software licensing you are only prohibited from taking the code and building upon that, while with patents, the idea is protected. Let's say no one before me had written a hello world program, and I were the first one to write one. Software licensing means you may not use my code without my permission, but it doesn't prevent you from writing your own hello world from scratch, even after having seen what my program does, and possibly improve on it (e.g. by adding localization). However if I had a patent on "hello world", you wouldn't be allowed to distribute a hello world program without my agreement even if you write all the code yourself! Basically I'd have the monopoly on everything saying "hello world".

Re:Waiting..

[colonslash]

Is it possible that Apple could license this IP? If they do, then the inventor will be paid for their invention, and people will get to use it in other devices.

I think the retarding progress for 20 years is a little much - others just can't rip off Apple's approach. One possible consequence of this patent is that other companies may employ some interface designers to make a competitive implementation, and we may get more useful interfaces instead of lots of copies of this one.

Re:Waiting..

[colonslash]

software development becomes a game for the very rich where you can buy certain must-have technologies.

That is where prior art comes in. I think open source could be more creative than it is, and if someone had implemented this before Apple, then Apple couldn't get or defend a patent on this.

...in some areas the money needed to license a patent would be the only expenditure

I don't think that applies in this example. Apple must pay a lot of people a lot of money to come up with different interface designs, and programmers to implement them.

Re:Waiting..

[maxwell demon]

I wish Steve Jobs can see my middle finger gesture.. I hope he hasn't patented that already..

I guess that's patent number 7382916475901276021.
(Hint: convert to hex, and interpret the bytes as ASCII)

Re:Waiting..

[walt-sjc]

I mean, look at this. It's clearly Apple's IP. It's clearly a new invention.

Is it? Or is it a natural progression, obvious to anyone in the field?
We've had touch screens for well over 20 years. Isn't it obvious that you would eventually handle MORE than one touch? Gestures to do things is also not novel, as we could drag scroll bars and and whatnot and have had mouse gestures for years.

But the patent office doesn't give a damn about anything obvious. Even the smallest little thing is "wildly new and highly innovative that nobody could EVER POSSIBLY conceive of - OMG this man is a FRACKING GENIUS!!!"

IMHO, the patent office should be granting only about 0.01% of the patents they currently grant. All the business process patents should be immediately null and void too, along with all software patents. That would jump start this economy too.

Re:Waiting..

[XxtraLarGe]

That patents on life saving drugs in poor countries is tantamount to mass murder.

More people would die if the companies that created the drugs didn't make them in the first place. If they don't have a way to recuperate their costs, there's going to be less incentive for them to create *NEW* life saving drugs. Does that mean getting rid of the patent system would be a holocaust?

Re:Waiting..

[db32]

And they have sued exactly how many companies for the use of all these patents? This is the same problem that came about because of nuclear weapons. You are forced to build more in case your enemies happen to build more than you, then everyone has to keep building until everyone has enough to destroy the world many times over. You say patenting other companies products, but if they really were other companies products wouldn't those companies have the patents first? Unless of course those other companies just cross licensed stuff for the use of those patents and Apple deemed their patents on those technologies more valuable as trading leverage rather than for building deliverable technology. Not that I defend this approach, I think it is a pretty horrid abuse of the system, but that is the way it is.

Now, I haven't read the actual patent on this, but it seems to be fairly legit. Apple is the first one to deliver the whole multitouch thing. The point of a patent is to reward the person who gets it done first with exclusive rights to it for a limited time. It makes innovation a race and encourages it. The only other thing even remotely similar I have seen is that godforsaken Microsoft Table video. When Microsoft actually manages to deliver a product that does what they claim it can do, let alone fancy vapor products that aren't even built yet...call me. No really...I would like to see it. When Apple announces their new fancy shmancy dodad they generally have on ready and waiting...when MS announces their fancy shmancy dodad you still generally have to wait 5 years until it is on the market in a usable state.

Re:Waiting..

[howlingmadhowie]

That is where prior art comes in. I think open source could be more creative than it is, and if someone had implemented this before Apple, then Apple couldn't get or defend a patent on this.

unfortunately, no. to the best of my knowledge it takes a lot of money to challenge a patent.

Re:Waiting..

[Rogerborg]

Conceivable, you could even have small engine motor shops, that would invest on designing innovative engines, only to license them to big manufacturing companies.

That's... optimistic. When SmallBlock Ltd goes to Zaibatsu Motor Industries and Fish Gutting Mega Concern Incorporated waving their handful of patents, they'll get a hundred waved back at them.

Which is why patent trolls thrive: you can't be countersued if you don't produce anything. So SmallBlock Ltd live long enough to make a minor "invention", sells it to Trollcorp, and vanishes in a puff of stock options. Trollcorp mugs Zaibatsu, who pay up to settle the suit, and then throw the "invention" on the huge slush pile of ideas that their thousands of in house engineers will ignore anyway because it's Not Invented Here.

Nobody benefits from that. There may be a very few exceptions where the patent system plays out in the favour of a genuine inventor, but I'd have to see more case studies to believe that's a statistically significant outcome.

Re:Waiting..

[AndersOSU]

First, let me say that I think the patent system is in desperate need of reform, especially in the area of IT. That said, I think patents have done a great deal of good in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals. For my second caveat, let me add that the pharma companies do a great number of indefensible things, I'm not in anyway under the impression that big pharma has clean hands.

But here are the facts: Drugs require enormous resources to develop, once you have a drug developed it requires even more enormous resources to test. Finally once a drug goes off patent the generics eat the original inventors lunch because they don't have to support an R&D infrastructure (which is as it should be.) Simply stated, I don't see anyway anyone would develop new drugs without patent protection. (Academia could do it now, but they don't, IMO because there already isn't a sufficient profit motive.)

Surely, this has some negative side effects, like the emphasis on maintenance as opposed to curative drugs, and the practice of overdeveloping families of drugs that do the same thing because it's easy and lets you get a new patent, but taken as a whole, I think modern medicine would not be where it is today without the patent system.

Re:Waiting..

[Marcos Eliziario]

Anyway. I don't think innovation would come to a halt with the end of all patents. But I do think that we would see a lot of inneficiency and red tape on companies trying to protect their trade secrets. Generics? forget about that, no way I am publishing how do you sinthesize MetaErgoDiidroHeaxaDiOxiFuckinstan,3,2,4. When people talk about medicines that are too expensive because of pathents, they forget that those medicines didn't exist, they had to be invented. If you don't think it's fair, them vote for candidates that favour public spending on public financed drug development, and pray God it works. I really don't give a fucking damn if Pfizer made loads of money with Viagra, after all they were researching a hearth drug, and as most drugs tested, it turned out it didn't work. Luckily it worked for something else: namely spawning insane loads of spam

Re:Waiting..

[Mascot]

Did you overlook the "poor countries" part of that sentence, by any chance?

And, again, this was *his* point, not mine. Though if I were forced to take a stance on it, I suspect I would end up on his side of the fence.

Pharmaceutical companies produce drugs for the rich markets that can afford them. There's not a lot of cost to be recuperated from countries with no money or welfare system. Following that, there's no significant loss in waiving patent rights for saving lives in those countries either.

Re:Waiting..

[Hijacked Public]

Unless there is a change in the progess of the leagilities of patent enforcement on a global scale I think patents in general are fubar.

Right now there are places in Asia you can walk into and think you are in a manufacturing facility owned by Samsung or HTC or some similar company. The people there are wearing logo'd shirts, the building has the logo on the side, the products coming off the line are all logo'd. But the entire operation is a clone and has nothing to do with the actual legitimate company.

I do some work for small manufacturers in the firearms industry. LaRue makes mostly mounts for optics. Magpul makes various tactical products. Aimpoint makes optics. Those 3 all hold several patents but all are well aware that nearly every product they make is being cloned somewhere in Asia and there is nothing they can do about it. Even if they hired lawyers and bribed the necessary government officials the cloner would just shut down and move elsewhere. Nearly every Aimpoint sold on Ebay is a fake. Nearly every one I've run across at gun shows lately is a fake. The small guys I know have even given up asking Ebay to take down clone auctions because they don't see an economic advantage in doing so.

Unless things change on the legal front patents, at least on physical products, will just be a money sink. Anyone who wants to clone your product is going to manufacture it in Asia anyway, so other than some small distribution advantage it matters little whether the clones are contracted out by a US entity or the work of a foreign one.

Re:Waiting..

[DrgnDancer]

I think the drug companies illustrate two interesting point about the current patent system. Not just what is wrong, but what is right as well.

First, drug patents are awarded for the same 20 years as technology patents, but exclusivity is only for 7 years in most cases. This is to improve innovation in a field where we have a pretty clear public interest in keeping things moving. The original point here was not so much that patents were a bad idea per se, but more that they should probably be shorter. The exclusivity stuff for drugs kinda show how that could be a very good this for innovation.

Second, drug patents are VERY specific. If company A has a patent to reduce heart irregularities by combining compound XYZ with compound CZF, and company B comes along and tries to patent controlling heart irregularities by combining compound XYZ with compound ABC, no one is going to argue that Company B's patent is infringing on Company A's. Both companies had reason to think that with the right additive XYZ could control heart irregularities, both were right, and since they used different additives it's not a problem. If these same two patents were for software, there'd be all kinds of arguments about how similar or dissimilar they were, whether one was derived from the other, etc.

This shows two points in my mind. First, it seems likely that in a world where product cycles can be measured in years or even months, 20 years is too long for a patent. The iPhone will be an obsolete brick in 20 years, why not allow others to benefit from its innovations after it is no longer a commodity itself (and I say this as an iPhone owner and moderate fan of Apple's work). Second, patents should be granted in such a way as to maximize addition innovation in the field. Granting very general "A method for entering data with your fingers" kind of patent hurts innovation more than it helps. Now, Apple's application for this patent is over 250 pages, so it is probably is very specific. I don't know that this point necessarily applies to this particular patent (at over 250 pages I didn't read it), but we HAVE seen some very obvious and VERY general patents granted in this field. That creates situations where companies are afraid to innovate because they can't tell if they're in violation of a patent or not. If software patents looked more like drug patents, it might be a lot better for everyone.

   

Re:Waiting..

[stiller]

Software patents are only enforceable when they involve some technical (as opposed to business) innovation. For the whole story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention

Re:Waiting..

[salimma]

Here it is: Against Intellectual Monopoly (Boldrin and Levine).

Really insightful read; I forward it to anyone who still have the patent cotton-wool over their eyes.

Re:Waiting..

[salimma]

Yup. When it comes to user interfaces, it is bad enough; when it comes to, say, power-efficient hybrid drivetrains, who knows how much CO2 we have released to the atmosphere because Toyota, Honda, GM, Ford effectively partition the solution space and can't make use of each others' innovations (or rather, they can, but choose not to for business reasons)

Re:Waiting..

[defile39]

Though this point will likely get lost in the abyss, most drug companies (if not every one of them) would love to supply drugs to poor countries at low prices. Frankly, most drug companies would be willing to supply poor countries with drugs FOR FREE. The problem is . . . many poor countries also have corrupt leadership. The governments of these poor countries are complicit in diverting donated medicine to other countries, for a profit. So not only would the drug company be donating medicine to a poor country, losing money in the process, but the drugs would then be shipped off to other countries where people would otherwise be paying for them . . . paying the drug company, that is. And the drug companies simply can't take that kind of a loss. Especially when the people in need in the poor country aren't getting any benefit.

Re:Waiting..

[DrgnDancer]

It's nice that everyone in universe 1 is all good and stuff and no big corporations steal ideas from people as soon they release them, and companies don't hide the secret to HOW they did something so deeply in the ground that now one will ever know how it all works. I'm not saying that the current patent system is great or anything, but your hypothetical universes seem full of good people in the patentless one and only evil people in the patent having one. Patents DO have a function and often they accomplish that function. This is not to say that the current system is perfect, or even all that great, but to pretend that getting rid of patents is going to suddenly turn the world into utopia is silly. We'd just have different problems caused by human greed.

Re:Waiting..

[Zordak]

Where would we be if the creator of the first spider patented the concept of a spider

I'm pretty sure that God had the spider market cornered for more than 20 years, even without a patent.

Re:Waiting..

[mdwh2]

I don't recall having seen anything like the iPhone until the iPhone came out; all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon

What bandwagon? Mobile phones, including doing what the Iphone does, have been around for years. Imagine if those things had been patented? You wouldn't have seen the Iphone at all.

and generally doing so pretty poorly.

In Your Opinion. This is nothing to do with whether patents are a good thing or not.

Re:Waiting..

[L Boom]

Good points, but I'm curious to know how much of those development costs are recouped by government subsidies and tax breaks.

A significant chunk of the research done takes place at state-funded universities using both government and private grants. Additionally, costs like extra staff used to administer test programs are usually written straight out as tax breaks at the end of the year, so the effective cost is often zero.

So yes, the taxpayers get it coming and going. We pay to subsidize those programs through our taxes then we pay extortionate health premiums to buy overpriced drugs sold through expensive advertising campaigns.

Re:Waiting..

[DrgnDancer]

Well, that is typically how innovation happens. Most of the time "inventions" don't make something entirely from scratch, they build on existent ideas. Could the car exist without the wheel? The internal combustion engine? The guy who invented the car just took a bunch of existing ideas and combined them in a new way. Nothing in early cars hadn't already been "invented" but the combination of all them was "new". The airplane had a legitimately new concept (moving air over the properly shaped "wing" to provide lift), but again cannibalized several existing ideas to implement.

The idea of "gestures" is going to be fairly difficult to "innovate around". It's a very intuitive way to interact with a touch screen device, a potential building block to many other even more intuitive methods. Apple deserves props for having come up with a useful system, but giving them 20 years to sit on it seem excessive. Having said that, the length of Apples patent application seem to indicate a VERY specific patent. It may be that this isn't as big a deal as people are making out. A sufficiently specific patent allow others to innovate without infringing. I haven't read it though (and at 250+ pages i don't intend to), so I can't say.

Re:Waiting..

[howman]

It means make it in China, distribute everywhere except the US, hide when apple comes knocking, business as usual.

Re:Waiting..

[mdwh2]

Of course it's in part because no one in the world owns a teleporter, a flying car, or a holographic display; they don't exist. In fact, not even computers exist.

Well, it's easy if you can just make things up:

In Universe 1, patents don't exist, and everyone lives happily ever after, and money grows on trees.

In Universe 2, patents exist, and everyone has been enslaved to work 24 hours a day.

Your call!

Re:Waiting..

[howman]

I agree with everything you say... but. I think a patent should only last as long as it takes to recoup the costs associated with bringing the item to market, plus a percentage over that for profit. Then, you deal with competition. At least this way, you create something, you get your money back, you get a 'guaranteed' profit, you get first crack at brand association. This helps the public by forcing companies to create great products because if they don't, they only get a percentage profit then they lose market share to better innovation. It ain't perfect, but KISS.

Re:Waiting..

[riegel]

It's the difference between building new and exciting interfaces that start with the iPhone and expand beyond it, and instead having everyone else have to build ugly hacks to avoid infringing on that patent even when the iPhone is a horribly obsolete product.

I am curious why do you think patents prevent someone from building on the idea?

Re:Waiting..

[riegel]

Now, Apple's application for this patent is over 250 pages, so it is probably is very specific.

I do not know what is contained in the patent but is it just a touchscreen patent or is it an iPhone patent. The iPhone uses an accelerometer and a gyroscope to detect user input as well are these part of the patent. If so then it does seem that the patent is much more than touching a screen.

Re:Waiting..

[JAlexoi]

Software? Shouldn't software be covered only by copyright? Or are you a paranoiac? Or should US have patents on books!?!?

Re:Waiting..

[Mascot]

The point I originally quoted went to patents, not providing the physical product. I'd imagine those corrupted governments wouldn't care about patents to begin with and would produce the drug themselves for sale already if they were able.

If the companies are keen on providing these drugs pretty much for free, I would guess aid organizations would accept them gladly (or are already for all I know). There are no guarantees, but it would seem a lot safer than just handing it over to "the country" for distribution.

Yours is certainly a valid point either way.

Re:Waiting..

[jstott]

It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.

That's up to Apple. There are really three basic possible scenarios:

1. Apple uses the patent to kill all possible competition. That will lock everyone else out until the patent is overturned or a non-infringing design becomes available.
2. Apple licenses the patent for a fee. This limits the field to just the big players, but would also have PR advantages for Apple and could help avoid some potential anti-trust lawsuits.
3. Apple treats this as a defensive patent — the point is not to lock others out but rather to make sure you control (own or license) all the relevant IP, so that someone else won't come along with a submarine patent and ask you for 15 years of back-royalties.

Which course of action Apple actually intends to pursue, only time will tell...

-JS

Re:Waiting..

[shelterpaw]

I know this may be unpopular, but I think we should have a patent system, but not the way it's implemented now.

I think patents should only protect companies with a small market cap and as they reach a specific size, they lose their patent. This would help protect small companies as they are getting started without larger companies with massive resources destroying them before they get off the ground. It should be based on industry and market cap.

I also believe companies that do not intend to produce products with their patents should be force to sell them or lose them. No patent trolls with ridiculous fees.

Re:Waiting..

[Echemus]

Coming to the Mobile Phone game 15 years late means Apple's IP for mobile phones is exceedingly week. Other players (Motorola, Nokia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Ericsson, etc) have a lot of IP in that area. I doubt anyone has called Apple on these patents yet. If Apple starts throwing its patents in their faces, Apple may well get more than they bargained for. It probably isn't possible to produce a phone that talks to GSM or UMTS without infringing on all the above player's IP. As with most patent disputes, the end result will be a cross licensing scheme. Meaning Apple's "innovations" will be used and improved upon by other players.

Re:Waiting..

[jedidiah]

Sorry Wilbur, but if the rest of the world can replicate
your invention without the benefit of your trade secrets,then
you don't deserve a patent on your work. The whole point of
patents is that your trade secrets are so valuable that
progress can't continue without them. If every Tom, Dick and
Santos can replicate your work then it's not that inventive.

        This is one key area where patents have gone horribly
wrong. They don't reward solving of the difficult problems.

        You should be the first that is able to make a thing,
not the first person to consider it.

Re:Waiting..

[JAlexoi]

Yeah, but they patent holders for 3G are mostly wireless equipment companies, that have little to none interest/investment in smartphones/phones/mobile devices.

Re:Waiting..

[riegel]

Apple isn't even willing to allow an interpreted language on the iPhone

Javascript

Re:Waiting..

[jedidiah]

> It costs a bundle to develop new technology, and it's always a big risk.

Sometimes.

Other times, it's just a side effect of going about your business.

The current patent system doesn't do a good job of evaluating
what's really is the result of hard work and is an improvement
to the state of the art... rather than just a reflection of it.

People that aren't terribly bright manage to get patents just
for practicing their particular profession. No "development
cost" is involved. Yet those patents will become part of a
legal minefield.

Re:Waiting..

[Sentry21]

Chances are that either 1) those patents will never be enforced; 2) They were applied for before the relevant product came out; 3) They don't cover the examples given; or 4) if they were enfored, they would lose the patent.

Keep in mind that in the US, the general litigious environment means that you need to do everything you can to protect yourself. If Apple didn't have boatloads of patents, like every other major tech company, they would stand a real chance of infringing upon some other obscure, obvious-but-granted-anyway patent that some patent troll company had. I don't recall Apple suing Amazon over Mechanical Turk, but you can bet that patent trolls would definitely do so.

Apple protects its innovations; multi-touch isn't new, but no one else did anything with it. Apple brought it to market and has made millions because of it. Good for them. That's the whole point of capitalism.

If you don't like the current 'patent the obvious' environment in the US, I hope you don't buy at Amazon. Their absurd one-click patent could be argued to have started this preposterous mess in the first place.

Re:Waiting..

[jedidiah]

The patent gives Apple the right to sue anyone making a "derivative work" out of existence.

The patent gives Apple the right to sue anyone that "re-invents" their device.

The patent gives Apple the appearance of standing to sue anyone that
makes a device similar enough to be mistaken for a derivative or
re-invention.

After the first successful revolver patent, no one wanted to work on that
technology for fear they would be sued. For the rest of the industry it
was hands off until that patent expired.

Fine perhaps for a tech that the whole planet spent centuries trying to perfect.

Re:Waiting..

[Rich0]

Drug patents have the same effective duration as in other industries. The difference is the lead development time.

It typically takes 5-10 years to get a patented drug onto the market. So only about 10 years of market exclusivity remain. Also - the only thing a drug patent applies to is a specific molecule - not a concept of treatment. So, if the drug works by inhibiting some enzyme, other companies can target the same enzyme with other inhibitors.

On the other hand, this patent for the iPhone was granted AFTER the device was already on the market. That is unheard of in the drug industry.

I think that patents do make sense in industries where the up-front costs are extremely high and the marginal costs are very low. The same applies to copyright. Yes, there does need to be balance as well (something lacking generally in both the drug and music industries). However, balance doesn't mean that something that cost hundreds of millions to produce should be copyable by anybody without any license at all.

In the end, society gets what it pays for. If everybody wants free everything, then nobody will work on anything. Perhaps we can afford to invest less in medicine and entertainment, but we probably don't want to cut that down to zero either...

Re:Waiting..

[pauljlucas]

I'm curious if a patent ever is a good thing for the public. it really only ever seems to do exactly this.

No, it's just that these are the kinds of patent stories that usually only make the news. In general, however, a patent certainly offers protection to "the little guy" from having his invention ripped off by some company. (A lot of patent lawyers would probably take the case on a contingency basis with the possible windfall of licensing money.) However, you can't just afford patents to "the little guy": they have to be afforded to all entities, companies included. Indeed, it also prevents a case like, say, Microsoft from ripping off Apple after Apple is the entity that spend all the R&D money.

Which means that all the patent does, in this case, is retard progress for twenty years by preventing anyone else from beginning to compete with the iPhone.

Not necessarily. Assuming Apple is willing to license the technology (and we don't know what they're willing to do yet), then all anybody else has to do is license it. Certainly, if it's another big company, they can afford it. It also gives Apple leverage to license other patented inventions of other companies: cross licensing. But, even if Apple refuses to license anything, it's their right to do so since they're the ones that spent the R&D money to bring the thing to market and raise the bar on cell phones. Over-night, we went from crappy phone browsers, teeny keyboards, and answering-machine-style voice-mail (and settling for it), to the iPhone and forcing other companies to innovate. Indeed, one way to circumvent a patent is to invent something totally new. It can also force innovation rather than hinder it.

I realize this view isn't popular with the /. crowd, so if you disagree, respond with an intelligent argument rather than modding down.

Re:Waiting..

[powerlord]

It means 20 years of waiting for the patent to expire before this kind of interface can be advanced at all.

Yes ... because there was already such a tremendous spirit of innovation in the SmartPhone market before apple joined the fray. [/sarcasm]

Your choices were:

• Blackberry, which had changed form factor slightly (to include a trackball in the Perl), but always retained the keyboard and a small screen.
• WinCE, which sometimes had a keyboard, but was essentially an OS designed for a keyboard and mouse, stuck on a phone.
• Palm, which hadn't updated their OS in ~3-5 years to the point of producing Palm phones with Windows on them.
• Smaller market player who provided a phone that had some of the features of a smartphone, but usually not available in all regions.

Since Apple released the iPhone and made a SmartPhone that people OUTSIDE business were buying in droves, we've seen lots of innovation in the SmartPhone area, primarily with people trying to release "iPhone killers". There is no reason someone couldn't have released an iPhone like device before iPhone. Very few phones bothered to offer the full touch screen w/multimedia features. Certainly the fact that so many already used iTunes meant that it had a quick added advantage to get peoples interest, but Palm could have beat them to it if they hadn't lost their way, or MS if they had bothered trying to really innovate. Blackberry got pretty complacent with their leading share in the business world, and nobody was doing much innovation.

Re:Waiting..

[theJML]

While I completely agree with pretty much everything you said there you also have to remember that just because they have the patent doesn't mean they're the only ones that can make such a product... plenty of other people can too.... they just have to give Apple a kickback for it. This has happened for a number of patents. A little money to the person that holds the patent for the ability to use the IP and they can use it too. It just drives up the price of competitors due to that cash for licensing the patent.

I suppose this spells some doom for the Palm Pre... though I do have to wonder about all the prior art of the Palm Pilots, though IANAL, and I didn't read the 358 page doc either.

Re:Waiting..

[adonoman]

Of course, this has nothing to do with copyright.

Re:Waiting..

[Theaetetus]

they can't do a damn thing to stop American Android users from downloading code to do it anyway from a server in Bulgaria, Vanatu, Russia, or anywhere else not subject to the long arm of American patent law.

Yeah, if only there were some sort of international Treaty involving Cooperation in the field of Patents. You could call it the Cooperation Patent Treaty. Or something like that. Maybe they should hold a Convention in Paris to discuss it.

Re:Waiting..

[ubrgeek]

> I'm curious if a patent ever is a good thing for the public.

I know "individual" != "public" but wasn't there some movie recently (I don't remember the name) about some guy who invented the functionality of variable windshield wipers and how a patent helped "the little guy" triumph over the big corporation? Like I said, I know it's not the same thing, but IMO the public is served when one of their own doesn't get dicked over by MegaCorp.

Re:Waiting..

[steelfood]

I diagree that patent terms should depend on the duration to market.

Companies who aren't ready to sell their new wares can always keep it a trade secret. Patents should last long enough to recoup the research expenses, if that long (I personally would advocate for the outright dissolving of patents, but I'm trying to compromise here). That would be within the 2 to 5 year timeframe.

Re:Waiting..

[Overzeetop]

If the pharm cos annual reports are correct, they spend less on development than they do on marketing. That's not to say that development isn't expensive, but rather that the bulk of the cost of the drugs is not tied up in research.

Chances are, if patents were not available, there would be slower progress in drugs is the "hot" markets, but would likely only slow a bit in many areas. The slack would be taken up by other research avenues. Humans have very diverse, but focused, goals - someone who is really good at research and strives to develop new cures will not be substantially deterred by less lavish facilities or a lower salary, simply less efficient. The advantage is that they will not be pressured into striving to determine a cure for what the marketing department thinks will make the most money and will more likely pursue personally gratifying projects (such as at research universities).

I won't argue that the windfall of blockbuster drugs helps fund a more rapid pace of development, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that if such monopolistic based funding were eliminated that there would be no furtherance of pharmaceutical research. Would your office eliminate all drug trials if you weren't paid? Would you still offer them for patients who are most likely to be benefited by a proposed new drug?

Re:Waiting..

[D Ninja]

...except for the fact that, given the research, approvals, etc. that are involved, medicine can easily take 20 years to market.

Re:Waiting..

[petehead]

Just as an example: I'll bet Apple patented the magnetic cord of the MacBook

US patent application number 11/876,733 filed October 22 2007.

And lets look at what happened with that. My girlfriend left her charger at home on a trip so we were going to get a new one. Come to find out that they cost $80. $80.00! For a charger! And of course, there are no other options. Keep in mind that this $80 charger has ratings of 1.5/5 (60W) and 2/5 (80W) on Apple's own webstore.

Re:Waiting..

[Redlazer]

Right - I of course meant patent.

It was pretty late : )

Re:Waiting..

[ChrisA90278]

No, Others will just have to do it differently. They will have to think for them selves and just maybe come up with a better idea than Apple did.

Why use "touch" at all? why not just move your fingers in the air and let some kind of optical trackers watch?

So you are prevented from copying. No big deal.

Re:Waiting..

[Jamie Lokier]

You don't plan to earn any wages ever?

I suppose it works for someone who's renting and on social security for their whole life after the judgement.

However if you want a bit more than that in your life, like a house, car, paying for your children's education at any stage, even a computer you own(!), oh and a job which pays more than minimum, then you might think twice about putting yourself in the firing line.

Or, as you say, live outside the patent-enforcing countries. Unfortunately it's not just the US. But it is mainly the US :-)

Re:Waiting..

[Anonymusing]

I often sit and wonder about the cases where this truly causes harm -- suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent. Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.

You're assuming that the purpose of such inventions is for the greater good. It is not, at least primarily. It is for making money. Most Slashdot readers live in capitalistic societies, after all.

Re:Waiting..

[orgelspieler]

If these pharmaceutical companies didn't file the patents, how do you think any other drug manufacturer in a "poor country" would manage to figure out how to make a certain drug? If this country doesn't have a welfare system, you can bet they don't have the research infrastructure to develop the cure to AIDS or cancer. So they would have to rely on some company just giving away the magic formula. Or, they'd have to rely on the company just giving away the drug itself.

I would say, rather than filing a patent and waiving their rights to enforce it, they would be better served by just giving away the drugs. They keep their rights, and they get "goodwill" in the country they're helping and worldwide. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some partnerships between groups like the Gates Foundation and companies like Pfizer to do just that.

Re:Waiting..

[Rogerborg]

As opposed to the inefficiency and red tape necessitated by retaining a huge legal department and strong-arming any competitors who lost the raced to file?

Which still doesn't work, because your competitors either just paint your red McGuffin blue, or simply ignore your patent and damn your eyes. See most of the Far East, where Chinese companies clone and sell whatever they like. The only people profiting from patents are the lawyers.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

I would say, yes.

And again, I would point to this paper which I can't remember -- the steam engine would have been invented one way or another. It's not as if you couldn't sell it, even if others are reproducing it. If you're thinking of the little guy who gets ripped off by a corporation, make sure you make them sign an agreement ahead of time -- but if you're that corporation, being first to market will give you a lot of advantage.

Either way, it's something that's worth thinking about seriously -- how can we be sure the research will be done? How can you protect an investment without a patent? Because the world will be better off if we can answer those questions.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

their sole motivation for doing that research is that they can sell their findings to engine manufacturers using the patent system as protection.

Why not sell their findings to engine manufacturers using trade secret laws and NDAs as protection?

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

I bet if you looked equally hard, you'd find example where the competing companies developed more effective and more efficient workarounds.

Point is, with no patent system, people will still always be trying to build the better mousetrap, the more effective and more efficient workarounds. Just look at open source -- there's nothing really stopping people from just picking GNOME or KDE, but instead, they compete, each always trying to develop more effective systems than the other.

All the patent system does is remove choice -- and sometimes, the choice it removes is really the best choice.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Or maybe other companies could license this engine.

That relies on the good grace of whoever invented it. Look at the way Apple has locked down the App Store -- I don't really trust them to be reasonable, here. Nor do I implicitly trust any inventor to be reasonable.

Conceivable, you could even have small engine motor shops, that would invest on designing innovative engines, only to license them to big manufacturing companies.

We already have trade secret laws and NDAs. Why aren't these enough?

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

However, the purpose of the patent system is for the greater good, not for making money.

And the purpose of the capitalist system is, at least theoretically, that it brings greater good, not so that we can have a few wealthy people.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

In the browser, sure. But where can I provide a downloadable Javascript app?

What if I want to write my own?

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

And this is different from (for example) the GPL, how?

Because a license means I have to rewrite it from scratch if I don't like the GPL.

A patent means even if I do rewrite it from scratch, it's illegal because it does the same thing, and close enough to the same way.

Apple is the one that spent a cock load of time and money developing the hardware and software designs to make this work after all!

And they have gained a cock load of reward for it, all without the aid of a patent. The iPhone got where it is, without the need for any patents.

Why should they be able to continue to monopolize the market, and/or collect a free check, for the next 20 years because of this?

Re:Waiting..

[cecille]

Depends on the drug. If it's just a copy-cat style drug (viagra->cialis), the company will just comb through known chemicals for similar structure etc. and skip the preliminary research stage altogether. Of course, they still need to confirm safety / some efficacy before clinical, but the major cost in such a case would be clinical. Same when using the same drug for different uses (wellbutrin/zyban). The development would START at a stage 2 or 3 or even "stage 4" clinical trial stage when the new approved use is normally reported as a side-effect.

For a unique drug, most of the time the preliminary research is done at universities etc., normally in the US under an NIH grant. Many university researchers don't engage a company until they want to go to trial.

So yeah, clinical trials are expensive, but compared to the amount of money coming in from these patents, it's peanuts. It's why so many pharmaceutical companies are fortune 500 - they make big money.

Re:Waiting..

[defile39]

There are. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and Merck have worked together to supply ARV meds for several African countries, including Botswana, a country particularly hard hit (with HIV+ rate around 40%).

This kind of effort doesn't work in less friendly countries, however. Look at what efforts have gone into Nigeria, Namibia, Liberia, etc. Their situations are much more dire, even though they have lower HIV+ rates. The sad fact is that they don't offer hospitality to those with a desire to help.

Bringing this back on topic, however, patents work as they should in the drug world - regulatory approval and high investment risk requires patent-like exclusivity incentives - however, in other fields of technology, patents CAN be counterproductive. Just keep in mind, though, that innovating around existing patents is STILL innovation. Who knows what someone might come up with to get around this Apple patent? Patents provide incentives for the proprietor and for the competitor. Especially if the market goes unsatisfied.

Re:Waiting..

[DerekLyons]

I bet if you looked equally hard, you'd find example where the competing companies developed more effective and more efficient workarounds.

Point is, with no patent system, people will still always be trying to build the better mousetrap, the more effective and more efficient workarounds.

All the patent system does is remove choice -- and sometimes, the choice it removes is really the best choice.

Translation: "Don't bother me with facts. My mind is made up. No really, abundant evidence of ongoing innovation in the presence of the patent system proves my point - people aren't trying to build better mousetraps. The patent system is bad. No, really, believe me."

Re:Waiting..

[arminw]

....I think patents should only protect companies with a small market cap...

How about only allowing real flesh and blood people, rather than fictitious constructs of the state to own copyrights and patents. These individual owners could rent out their intellectual property to others, including corporations, but it could never be bought or sold or inherited by someone else. Anyone who worked for one of these faceless corporations could get a patent, but the real live human owner of the patent would always have the final say about who gets to use it and under what conditions. No contract of any shape or form or agreement could be made with the owner of such a patent by anyone that would restrict the rights of such a person in regards to their patent.

A corporation would have to choose a real live human being to be the unrestricted owner of the intellectual property. This would allow individuals who come up with new ideas to be rewarded, but would prevent other entities, such as corporate patent trolls buying up large portfolios of patents and then suing somebody who made use of the principles embodied in these patents.

No corporation has ever invented or copyrighted anything. Only real living people are creative should primarily benefit from their creativity. Whether a person works for a big corporation or not is only incidental.

Re:Waiting..

[Dormann]

I'm pretty sure "I'm squishing your head" counts as prior art.

Re:Waiting..

[jdschulteis]

Which means that all the patent does, in this case, is retard progress for twenty years by preventing anyone else from beginning to compete with the iPhone. It's the difference between building new and exciting interfaces that start with the iPhone and expand beyond it, and instead having everyone else have to build ugly hacks to avoid infringing on that patent even when the iPhone is a horribly obsolete product.

But think of all the innovation that will occur as we come up with paddles and joysticks and tillers to control our cars with, now that Apple has patented the steering wheel.

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

Apple has nearly $30 billion in the bank now. It didn't need money from AT&T to start developing the iPhone.

But the thing is, no matter where Apple got the money, it needed a viable business model for investing those millions into developing the iPhone as a product.

What past examples are there of Apple using its patents to destroy competitors? There may well be examples, but I'm not aware of any. I am aware of a number of cases where Apple has been hit by patent trolls and benefitted from having a patent portfolio to use defensively. Creative, Burst, etc. Apple is always being sued by a half dozen patent groups at any given time.

On the other hand, the only example I can recall of recent patent threats to stop competition have been Microsofts', used to threaten Linux supporters and developers.

Apple has indicated it won't allow itself to be ripped off by cloners, but has specific patents in hand that cover a single product. It's not threatening to sue specific products out of business to prevent competition as Ballmer did.

Microsoft's Unwinnable War on Linux and Open Source

Why Apple's Tim Cook Did Not Threaten Palm Pre

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

The only thing "similar" about the LG Prada phone and the iPhone was that both were rectangular boxes with a screen on one side.

Two years after the iPhone, LG still can't poop out anything but junk. It copied the iPod to deliver the US "chocolate" phone, and its Prada follow-ups have all been assclown imitations of the iPhone.

If the iPhone was "inspired" by something, it was probably the iPod. Your desperate attempts to suggest that it wasn't original seem to suggest that there are better alternatives that the rest of us just never heard of. Where are these wonderful devices, and why isn't LG, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Samsung, etc selling them?

Apple iPhone vs LG Prada KE850

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

You can complain about Apple's patents, but the reason it patents is because it can. The reason it has to patent is because if it doesn't, it gets attacked.

Tearing into companies that file every patent they can is like blaming citizens for carrying guns in a country that makes gun ownership legal while failing to police criminals. Why not seek to fix the system rather than complain about a symptom you don't like?

Perhaps you are blinded by ignorant idealism? Apple, and every other corporation, isn't going to play a different game until the rules change. Everyone knows that the patent system needs reform, they just don't agree on what the game should look like. So come up with a solution and find consensus. We don't really need additional complaint about game players who are playing according to the ridiculous rules of the game.

Apple's Billion Dollar Patent Bluster

 

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

When you say "first," it suggests that the Surface demo arrived before the iPhone demo. The iPhone was not only shown first, but also shipped first.

And when you talk abstractly about gesture patents, are you even referencing what Apple patented here, or just making vague arguments laced with wholly inaccurate false statements?

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

So Apple was "inspired" to create the iPhone based on photos release of the Prada a couple months before the iPhone was demonstrated with a fully functional UI, one that the Prada never had and that LG still hasn't shipped?

What are you, an LG shill? Didn't know they existed.

The Prada was an overpriced piece of shit that didn't do anything interesting apart from sporting a clothing brand label. It was an ugly box with a crap UI, a high price tag, and was ignored by the market because it didn't offer anything interesting.

 

Re:Waiting..

[mysidia]

The drugs were not developed for the benefit of poor countries.

They were developed in rich countries.

The costs of development of those drugs has been recovered a long time ago.

The money they sell them for (at exhorbitatn prices) is profits for the owners of said drug companies.

And also costs of ongoing research and development of new drugs, only a small number of which are actually life-saving.

Nowadays big pharmaceuticals spend their cash on researching new diet drugs, and cosmetic things designed to improve appearance.

You can be pretty sure the money they are paying isn't being used to either cover the already-paid-for research costs, or to finance new life saving drugs

The fact of the matter is the poor countries simply don't have the cash to actually finance much at all.

Re:Waiting..

[mysidia]

Yes, but the patent office didn't issue a patent to the general claim of "A device, which when you infuse with steam makes stuff move"

The inventor of the LCD display didn't get a patent on the general category of: "A device which you plug into your computer and allows the user to visually see program output."

The problem is that if the patent is vague enough, there is NOT a possible workaround.

Imagine if Opera had been first, and patented the notion of gestures?

Well, then Apple couldn't have made the iPhone like it is, because the device's UI utilizes gestures.

What we have now are situations where the entire path is blocked; there is logically no possible workaround to accomplish the same result, the same UI, because patents have been allowed to run amok.

Re:Waiting..

[Kalriath]

Your post seems to completely ignore that a lot of Apple's patents are things other people invented. Like a rewards system, a shopping cart, or a completely non-novel method of injection moulding a plastic case.

Yes, the system is a problem. But companies like Apple (who do have their own R&D departments!) have more than enough original research which they can patent to defend themselves, without resorting to patenting obvious crap and other people's work.

There's no defense for Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Novell, or anyone else engaging in THAT practice, when they don't need to.

That said, I am tremendously amused that Roughly Drafted of all places just tried to sell me a 30GB Zune.

Re:Waiting..

[arotenbe]

If everybody wants free everything, then nobody will work on anything.

Every open source project ever begs to disagree.

Re:Waiting..

[MobyTurbo]

Apple isn't even willing to allow an interpreted language on the iPhone. What makes you think they would be willing to relinquish control here?

Palm, OTOH, has loads of interpreted languages available for download from third-party websites for their PalmOS smartphones and PDAs. Everything from C compilers and Python to Lisp and Lua.List of PalmOS interpreted and compiled languages

Palm, incidentally, is the maker of the device, the Palm Pre, most likely to be affected by this patent. After the patent's granting, their stock fell quite a bit. Considering that they've basically bet the company on the Palm Pre, you can kiss them goodbye if this patent is enforced by Apple, as Tim Cook, temporary CEO, has threatened.

Re:Waiting..

[mysidia]

I don't believe the phenomenon of KDE/Gnome can be attributed to the current patent system.

Free software is an exceptional case, because the competitors generally abstain from utilizing the patent system.

Participants may be motivated by profit, but it's not profit in terms of selling KDE or Gnome seats.

Most software companies are in the business of selling licenses to their products.

Most technology companies are in the business of selling units.

It's unthinkable for the latter category to release their product without patenting every bit of it. The risk is they lose a lot of money to third-party knock-offs that are intended to trick consumers into thinking the product being sold _IS_ the same, or _IS_ the original, that the inventor spent a huge bundle marketing.

(The third-parties act like leechies trying to trick consumers into buying their clone, instead.)

Patents are one thing that helps stop this.

Re:Waiting..

[SanityInAnarchy]

No really, abundant evidence of ongoing innovation in the presence of the patent system proves my point - people aren't trying to build better mousetraps.

I didn't say that. Try reading my post again.

Re:Waiting..

[MrCrassic]

I'm not saying that it was not original. I was simply trying to prove that it was not an invention. I suppose that this interpretation is highly dependent on vantage point, but I think most of them would agree that Apple did not invent anything new with the iPhone.

It's much safer (and probably more accurate) to suggest that Apple made several innovations that clearly turned most cellular device manufacturers upside down (LG and Motorola are really good examples). They didn't invent the smartphone platform, but they innovated on it to make it much more "elegant and easy to use" (in their marketing lingo). Apple didn't invent multi-touch (as some posts here reference), but they did innovate on it to make it a driving factor in a completely new UI design.

It's pretty clear that apart from the Blackberry Storm and possibly the HTC Touch series, everyone is playing catch up, and everyone will pay for that.

Re:Waiting..

[arotenbe]

... replying to myself to stop the inevitable flood of comments about free vs. open source software, how not all free software comes at no charge, etc., etc.

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

Yes please click the Zune ads.

But what still seems out of your grasp is the fact that companies, like individuals, do what is in their interest, not what fulfills your personal ideological fantasies.

So why should Apple care if the patent office allows it to file patents that may be similar or even identical/overlapping with existing ideas?

And when did Apple attempt to take down Amazon's mechanical turk service with their patent, or any of the other examples of sloppy patent filings? Why is this a problem in itself? The problem is the patent system. Solve that rather than pointing out symptoms of the failed system.

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

Your comments are so strained as to be absurd. The iPhone was chock a block full of innovation but is not an invention? What strawman are you arguing this point against, anyway?

And really, while the smartphone existed before the iPhone, Apple did invent the first viable smartphone platform. I tried to like the Treo for years, but it was such an unworkable pile of crap that never progressed. Apple popped out the iPhone, turned it into a successful software platform, and has regularly updated it every couple of months.

Why does this company need to be convicted of evil? It isn't holding back real innovation in the smartphone industry to push forward a copycat piece of second rate junk as Microsoft did in the PC world during the 90s.

There's plenty of valid criticisms to make against Apple, and against the rest of the phone industry. Why pick such a stupid argument and run with it ?

The Storm is an unusable joke, and HTC is no more innovative than Dell. It is embarrassing to see so little effective competition to Apple, but that isn't Apple's fault, nor are the problems in the patent system nor the economy overall.

Re:Waiting..

[SilentProwler]

when a company gets patent ,it has to release the formula to general public so that public/skilled person can work on it and can use this information to make new inventions. Normally a similar product invention is allowed but not identical. patent time is the reward to compensate company for the time/money investment it made. Although I am not sure if the invention based on prior art can be released into the market before patent expires...

Re:Waiting..

[Rich0]

Unfortunately, the open source model doesn't scale well to capital-intensive industries like drug development. How many people are willing to beta-test a drug put together by an open source consortium? And making pure drugs costs quite a bit of money - so it is hard to even get started. Those big molecules are very expensive to manufacture on kilogram scales until you get the process chemistry worked out.

And, if EVERYTHING were free then nobody would be working on open source software, either - since we'd all be starving.

Free can only work on a wide scale in a fairly communistic model - which doesn't work well in real life. Free software is actually fairly communistic in nature - and it doesn't always work out well in all applications. Many open source initiatives have some kind of commercial model behind them that often works off of some less-than-open aspect of the software. Firefox makes a ton of ad revenue from google - and can only do so because nobody else can change the default home page and redistribute it with the Firefox brand (which is less than completely open). MySQL's model depended on the fact that nobody is allowed to contribute a line of code without assigning copyright, which is less than completely open. RedHat depends on the fact that they have solid control over their distro meaning that it is hard for others to support it like they can.

Eventually I think we're going to have to face some changes in how everything works - simply because automation will get to a point where few people will have jobs. Once computers are doing creative work even that industry will be closed to humans. At that point we'll have to own up to the work->money system not working so well...

Re:Waiting..

[amRadioHed]

The iPhone was announced January 9, 2007. This multi-touch demo is from 2006.

The stuff in that demo seems awfully similar to what is in the patent. It's not Surface, but I was just guessing that it was a Surface demo I saw first. The actual name is not relevant.

PS: I made no wholly inaccurate statements, just asked a few questions. You could have tried answering them without the the unwarranted rudeness

Re:Waiting..

[mattack2]

You do realize that companies can LICENSE patents, don't you?

Just because a company patents something doesn't mean that other companies can't use those technologies -- it just means that they can't use them WITHOUT COMPENSATION to the patent owner. Yes, AFAIK, the patent owner can decide to not license the patent at all. But they could decide to. (I presume they could also patent it for *no* fee, but simply choose who to license the patent to -- e.g. license the 100 mpg car technology to OtherGreenCarCompany1, OtherGreenCarCompany2, but not GM, Ford, etc.)

Re:Waiting..

[saunderscc]

More likely Google, and others, would have developed. Once "search" companies became successful, a lawsuit would have forced (in the event of a legal setback/settlement) payment of royalties by the viable companies. Better than venture capital if you own the patent and a bankroll to defend...

Re:Waiting..

[saunderscc]

The example of the 100-mpg car that was patented isn't realistic, but it illustrates the problem with the patent-kept-another-invention/innovation-from-happening argument. First, you wouldn't patent a car, per se. You would patent the systems, processes, etc. that enabled the astonishing mpg. Second, if someone did have a patent for a 100-mpg car, it would pay (in the most ginormous way) to license your technology to other enterprises with the capital to do something about it. Just saying...

Re:Waiting..

[Kalriath]

I give up. You're obviously going to continue with your opinion no matter what.

But one question:

If I replaced all instances of "Apple" with "Microsoft" in the original post, would your answer be the same?

Re:Waiting..

[mysidia]

Their investors would sock them if their officers if they intentionally ignored an inconvenient patent of a technology so crucial to their enterprise.

What most likely would have happened is creator of technology would demand payment per-SEARCH.

The result is the first generation search engines aren't nearly as successful as they were.

Paying an additional $0.02 or $0.05 a search may not seem like much, but it makes scaling expensive.

Maybe Google would have arised, but it wouldn't be a multi-billion$ company that had the cash to go on and acquire all sorts of other companies like Youtube and develop all sorts of useful projects.

And more likely than not, pay-to-search would have arisen for passing costs on to consumers, otherwise known as a "$20 / month subscription" for the ability to use Infoseek, or Yahoo, or MSN Search, with X number of searches included.

Also, remember, patent holder can play favorites, and only allow licensees who are most profitable to them to do business.

If Yahoo only net'ed them a few hundred million$$ per month, they could refuse to renew Yahoo's royalty license (Yahoo can no longer be a competitor), and instead choose to license the technology only to MSN, who happens to pay more in terms of license fees per search, since they're using the "premium edition" of the technology, even if it's a Windows-user-only search engine.

Re:Waiting..

[Abcd1234]

I'm curious if a patent ever is a good thing for the public.

Given the alternative is keeping the idea a trade secret, I'd say the answer is a resounding yes. Which would you prefer? No one knowing how technology X is implemented, ever, or granting a limited time monopoly in exchange for the disclosure of said invention?

Of course, I want to qualify this by pointing out that not all inventions should be protected by patents... Apple's multitouch user interface seems like a classic example of something that should fail the obviousness test. OTOH, the technology to actually implement a multitouch display is certainly a patent-worthy invention, IMHO.

Re:Waiting..

[Carewolf]

The LG Prada phones shipped 8 months before the iPhone. 6 months before the iPhone it was celebrated as "Phone of the Year", and featured on several covers of monthly magazines. The first pictures and descriptions of it was available more than a year before the iPhone was revealed.

Seriously I doubt Apple threw away a complete design 12 months before, the similarities are probably more accidental, with some minor experience based improvements possible on the Apple side. The existence of the Prada phone only demonstrates that even in the UI and interface the iPhone was not revolutionary or innovating, and it makes it easy to make fun of Apple as "copy-cats", a well deserved punishment for years of accusing everybody else of copying them, and pretending to be "innovating".

Re:Waiting..

[DECS]

Oh Jesus have you even seen a Prada phone? It's a complete POS with the same unusable crap interface on every other phone.

If LG was so far ahead (pics leaked, but the LG phone didn't ship until well after the iPhone unveiling, and the iPhone shipped 6 months after Macworld, so where is this 8 months idea coming from?) , then why hasn't the company been able to do anything since the iPhone's launch apart from pooping out a bunch of pathetic iPhone-wannabes: the Vu, Viewty, Dare, Voyager, etc.

The only similarity between the iPhone and the Prada was the FREAKING NUMBER KEYPAD, and there isn't much room for basic innovation there. Clunky buttons and sliders, square edges, thick in hardware, and the software was based on atrocious Flash Lite garbage.

Your concept of "innovation" is seriously spastic when you confuse "the shape of a box" with being able to deliver a functional, sustainable software platform with a consistent, well thought out user interface.

And the next question: how many people are still using the Prada, compared to the original iPhone model? And are they happy with it? There's certainly no reason to think they should be. It was garbage.

When you say shit like the iPhone was "not revolutionary or innovating" because you've seen a handset before, it just makes you look like an ignorant dipshit. If it weren't revolutionary, it wouldn't have upset the market and changed what everyone was doing. It if wasn't innovating, everyone would have passed it up with their superior models.

Consequences for competitors?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

While many people paint Apple as a friendly company, (who wouldn't sue a school), the fact is that COO Tim Cook said recently (at a quarterly earnings conference call):

We approach this business as a software platform business. We are watching the landscape. We like competition as long as they don't rip off our IP. And if they do, we will go after anyone who does.

and

I don't want to talk about any specific company. We are ready to suit up and go against anyone. However, we will not stand for having our IP ripped off.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[dangitman]

Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of Intellectual Property is inherently evil.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of Intellectual Property is inherently evil.

Sure - hardly anyone thinks all Intellectual Property laws are inherently evil, but threatening that you "are ready to suit up and go against anyone," is not the actions of a company that's as ethical as Apple like to present itself.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[dangitman]

but threatening that you "are ready to suit up and go against anyone," is not the actions of a company that's as ethical as Apple like to present itself.

How? If your ethical system agrees with patents and enforcing them in court, then it's perfectly ethical. It's certainly legal.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[bit01]

Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of Intellectual Property is inherently evil.

Which "concept of intellectual property" are you talking about?

IP as it is currently implemented in the law? IP in the patent office fantasy land? IP scientifically and rigorously justified to advance the state of the art? IP that protects hard work and not just fishing expeditions? IP that represents true innovation, as recognized by peers and not some bureaucrat? IP that is unambiguous and not handwaving?

The reality is that the entire patent edifice, as currently implemented, is at the bottom based on a very dubious and entirely arbitrary ideas about what it means to say two ideas are the same or different. It's all hand waving.

The patent office can't even separate new words from new ideas. Let alone something as utterly trivial as (compared to the universe of ideas) e.g. deciding whether two shades of orange are the same or different.

Unlike physical property where boundaries between property items are very carefully defined and generally recognized.

---

Patents: When all they've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

If your ethical system agrees with patents and enforcing them in court, then it's perfectly ethical.

So, you see no difference between (say) a patent troll, a broad, over-reaching patent, a concise patent on something genuinely novel & a patent on something with prior art?

The ethics of filing for & using court to enforce each of the patent types above is different. I certainly do.

You seem to have a rather naive view that people think either patents are inherently evil or OK. Like most things in life, there are shades of grey.

It's certainly legal.

Legal != ethical. I don't know why the fuck you bought that up.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[getuid()]

How? If your ethical system agrees with patents and enforcing them in court, then it's perfectly ethical. It's certainly legal.

Ethical and legal are two different pairs of shoes. They don't always match.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Adrian Lopez]

Heck... Apple is the company that sued Microsoft over the "look and feel" of Microsoft Windows being too similar to Mac OS. Back then, anything other than a command-line interface would have triggered a lawsuit from Apple. Apparently they felt they were entitled to exclusive rights to GUIs for being the first to popularize them.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Lars T.]

I find it odd that your link that supposedly shows Apple sued a school doesn't even mention a school, and also says nothing about Apple suing anybody, but then - it's one of your posts, so it's bound to be full of misinformation.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[dangitman]

So, you see no difference between (say) a patent troll, a broad, over-reaching patent, a concise patent on something genuinely novel & a patent on something with prior art?

Absolutely I see differences, and I think the patent system is not in good shape and should be reformed. But without that reform, the laws make it difficult to separate them, save for some insightful rulings by judges.

You seem to have a rather naive view that people think either patents are inherently evil or OK. Like most things in life, there are shades of grey.

Which is basically what I was hinting at in the first place.

Legal != ethical. I don't know why the fuck you bought that up.

Because for things like public companies, the law is the foundation of ethics. Sure, individual ethics can go beyond that, but it's a basic framework for public legal entities.

What I was trying to get at is that there are many different frameworks for ethics. In the eyes of some shareholders or economists, it would be unethical if Apple didn't use the court to protect their patents to the fullest extent possible. You'll certainly see that argument a lot on slashdot - that a publicly traded company must do everything possible for the bottom line, to the detriment of all else.

Now, I don't agree with that, but we are dealing with a complex set of overlapping ethics frameworks here.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[dangitman]

Ethical and legal are two different pairs of shoes. They don't always match.

I know. Read my previous post.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[dangitman]

Which "concept of intellectual property" are you talking about?

I'm talking about the general concept. Many people on slashdot seem to think any form of IP is immoral, criminal, or wrong.

The reality is that the entire patent edifice, as currently implemented, is at the bottom based on a very dubious and entirely arbitrary ideas about what it means to say two ideas are the same or different. It's all hand waving.

Sure, I agree that the current system is very flawed. I never said otherwise. But it doesn't change the fact that that's the system. It needs to be reformed. The problem is that if you want to play in the technology sphere, you have to use it, or someone else will use it against you.

See my previous comment.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Weedlekin]

"Apple is the company that sued Microsoft over the "look and feel" of Microsoft Windows being too similar to Mac OS"

They also sued Digital research for GEM, which also bore an uncanny resemblance to MacOS (much more so than Windows 1.0), and HP for NewWave.

"Back then, anything other than a command-line interface would have triggered a lawsuit from Apple."

This isn't actually true, because there were other companies making GUIs at the same time which Apple didn't go after due to them not copying concepts that Apple had developed for the Lisa rather than them having been part of the Xerox STAR software system (e.g. menus and overlapping windows, neither of which were present in the original Xerox UI).

NB: it's interesting to note that both Apple and MS licensed the basic GUI concepts from Xerox independently during a similar time frame. This was a significant factor in the judge's eventual ruling, which went against Apple on the grounds that everything copyrightable had been licensed to both parties by the legal copyright holder, and the remaining stuff which had been developed by Apple couldn't be copyrighted.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I find it odd that your link that supposedly shows Apple sued a school doesn't even mention a school, and also says nothing about Apple suing anybody, [emph mine]
Says nothing about Apple suing anybody? The headline is "Apple sues Big Apple". I don't expect people to read the article, but at least read the headline.

Seriously, yes, I linked to the wrong article. Here's the correct one.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[bit01]

I'm talking about the general concept. Many people on slashdot seem to think any form of IP is immoral, criminal, or wrong.

My point in part, probably badly expressed, was that there is no "general concept", despite what the patent lobby claim.

IP changes character completely depending on who you assign the ownership to (user, inventor, developer etc.), how far reaching each ownership grant is (all possible variations of an idea or just a particular example) and for how long it is (zero time or forever). Most people here would at least support what you probably regard as a weak concept of IP ownership, that of giving credit in perpetuity. Most also think that first mover advantage is sufficient reward for most forms of IP.

Others support assigning financial control on some combination, or not, of business processes, chemical processes, computer algorithms, mathematical algorithms and traditional machine patents. Some would support automatic patent assignment like copyright, others no. Others like you appear to support copy control with all financial rights assigned to the first person past the gate. Others support more limited rights like split ownership for bonafide independent re-invention. Some support the patent office bureaucracy as a means of assessing patents, others no. Other more blue sky variations include things like patents not applying to certain groups in society (e.g. children or researchers), patents having varying time periods depending on field, patents only having value to the extent that they are explicitly paid for, innocent until proven guilty for patent infringement, independent re-invention being a valid patent infringement defence, patents not given to the inventor but to the best exploiter, only a fixed number of patents given per year. patents not awarded for anything except things that can be explicitly and individually proved to have high research costs, independent reinvention invalidates a patent, different aspects of patents given to different entities etc.

All of these things change the character of IP completely. Patents as they are currently implemented are only one of a virtually infinite number of possibilities. People here typically disagree with the patent office way of doing things but I think most people here would agree that intellectual work should be rewarded while also saying that copying of ideas should be as liberal as possible. Personally, I find it strange that the legal system allows a single individual to restrict the use of an idea that could potentially be copied/used by billions. Patents made more sense when the population was smaller. In addition it seems that most of the ideas the patent office assigns ownership to are ideas whose "time has come", that in a population of billions will be independently re-invented many times, negating most of the ethical basis for patents.

---

Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical (not legal) argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Darth]

I was on that earnings call and heard that statement. It was in response to a question that asked specifically what Cook though about other company's products that appeared to be ripping off Apple's technology. The questioner specifically mentioned Palm.

Cook's response was simply that they like other companies competing with them because it pushes them to improve the products, but if a company is ripping them off, they'll pursue it. He also said he couldn't comment on a device that isn't even on the market yet, like Palm's new device.

The "We are ready to suit up and go against anyone" line wasn't about lawsuits. He was talking about competing in the market.

Personally, I dont think that sounds any different than any other company would say to the same question.

Apple is no more or less friendly than any other company.

Re:Consequences for competitors?

[Riven.exe]

Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of Intellectual Property is inherently evil.

Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of blowing humans up (especially Americans) is inherently evil too.

Computer-implemented?

[daybot]

A computer-implemented method...

Oh God, is iPhone becoming self-aware?

Re:Computer-implemented?

[microbee]

Sure, otherwise why does it have an "i" in the name. (just to clarify it DOES NOT mean "idiot")

Re:Computer-implemented?

[darkmeridian]

Courts have recently held that American patent law does not allow an inventor to claim mental processes that were not tied to machines or other physical entities. For the longest time, courts have said that American patent law could be used to claim anything under the sun made by man. But courts have now held that mental processes cannot be patented. You cannot patent a process for adjudicating disputes using human insight.

In this kind of an environment, it does not hurt to be overly cautious and say that this Apple patent only claims a method implemented on a computer or a machine and not be overly broad by covering sign language.

Re:Prior art is available

[KibibyteBrain]

This is even more confusing, since Apple bought the Fingerworks technology which already had a bunch of this technology in effect, well before the patent. I believe you are not allowed to publicly disclose a technology before filing for a patent if you want protection in most cases. Also, What is Apple Trying to accomplish? All I can see coming of this is a patent cold war, where companies like Palm and RIM will use their patents on obvious basic functions to threaten Apple similarly. Not to mention, some of the pioneers of PDA Phones like Kyocera who might see Apple messing around with lawyers as an invitation to sue them for the very basis idea behind their phone. Nothing good can come of this for anyone, Mr. Cook.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[0xdeadbeef]

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[djupedal]

> Apple is the new Microsoft.

LOL

MS couldn't come up with anything nearly as sophisticated as the iPhone... And their 'Surface' table - funny that it doesn't have anything to do with touch.

MS abuses from the point of a bully, far from anything groundbreaking and you throw Apple into the same bag - hilarious, simply hilarious.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[daybot]

LOL...MS couldn't come up with anything nearly as sophisticated as the iPhone

Er, I think the GP was making a point about Apple's business practices - i.e. innovation-stifling, monopolistic, evil.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[tyrotyro]

Apple is the new Microsoft.

And like Microsoft, Apple also patents ideas with clear prior art. Take a look at Daniel Stenberg's post about two cases where Apple patented ideas that were included in Rockbox years before.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[fabs64]

Did you miss the 80s and early 90s or were you just not here?

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[jwdav]

I don't believe any company has lost as much money as Apple due to not having proper patents and enforcing them. Microsoft alone built a large part of their business courtesy of Apple's prior ineffective enforcement, from Windows to QuickTime and a lot in between.

The fact is, if Apple had not done multitouch first, they would have nothing to patent.

Since they had the vision, did the R&D, bought a few companies and released an actual product incorporating the technology, it would seem they are entitled to a patent on that work. If there is nothing unique or prior art in the patent, it will not stand anyway.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Lars T.]

Sorry, but saying "wouldn't be nice if x existed" doesn't count a prior art. If this is included in Rockbox, he should say that it is, not that somebody once requested it to be included. As for the second claim - I have no idea what Rockbox actually does, but if it is what he claims Apple patented, it isn't what Apple actually patented.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[tyrione]

They most likely weren't born to witness the 80s and early 90s.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Kreigaffe]

On the other hand, I don't think any company has lost as much money as Apple due to rigidly enforcing their monopoly.

Look at their home PC market. Look at it 20 years ago. Look at what they did to shoot themselves in the foot. You could choose between an *IBM compatible* or an Apple. Mac. Whatever.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Weedlekin]

The problem with Mr. Sternberg's claims is that neither of them actually holds any water, i.e.:

1) Adjusting volume according to ambient noise levels was a feature request that (a) never got implemented, and (b) now only exists as a table, so it's impossible to tell how close it is to Apple's patent.

2) Rockbox's "talking menus" are nothing like the system Apple have patented, and Rockbox was in any case far from being the first piece of software to use audio cues for selecting options.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[NexusTw1n]

I'm not convinced they did invent multi-touch first. I use a laptop powered by an N-Trig touch screen, which uses dual mode (pen, finger) ignores accidental touches (your palm) and implements gestures (two finger gestures allow you to scroll, zoom , one finger gestures move you back and forward etc).

This tech has been around on tablets for years.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[SupremoMan]

Apple is the new Microsoft.

Rather scary to contemplate, but inevitable.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[JonasH]

2) Rockbox's "talking menus" are nothing like the system Apple have patented

I'm sorry, but it's exactly like Rockbox' talking menus. Have you ever tried it? Knowing how it works, you couldn't tell from reading the patent application that it wasn't talking about Rockbox.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Frankie70]

Microsoft alone built a large part of their business courtesy of Apple's prior ineffective enforcement, from Windows to QuickTime and a lot in between.

Apple built a large part of their business courtesy of Xerox Parc's prior ineffective enforcement.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Weedlekin]

"I'm sorry, but it's exactly like Rockbox' talking menus."

I suggest that reading beyond the patent summary would be enough to indicate that not "exactly the same".

"Have you ever tried it?"

Yes.

"Knowing how it works, you couldn't tell from reading the patent application that it wasn't talking about Rockbox."

You have to read all the claims in order to tell the difference between closely related concepts, including those in two or more patents which cover similar concepts in subtly different ways. Doing this with Apple's patent reveals that what they're actually patenting is the idea of directly embedding information in a file's metadata that contains either the audio for the spoken information directly, or something that points to it if the audio info. is in a separate file.

"6. A method as recited in claim 1 wherein the selected audio file is associated with an associated media file, and wherein the method further comprises: retrieving the selected audio file from the associated media file. ...

"16. A method as recited in claim 15, wherein the method further comprises: inserting the audio file into the media file.

17. A method as recited in claim 15, wherein the method further comprises: inserting a pointer into the media file, wherein the pointer points to the audio file."

There are also other claims for things Rockbox doesn't do, so I had far less difficulty knowing that I wasn't reading about RockBox.

NB: patents tend to be as broad as they possibly can because the lawyers who write them know they're likely to be narrowed during court cases, so it's common for the real "meat" of a patent to be scattered somewhere among a bunch of more generic claims that are already covered by other (usually cited) patents or unpatented prior art.

Re:Prior art is available

[Sentry21]

Touchscreen devices are far older than 2001; the distinction here, I believe, is that it detects 'one or more' touches and applies heuristics to them (presumably to determine gestures such as pinch, twist, etc.), and then acts on the results of those heuristics.

Scrolling patent...

[Microlith]

It's basically a patent on how Apple handles scrolling on the iPhone. They've patented:

- Using a touchscreen to scroll in one dimension
- Using a touchscreen to scrollin two dimensions
- Using a touchscreen to shift between items in a list

Basically, scrolling in your address book, in Safari, and coverflow. The "heuristics" are all about analyzing the inputs and motions in the context of the application, and not interaction with any onscreen element.

Now it's HTC, Google, and Palm's turn to scramble for prior art. The attempt to claim this with single inputs even, however, may weaken the basis.

IANAPL. HAND.

Re:Scrolling patent...

[shank001]

'A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command.

So in plain english he is saying is:

I've developed a program which will know where you touch on a touch-screen(which is basically a touch-screen-driver). Didn't we have this in the linux before? This can be considered Prior Art right?

Let me elaborate:

a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command,

Implies that you can have vertical scroll. (Openmoko has this. You can do a vertical scroll on the home page)

a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command

Which is basically like the HTC Diamond Touch doing effects like compiz.

a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

Which says that you have a gesture to go to the next item. (again Openmoko already has this. The illume keyboard changes the keyboard format on slide)

When most of the code is out there, how can this patent be granted!

Re:Prior art is available

[WCguru42]

I believe you are not allowed to publicly disclose a technology before filing for a patent if you want protection in most cases.

Nope, it's just a dangerous practice because once your technology becomes public anyone can try to get a patent in before you.

Re:Prior art is available

[PPH]

Sounds like an old Tektronix X Terminal we were workig with at least a decade ago. It was equipped with a touch screen and I know we had various gestures mapped to scrolling functions.

heuristics are out.

[NonUniqueNickname]

Heuristics, by definition, are just an educated guess. If you write software that gets it right without guessing you can circumvent the patent entirely.

Besides, didn't the palm pilot already do that for Graffiti back in the 20th century? Sans multi-touch of course.

Patent to the touch

[ArtificialPulse]

Can you patent a hand gesture? A little birdie told me one for these guys...

"one or more finger contacts"

[bschoate]

This patent seems pretty bound to fingers, so multi-touch toe interfaces are wide open, folks!

Re:"one or more finger contacts"

[supernova_hq]

Tomorrow's headlines: Doctor's say athletes foot and planters warts have become worryingly common in the pas few months...

Re:"one or more finger contacts"

[dwarfsoft]

You think THAT is the issue... just wait until the Toe methods are patented... then the competing devices are ones that only men can use... and you don't wanna know what kind of diseases suddenly became worryingly common in those months. *shudder*

Re:"one or more finger contacts"

[Tablizer]

This patent seems pretty bound to fingers, so multi-touch toe interfaces are wide open, folks!

Dibs on iFart, orFace, and iPit!
   

Re:"one or more finger contacts"

[jonaskoelker]

This patent seems pretty bound to fingers

Me and the missus want the next thing in social computing: multi-touch tongue interfaces ;)

Re:"one or more finger contacts"

[FrankieBaby1986]

Well, I've developed a multi-touch system that uses your fingerNAILS instead of your fingerTIPS!

Re:Prior art is available

[calmofthestorm]

Great...so my multitouch tablet just got patented out of innovation. Ah well.

Prior art?

[xlotlu]

How about the Palm gestures?

Re:Prior art?

[skyphyr]

Not to mention the idea of stretching something has been around forever. Plus there's a small piece of prior art (albeit theoretical) that some people may be familiar with http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/

Re:Prior art?

[StreetStealth]

This could get really ugly really quick.

Palm has essentially been wielding the nuclear stick of patent-MAD with its most recent response to Apple patent saber rattling.

Of course, perhaps a patent armageddon is just about due right now.

Re:Prior art?

[supernova_hq]

Technically it was not a "touch" interface, since the user never actually "touched" the screen.

Re:Prior art?

[GF678]

Of course, perhaps a patent armageddon is just about due right now.

I don't think sending Bruce Willis to drill down into the heart of Apple HQ, plant a nuke and detonate it while still stuck inside is a worthwhile course of action.

Re:Prior art?

[Kalriath]

Now, if we can get Tom Cruise to do it...

Re:Prior art?

[Aladrin]

Since the patent says '1 or more fingers', wouldn't the Android interface be the same? So they're also taking one Google and possibly HTC. And Samsung. And everyone else making an Android phone right now.

I think maybe Apple has bitten off more than they can chew this time.

Re:Prior art?

[tyrione]

How about you read up on the concept of Patents and grasp the context in which the iPhone gestures, with it's hardware, actually interacts and how come it's an innovation and won't be challenged as prior art. Seriously, an excellent text on Patent Law and how it works is ``Patents and Trademarks, Plain & Simple,'' by Michael H. Jester-Registered Patent Attorney. ISBN1-56414-728-2

His last name aside, the man destroys all the misunderstandings of the term, ``prior art'' and cites countless examples on how the patent system is designed and continues to sustain it's value.

Re:Prior art?

[monktus]

Palm has essentially been wielding the nuclear stick of patent-MAD [precommunity.com] with its most recent response to Apple patent saber rattling.

Ah MAD - Mutually Assured Deposition.

Re:Prior art?

[Zerth]

Ditto RIM with the crackberry storm. Although anybody with a patent can make them their bitch, they're Canadian.

Re:Prior art is available

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Shut up, traitor. Tektronix traveled through time to steal that technology from Jobs' private R&D sanctum...

Re:Prior art is available

[atraintocry]

It's a patent on the iPhone interface as a whole, not touch screens.

Isn't that what patents are meant for

[youcantwin]

I did not RTFA so I don't know how much this patent covers but nobody can deny that Apple came up with an innovative good interface that everybody is trying to copy now.
Sure it sucks to be a copycat now but maybe it will push these people to innovate like Apple did.

If the patent does not include every single interface using some kind of touch or multi-touch technology (which it might...) there is still room for innovation.
It's sad that nobody came up with a clean UI like that before but you have to give credits to Apple for that.
I really like the iPhone UI but it's far from perfect. I could think of lots of different ways to improve on that.
If I can do it, I'm sure some phone makers can do it too.

Impress us!

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[artor3]

I really like the iPhone UI but it's far from perfect. I could think of lots of different ways to improve on that.

If I can do it, I'm sure some phone makers can do it too.

Can you really think of any improvements that don't involve scrolling or submenus? Remember, if I patent a wheel, and you then patent a bicycle, you still can't make any bikes without my permission. Apple has patented using your fingers to scroll in one or two dimensions, and using your fingers to enter a submenu. That means that no other company can have any sort of touch screen-based scrolling or menus for the next two decades, no matter what sort of improvements they may think of.

If this patent stands, it pretty much guarantees that touchscreen technology will stagnate and die.

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[ConanG]

If this patent stands, it pretty much guarantees that touchscreen technology will stagnate and die.

No, it means Apple gets to use their patented ideas exclusively for the next 18 years. If they keep using it, it's not dead. If they keep improving it, it's not stagnant.
It'll only stagnate and die if Apple lets it.

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[Lars T.]

Remember, if I patent a wheel, and you then patent a bicycle, you still can't make any bikes without my permission.

Sure, but neither can you. So if you want to, you will have to make a deal with him.

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[howlingmadhowie]

and the party that gets the best deal will be the party with the best lawyers. meanwhile, free software developers will be unable to use the idea because they could never afford to license it.

in the beginning, computing (like any theoretical science) was about learning and work and inventiveness and intelligence and dedication. now it's about who has the most money for lawyers.

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[Lars T.]

in the beginning, computing (like any theoretical science) was about learning and work and inventiveness and intelligence and dedication.

And ten seconds later it became an applied science - live with it.

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[Lars T.]

And if there were no patents, he would simply build bikes with his wheels, and the poor bike inventor would get nothing out of it. Sure, he could try to build his own bike with his own wheels - but then the wheel guy would just sell his stuff cheaper, because he can even out the losses from his other wheel sales.

And we didn't even get to the part where nobody but the original inventor exactly knows how wheels are build exactly, what tools to use etc.

Re:Isn't that what patents are meant for

[howlingmadhowie]

but it isn't an applied science like astrophysics where you have to spend billions on equipment to find something new. it could be a free field where everybody has access to the sum knowledge and a machine to allow experimentation.

but no, that wasn't to be. instead we have patents on patterns of bits and bytes and mathematical algorithms. it really is quite sad and shows the weakness of government in the face of the corporations.

Hope

[EdIII]

I sincerely hope they are willing to be generous with license agreements to competitors since Apple products suck.

Yeah, I said SUCK. I already have my DragonArmor vest on, the windows are boarded up, and I think I will survive the siege with a few tons of hot pockets. I await the storm...

Apple has been so disappointing as they have repeated Sony's mistake about obsessively locking down their products. The iPod on its own is a great product. The software support for it is horrible and Apple has made it incredibly difficult to use anything but iTunes to manipulate the music stored on MY FREAKIN DEVICE. iTunes does not offer the features and abilities I want and I have always found it to be unstable on every system I have put it on.

There are plenty of other examples, but I don't mention this to bash Apple. Truly I don't. I mention this since it would make it nearly impossible for competition to survive the LawyerPult over at Apple HQ.

If nobody else can use this technology for 20 years (possibly more since we are going nutso over IP protection) then Apple will have far less motivation to make a great product, develop better software for those products, and service them.

It's the beginning of a monopoly over a human interface. Any company having that makes it bad for the consumer, but Apple has demonstrated to me, that it already does not care about my needs as a consumer.

Re:Hope

[Toonol]

I don't use a Mac, I use Windows primarily. So my exposure to Apple software is iTunes and Quicktime.

I can therefore say that every bit of Apple software I've used is atrocious, as bad as anything from Microsoft. I'll mitigate that some by saying that the ipod UI is fine; I don't find it particularly better than most other mp3 players, but no worse.

I guess that you really need to switch completely over to Apple, to really get the benefits; maybe the Windows versions are partially crippled. Still, while I wouldn't go so far as to say Apple products suck, my experience with them sure isn't selling me on them.

Re:Hope

[indiechild]

Sounds like you are better off with Linux or some other free OS/platform.

I don't think Apple ever really did care about the consumer. Apple makes products that it thinks are awesome; it certainly doesn't care whether the consumer thinks it's awesome. As far as I know, Apple has always been like this.

It's worked for me so far. I love my Apple products -- my iBook, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple TV. They've made life easier for me and given me far more enjoyment and entertainment than other products have.

Sure, I like free and open software and hardware as much as the next guy, but if a great product that suits all my needs comes along that is not free and not open, them I'm still going to use it.

I'm not going to pretend that Apple products are for everyone, and it certainly sounds like it isn't a good fit for you. You're a tinkerer, and in most respects Apple's philosophy does not play well with tinkerers.

There are usually plenty of other companies and manufacturers who make more open products. For my needs and wants, these products are usually not as good as the ones made by Apple.

Re:Hope

[indiechild]

I agree with you that Apple software on Windows tends to suck. QuickTime and iTunes on Windows are slow as hell.

I use a Mac most of the time, so this doesn't usually bother me that much.

I never encourage people to switch to Mac unless I know that personality-wise they'll be a good fit. There are certain people who would never be satisfied with Apple products. It's a completely different kind of philosophy and mindset.

Re:Hope

[tux0r]

Apple has been so disappointing as they have repeated Sony's mistake about obsessively locking down their products. The iPod on its own is a great product. The software support for it is horrible and Apple has made it incredibly difficult to use anything but iTunes to manipulate the music stored on MY FREAKIN DEVICE. iTunes does not offer the features and abilities I want and I have always found it to be unstable on every system I have put it on.

Have you used iTunes? Have you used Sonic Stage? I have used both, and in comparison with Sonic Stage's depths of hell, iTunes is blissful heaven filled with nubile servants.

However, my opinion is but an anecdotal contradiction to your anecdotal evidence. Meh.

Re:Hope

[tyrione]

You can say it, but it holds absolutely zero credibility beyond your own opinion.

Re:Hope

[idlemachine]

I sincerely hope they are willing to be generous with license agreements to competitors since Apple products suck.

I know that anecdotes != evidence, but here's mine anyway.

My only Apple purchase to date was a 3rd gen iPod which I picked up not long after its launch. I'd held off from the first two iterations expecting the product to be polished enough by then.

Unfortunately, I had two issues with it, which were annoying enough to prompt me to sign up to the Apple forums and make a polite general enquiry. Briefly: every time I turned it on it would skip the first track played, and as I listen to a -lot- of mixed music - where the transitions between songs are often as interesting as the songs themselves - I was surprised to find no gapless playback.

I was -astounded- to receive nothing but vitriol from the forums. The general consensus was that I was a dirty fucking liar who clearly didn't own an iPod otherwise I would know how baseless my "allegations" were.

However, the point at which I gave up, stopped reading and realised I would never own another Apple product again came when one of the iPod engineering team replied, stating that there (and I quote) "must be something wrong with [my] attention span" if I was so put off by a millisecond delay while listening to music. His solution for the skipping track problem was "use the previous track button".

Such a great community, filled with such genius insight...

Re:Hope

[BenihanaX]

Apple's decisions are not relevant to the discussion. Apple did not set up the USPO, and is not solely responsible for a lack of reform. They took necessary steps to ensure they would not be sued. If this style patent did not exist, what would motivate Apple to make a great product and develop better software. Other companies would just come in behind Apple and use their technology.

Re:Hope

[qwertyatwork]

I went pure linux (slackware, then moved to debian) back in 1996. Nine years later I got a mac. The problem with apple software on a pc, is that it uses an apple interface. I love the apples gui, in my opinion definantly better than anything else out there. However, when you put an application with an apple interface on a different system, its horrible. I agree on windows the apple interface is atrocious. Its like loading a gtk app in qt. It just doesnt look right.

Re:Hope

[EdIII]

You have obviously never used Apples products. For those of us that do, its real easy to spot people like you.

Ahhh, right. Negative comments about Apple = Someone who owns no Apple products.

Stop being such a dumbass.

I did pick up an iPod and you cannot transfer music to it directly without iTunes. It's more complex than that.

iTunes does suck, has sucked, and apparently will continue to suck. I have tried using 3rd party programs but its a war with Apple and they change the firmware so those programs don't work.

Ohhh, and let's talk about the iPhone shall we?

I don't need to own an iPhone to know that in order to do anything interesting and enjoy actual ownership of your device you have to jailbreak it. That little piece of information is not restricted to the Apple subjects is it?

Re:Hope

[EdIII]

I think you missed the point of my post.

There are usually plenty of other companies and manufacturers who make more open products. For my needs and wants, these products are usually not as good as the ones made by Apple.

I stated at Apple products suck because they are not open and do not play nice with the consumer. It's fine that you don't care about actually owning your device and you are content to "rent" it from Apple. That's cool. However, there are more people like me that want to do something with their hardware and won't put up with manufacturer locked down bullshit. Just look at the number of "hacked" iPhones, PSP's with custom firmware, and 3rd party iTunes apps that are in a constant war with Apple to maintain their function.

I did not buy an iPhone because of my experience with the iPod and knowing that Apple was going to to do their best to cripple the device. Was not interested in putting that much effort into doing it.

Your comment is fair that I can go someplace else, but what happens when there is no place else to go? Apple has a monopoly on any device that contains a touchscreen interface now. At least ones with heuristics, etc.

Who knows what will happen, but it is possible that for the next 20 years or more I will be forced to choose between Apple touchscreen products and non-touchscreen products from other manufacturers. This is not a good thing for me, or for a lot of other people.

That was my point. Apple has a monopoly over an interface itself and a lot of people don't like Apple for all the reasons we have discussed.

Re:Hope

[mjwx]

Forget about Linux support for Apple either.

I just don't buy apple products. Many non-apple MP3 players such as Iriver and Cowon support the MSC standard which simply makes the device act like a flash drive, that way I can load media to it from my Linux laptop and media centre as well as my XP based gaming PC and work PC.

Quicktime is one of the most bloated pieces of crap I've ever seen and Safari doesn't like proxies (kept crashing on an XP box before trying to authenticate) and Apple have bundled these in with Itunes so an Ipod owner has no choice but to install them, I'm waiting for an apple fanboy to tell me that isn't abusing a dominant market position al a Microsoft.

Re:Prior art is available from ... Tom Cruise

[Anonymous Coward]

Minority Report (2002)
iPhone multi-touch (2007)

I for one, welcome our Thetan overlords.

Other products developed while patent pending?

[shtrom]

what will this mean to other touch developers?

What about those which developed products with similar features while the patent was under examination?

To they just put their blueprints in the bin and try to find another idea?

I'm actually quite interested, if anyone has an idea, in the answer to this question: if you release a product before you get the patent, and concurent makers release similar products before said patent is granted, doesn't that constitute prior art?

Working in a research lab, we are regularly reminded that we should not publish patentable ideas before having patented them, as such publication would constitute prior art voiding any subsequent patent.

Anybody has clarifications?

Re:Other products developed while patent pending?

[artor3]

Disclaimer: IANAL, all this info is based on seminars on IP that I have (been forced to) attend.

What about those which developed products with similar features while the patent was under examination? To they just put their blueprints in the bin and try to find another idea?

Yes, unless they had already filed a provisional patent, which essentially says, "We're working on X, but don't have it developed enough to patent yet." In that case, so long as they file for the actual patent within a year, they will be the ones who end up getting the rights to the invention. Of course, only the details covered in the provisional will be granted to them.

I'm actually quite interested, if anyone has an idea, in the answer to this question: if you release a product before you get the patent, and concurent makers release similar products before said patent is granted, doesn't that constitute prior art?

If you release a product, or even announce technical details, before you apply for a patent or a provisional, then your own invention now counts as prior art which will prevent you (or anyone else) from ever patenting it. If I start selling time machines today, and apply for the patent tomorrow, I'll get rejected as there is prior art (fortunately, in that case I can just refile the day before I started selling).

However, if you applied for the patent, and then the other company made their device, and then you received the patent, you can stop the other company from making any more of their device. Since your patent was filed before their device existed, there was no prior art.

Working in a research lab, we are regularly reminded that we should not publish patentable ideas before having patented them, as such publication would constitute prior art voiding any subsequent patent.

As I said above, that is absolutely right. Once information is available publicly, it is considered no longer novel, which means that no one can ever patent it. Not even the inventors who released the info.

Re:Other products developed while patent pending?

[Exlee]

If you release a product, or even announce technical details, before you apply for a patent or a provisional, then your own invention now counts as prior art which will prevent you (or anyone else) from ever patenting it. If I start selling time machines today, and apply for the patent tomorrow, I'll get rejected as there is prior art (fortunately, in that case I can just refile the day before I started selling).(...)

Wait a sec... from what I see iPhone has been released 29 June 2007 and on the US Patent Office webpage I can see filled date April 11, 2008. Release date for iPhone touch is even earlier.

Does it mean, that Apple patent is invalid due to prior art thing?

Re:Other products developed while patent pending?

[Lars T.]

I'm actually quite interested, if anyone has an idea, in the answer to this question: if you release a product before you get the patent, and concurent makers release similar products before said patent is granted, doesn't that constitute prior art?

If you release a product, or even announce technical details, before you apply for a patent or a provisional, then your own invention now counts as prior art which will prevent you (or anyone else) from ever patenting it.

Wrong. It prevents others from patenting it, but you still have one year for filing a patent.

Prior art. ???

[TapeCutter]

it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'

Circa 1991-2 I was developing for an OS called PenPoint, it implemented gestures using "hueristics".

Re:Prior art. ???

[ConanG]

Multitouch gestures?

I'm not saying there isn't prior art for what Apple has patented, but PenPoint doesn't seem to be it.

Re:Prior art. ???

[TapeCutter]

"Multitouch gestures? I'm not saying there isn't prior art for what Apple has patented, but PenPoint doesn't seem to be it."

Read the first few lines of the link. Care to enlighten us as to how to make an X with a single stroke? /sarcasm

IIRC PenPoint even included a tool to define a command macro and then train the OS to recognise a new gesture to run it. From what I have seen handwriting/gesture recognition has not improved much in the last 20yrs, dramatically more powerfull devices is the main reason the engines are more practical than they were 20yrs ago.

Also, re-reding the link I found what could be an alternative explaination for Apple's behaviour: "In April 2008, as part of a larger federal court case, the gesture features of the Windows/Tablet PC operating system and hardware were found to infringe on a patent by GO Corp. concerning user interfaces for the PenPoint OS." ( "GO Corp." owned PenPoint )

Re:Prior art. ???

[Mattsson]

There is, basically, no real difference between multitouch gestures and singletouch gestures.

And the Apple interface isn't only multitouch. It is also singletouch. There is only limited use of multitouch in the Iphone/Ipod

And, anyway, that is simply a interface-design idea. Shouldn't be patentable in any sane system.

Re:Prior art. ???

[KlaymenDK]

it implemented gestures using "hueristics".

Is a colour screen required in order to support hueristicts?

Re:Prior art. ???

[tyrione]

Then defend it. What? You never filed a patent on this?

As I recall Leibniz was to Calculus what Newton was to Calculus. Newton got most of the fame for publishing first and Leibniz notation became the most commonly used notation.

If Apple didn't patent their work, Microsoft would and claim they invented it first [citing the patent] and screw everyone over.

Re:Prior art. ???

[Lars T.]

"Multitouch gestures? I'm not saying there isn't prior art for what Apple has patented, but PenPoint doesn't seem to be it." Read the first few lines of the link. Care to enlighten us as to how to make an X with a single stroke? /sarcasm

Sarcasm doesn't help if you are wrong - making one stroke after another is not thew same as making two strokes at the same time.

Re:Prior art. ???

[tolan-b]

I'm pretty sure there's prior art for multi-touch gestures. I certainly saw them before the iPhone was *released*. Whether it was before the patent I'm not sure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch#Fingerworks

Here's an example of multi-touch research that certainly implies it's using gestures based on its name (iGesture...).

Re:Prior art. ???

[tqft]

The Newton?

Couldn't it heuristically interpret "pen" strokes?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

Not fingers but a "pen" and would guess at what to do when you hit something with the "pen"

Re:Prior art. ???

[Weedlekin]

"Read the first few lines of the link. Care to enlighten us as to how to make an X with a single stroke? / sarcasm"

Care to enlighten us as to how to play a two or three part fugue on a keyboard with one finger, because that's the difference between what the parent and nearly everyone except you understands by the term "multi-touch" and single point of contact systems like PenPoint (or indeed, a mouse).

Re:Prior art. ???

[OolimPhon]

Read the first few lines of the link. Care to enlighten us as to how to make an X with a single stroke?

I have had no problem writing Xs in a single stroke on my Palm for at least the last 7 years.

Re:Prior art. ???

[TapeCutter]

Me? I didn't develop the OS, I developed apps for it. To be specific a simple but functional SQL parser that stored (amoung other things) gesture structures, part of which was a timeout value to help determine when to start translating strokes into a gesture/text. The other factors were positional, (eg: outside the square is a new character), characters and gestures used the same structure to represent pen strokes.

I have no idea who owns GO Corp.

Re:Prior art. ???

[tyrione]

Last I recall, the Apple Newton in 1989 paved much of the advances and foundations for pen and PDA interaction.

Re:Prior art. ???

[TapeCutter]

ASS-U-ME, I didn't realise it meant two pens - although I'm having are hard time figuring why you would want it on anything smaller than a table top?

Not sure how the hardware would have coped back then but PenPoint was OO from the ground up and made use of threads, two pens would have required nothing more than a new screen driver. It was "before it's time" so it ran like cold molases just loading a decent sized app into memory.

Re:Prior art. ???

[NatasRevol]

And is owned by Apple.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/22/some-iphone-touchscreen-roots-splained-by-fingerworks-inventors/

Yes, Apple bought the actual prior art, then patented it.

I don't agree with the patent system, but Apple did play within the rules.

Re:Prior art. ???

[mdwh2]

As I recall Leibniz was to Calculus what Newton was to Calculus. Newton got most of the fame for publishing first and Leibniz notation became the most commonly used notation.

Yes, it's such a shame that Leibniz didn't patent his notation, so that no one else could then use it, and instead we had to adopt the less preferable notation.

If Apple didn't patent their work, Microsoft would and claim they invented it first [citing the patent] and screw everyone over.

Actually, I'd say Apple are far more likely to misleadingly claim firsts: first GUI, first 64-bit computer, and now some people act as if they made the first mobile phone.

Re:Prior art. ???

[tolan-b]

heh, I just came back to correct myself after finding out Apple bought them.

However poking around elsewhere there did seem to be a fair bit of prior art regarding multi-touch gestures and touch screens. I don't think that combining multi-touch with a screen, when there's already single touch with screens, and multi touch without, would pass the 'not obvious' test.

Or I'd hope not anyway...

Re:Prior art. ???

[Abcd1234]

If Apple didn't patent their work, Microsoft would and claim they invented it first [citing the patent] and screw everyone over.

Except, of course, that Apple could just publish their ideas in a well-known trade paper, and voila, the idea becomes unpatentable.

Patents aren't required to protect your use of an idea. They're only required if you want to prevent someone *else* from using them (or if you want to use your patents as a club so you can violate someone else's, which is, I suspect, the way the Palm/Apple negotiations will end up playing out).

There is no other way of implementing this

[Morgaine]

And therefore Apple's patent is invalid, as it fails the test of not closing off the only way of doing something.

Fingers moving about on a point-detection surface are inherently ambiguous in their meaning, and therefore only a heuristic method can handle the problem -- a deterministic algorithm cannot.

The USPTO will happily allow you to patent breathing, but that doesn't mean that it will stand up in court.

It will be interesting to see Apple try to defend their Imaginary Property on this issue.

Re:There is no other way of implementing this

[beelsebob]

Perhaps that's why they patented using heuristics to solve the problem?

Re:Prior art is available

[dangitman]

All I can see coming of this is a patent cold war, where companies like Palm and RIM will use their patents on obvious basic functions to threaten Apple similarly.

But that's exactly what we've already got. It's been going on for a couple of decades at least.

Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[HockeyPuck]

Ok, so the first version of Firefox's "Mouse Gestures" came out on July 26, 2004 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/39#version-0.9.20040725. Which is before this patent was filed. So if we found evidence of someone using mouse gestures with a touch screen monitor, would that constitute prior art?

Re:Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[nwoolls]

"The Opera web browser has recognized mouse gestures since version 5.10 (April 2001)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_gestures

Re:Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[citizenr]

Ok, so the first version of Firefox's "Mouse Gestures" came out on July 26, 2004

you mean Opera Mouse Gestures ... Opera 5.11 April 2000.

Re:Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[TheNetAvenger]

If you are wanting to cite gestures as prior art, sure there is Firefox, but you could go back to the 80s or even pen-windows of the early 90s or even the TabletPC of 2002.

If you want to find where Apple got the specific 'gestures' they implemented on the iPhone, here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html

Apple literally ran from the TED conference to throw the multi-touch ideas from this presentation into a UI product.

If you notice, even the 'gesture' ideas the presenter 'made up on the fly' are exactly what Apple uses on the iPhone.

There are tons of prior art on the gesturing aspects of this patent, and Apple has some big b*lls to try think it will hold up. Especially, since the one of the main companies that will be forced to challenge the patent is MS, and Apple can't win against MS prior art, patents, and especially money...

So in a sick way, I hope Apple does what they will do and sue companies using a multi-touch interface, and wait until MS or equivalent steps in to take what is theirs out of defense alone or to protect another company, as MS has done before.

And after Apple loses the patent rights, watch as Apple pays royalties for every iPhone or iPodTouch, if not completely lose the rights to use the interface on the devices completely.

(Apple's ego could actually end up killing them.)

Re:Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[Aehgts]

Your argument definately has merit: I use these gestures with a tablet laptop[0]. This probably at least similar to the single finger section of the patent.

[0] The Opera Browser introduced integrated mouse gestures in version 5.10 back in April 2001, though I didn't get a tablet until '03.

Re:Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[onecheapgeek]

That certainly does seem to cover exactly what Apple has patented here, especially the heuristics used in zooming. Nice catch.

Re:Basic touch screen plus Firefox mouse gestures?

[tyrione]

No. The patent filing is over 600 pages. Read up on it.

Patents sucks

[yowlanku]

Patents sucks, specially when companies goes blind against development and feels they are knowledge and innovation overlords. Isn't it a subtle version of antitrust. Its like a genocide.

hah, I found prior art!

[sentientbrendan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

Oh... wait.

Well, software patents still suck.

Re:Prior art is available

[artor3]

Heuristics is just a buzzword you add to any patent application to make it sound more innovative. All it means is that the software makes a good guess based on less than perfect data. It would be impossible to make a decent touch screen without heuristics.

My company makes the microchips that Apple uses for their touch screens, and our app notes describe some basic heuristic algorithms for properly detecting fingers. I think the only reason we don't count as prior art is because their patent says it's done as a "computer-implemented method".

Re:Prior art is available

[artor3]

Incorrect. Any detail of the technology you disclose is no longer patentable. I think what you are thinking of are trade secrets. Keeping the inner workings of your technology secret is dangerous, because someone else might come along and patent it.

Heuristic defn: a commonsense rule

[MeridianOnTheLake]

The definition of a heuristic is a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem. Ok, so heuristics -- commonsense rules -- can be patented now. This is so far from the original patent intent that they should basically now be considered as a legal stand-over right rather than as a protection of a novel invention.

Olympus mp3 touch screen before iphone

[zymano]

http://www.hardwarezone.com/img/data/articles/2005/1479/olympus_mr-500i.jpg

Prior Art: Jeff Han's multitouch display at TED

[Paul Bristow]

Don't you think Jeff Han might just have some prior art on this? This link http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html shows his multitouch interface more than a year before Apple came out with their iPhone and before the Apple patent was filed.

Re:Prior Art: Jeff Han's multitouch display at TED

[im_thatoneguy]

Jeff Han even practically says in his presentation: "I'm not doing anything new or patentable. I'm just making it cheaper and bigger."

Apple didn't do anything new or patenatable. They just made it smaller and cheaper. But most importantly they actually did it.

Apple deserves accolades for actually implementing a sane interface on a phone. Then again what made the iphone possible wasn't someone saying "let's do multi-touch!" it was a screen with an accurate enough touch screen that multi-touch was affordable and usable in a product.

Apple is really good at getting to market first with cutting edge technology. Their 'innovation' is really in their hardware aquisition and licensing department. The Toshiba microdrive (not developed for the iPod but certainly exploited at its earliest convenience). Intel small form factor CPU (Macbook Air). Inexpensive capacitive touch LCDs. The hardware which enables these notable products is almost always made by someone else and designed for anybody to use but exploited first and well by Apple.

Does Apple deserve credit for being quick to pick up on opportunities such as Han's amazing presentation? Yes. Do they deserve a patent for putting the finishing touches on a marketable implementation? No.

Re:Prior Art: Jeff Han's multitouch display at TED

[Skuld-Chan]

We could always have the patent office re-examin the patent :).

Now Apple's got a monopoly on touch devices....

[Turzyx]

How long will it be before they have to offer Internet Explorer pre-installed as standard?

God, enough with this iCrap already!

[Marcx77]

iPhone iNterface.... Just call it a Nterface, like normal people!

Prior art

[pappin]

Wait a sec, did the Linux folks do this a few years ago with a touch screen? I remember seeing something like that, then microsoft did it as well.

Careful

[dreamchaser]

The subjects tend to get upset when one points out that their Emperor has no clothes on...

Potential Octupling Productivity: Gone!!!!!!!

[failedlogic]

From the headline: "...detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device..."

Darn it! All the touch screen interfaces I've seen only allow one or two fingers or then hand to control the interface. I was thinking of octupling productivity!

Seems to apply to ALL touchscreen devices

[altek]

One thing that does not seem obvious to previous posters is that this is not just about multi-touch, but about "one or more fingers" touching the screen. In other words, gestures.

There is a ton of touch software out there already using this, not just on phones but on tablets and other devices as well.

Re:Prior art is available

[Lars T.]

Incorrect. Any detail of the technology you disclose is no longer patentable. I think what you are thinking of are trade secrets. Keeping the inner workings of your technology secret is dangerous, because someone else might come along and patent it.

Incorrect. Any detail of the technology you disclose is no longer patentable by somebody else. In the US at least you still have one year to file for patent.

Sci-Fi movies

[failedlogic]

I can't believe in 'prior art' clauses, especially on /. there isn't thought to references made to Sci-Fi movies. There's plenty of 1 or 2 finger simulated-touch-screens I'm sure in the likes of Star Wars, Star Trek, Tron, The Matrix, etc. that might fit the characteristics of the Apple patent.

I propose, to embarass the US PTO and make a useful business communication device, a patent for mobile screen communication device that can be controlled with either: my tongue, nose, toes or elbows. Forked-tongue needs some software patents for the algorithm. You're welcome to design for other appendages. :)

Re:Sci-Fi movies

[Paul Bristow]

You're right. I once used a sci-fi Novel by Brian Aldiss to prove that a concept wasn't new. For controlling with other appendages take a look at www.fufme.com - this has been around since the dot.com boom

Re:Sci-Fi movies

[Teese]

My understanding is that the modern water bed wasn't patentable because Heinlein had described such a bed in enough detail in some of his sci-fi books (stranger in a strange land and Double Star) to be considered prior art. So there is some precedent for using sci-fi concepts as prior art. see wikipedia entry on waterbeds

Re:Sci-Fi movies

[sootman]

Look no further than 2002's Minority Reportwhen Tom Cruise was using the giant wall thing with the gloves. There was even some pinch/zoom stuff happening.

Re:Prior art is available

[91degrees]

No. Because it isn't a patent on the concept of the touchscreen itself.

Doing the same thing is not prior art. Doing the same thing in the same way is. Did the touch enabled computer allow you to scroll and zoom?

It probably couldn't even distinguish between one finger and two.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Semi-off-topic

[Waccoon]

If an interface concept is used in a movie and it is eventually turned into a real product and patented, does the implementation in the movie count as prior art?

I have a feeling prior art only applies to real, manufactured products, but I figured I'd ask. Wait... are we talking about patenting IP, where there isn't always a real product?

Re:Semi-off-topic

[dtmos]

If an interface concept is used in a movie and it is eventually turned into a real product and patented, does the implementation in the movie count as prior art?

Yes, it does, at least in the US.

The US statute reads, in relevant part, "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless--
(a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent ..." (35 USC 102)

Since finding printed art is a much stronger argument than, say, having sworn depositions from individuals in this country stating that they "knew" of the invention before the applicant claims to have invented it -- it's hard to cross-examine a scientific journal article -- that's usually the way these things go. The courts have a very broad interpretation of "printed," so don't worry, it doesn't have to be on paper. The emphasis is on "publication," i.e., available to the public.

[IANAL, but I've been down this road a few times.]

Re:Prior art is available

[im_thatoneguy]

It would seem to me that prior art of moving things around on my desk should nullify their patent.

"Using one or more fingers the piece of paper uses heuristics to determine where the hand wants the paper to slide."

You really don't get how patents work

[91degrees]

The attitude seems to be "OMG! They invented a user interface! But user interfaces have been around forever!!!!!"

Doesn't work like that.

This is not a patent on touch screens, or user interfaces. Inventions are incremental. Nobody has previously invented a UI that does exactly what Apple's one does in exactly the same way. this is a patent on a specific implementation of a touchscreen user interface that allows specific functionality and handles noisy input in a specific way. Most touch screens don't do this. They simply detect The centre of the touched locations.

I doubt this will stand

[Onyma]

This would be much too big of a blow to touch interfaces in general, someone will fight it hard. And once they do they only need one solid case of "prior art" to kill it, and there are tons of touch devices out before the filing of this patent. Apple may try but it won't stick.

Steve Jobs Rejoices!

[syousef]

When he heard the news, Steve Jobs was quoted on his sickbed as saying "How do you like them Apples!?" and chuckling maniacally.

Must-Read Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

for anyone gullible enough to think that Apple invented any of this stuff, rather than wait 20 years for the technology to catch up to the theory:
Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved .

Re:Prior art is available

[tolan-b]

There's prior art for multi-touch gesture systems from the early 90s at least (including touch being on a screen), probably earlier. As for the heuristics, I don't really see how else you're going to implement this, so I'm pretty sure those examples of prior art will match that part of the patent too.

Apples patent

[neptune612]

As much as I love Apple, this has the sounds of retribution for the Mac OS that MS has been stealing for the past 20+ years. Doesn't it just mean companies will have to buy the rights to use this technology/interface? It seems like companies who want to get on the bandwagon are going to fork out the cash or develop their own. Just follow Uncie Bill's lead and steal just enough to make it look like Apple, but isn't really Apple and there "aint" a damn thing Apple can do about it. I mean, when have the courts ever decided in Apples favor in reagards to other people ripping off Apples designs/look.

Microsoft Is Not Going to Like This....

[MadMorf]

What about MS's new touch screen stuff...

You think they're going to sit still for this?

Re:Microsoft Is Not Going to Like This....

[tyrione]

Since their implementation isn't remotely touching that of the iPhone and it's hardware/software interaction they'll be sitting on their hands for a long time.

If Apple were in Microsoft's position...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm pretty sure it would be safe to say that they would be far worse than Microsoft. Apple would be downright draconian. Their vision seems to be "don't touch anything, everything is done my way". I'd much rather have a sneaky bastard than an iron fist tyrant.

Re:Kinda agree with apple on this one

[Hognoxious]

I would allow a patent on the specific hardware that allows a touch screen to sense multiple touches.

But the idea of multi touch? No. On software that uses it? No. The concept has existed for a long time. A piano has multi touch - it can play two (or more) notes at the same time. When a key on a computer or typewriter keyboard is modified by pressing another key with it, like shift or alt, that's essentially the same thing.

The idea's nothing new. The hardware to make it practacal is.

Bring it on

[archeopterix]

Of course, perhaps a patent armageddon is just about due right now.

Bring it on. My big dream is a huge fucking armageddon where everyone sues everyone else over bogus IP, because that would effectively bring the end to the current IP mess. The alternative is much worse - a chilling effect that isn't seen by the general public.

but ... but

[savuporo]

Quick, someone resubmit that patent for buttocks- and toes-controlled interfaces, before Nintendo starts getting any funny ideas.

The Interface.

[MrCrassic]

Doesn't this just mean that any touch screen device with a similar interface would have problems getting out to market? If that's the case, then considering the other similar interfaces out there and how much they [b]suck[/b] compared to that of the iPhone, I'm thinking that this would actually make other companies think of something new...

Re:The Interface.

[MrCrassic]

Doesn't this just mean that any touch screen device with a similar interface would have problems getting out to market? If that's the case, then considering the other similar interfaces out there and how much they suck compared to that of the iPhone, I'm thinking that this would actually make other companies think of something new...

Simply ignore the patent...

[TheDarkMaster]

Too loosy patent == ignore. Simple that (and if i find a lawer, he will got a shot on head)

No it's not.

[yabos]

That was at a rest stop and it used old CRT monitors with a touch screen capability. There was no multi touch capability just single touch to select items/buttons. Apple patented multi touch which is using multiple fingers to do things such as the pinch gesture to scale images on the phone etc.

Re:Prior art is available

[witherstaff]

Minority report's user interface wasn't prior art? I guess you could just use the minority report without gloves UI on a phone to bypass apple's patent.

Re:Prior art is available

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

but there is prior art to that too. the Microsoft Coffee table is one example and the movie Minority Report is another example. and it was only in the movie because the technology had already been toyed with.

Re:Steve Jobs heart-lung transplant surgery next w

[Hal_Porter]

Would it not be ironic if Jobs died due to an unergonomic user interface on some medical equipment delaying his treatment?

Re:Prior art is available

[tyrione]

Someone who actually bothered to read a bit on the patent I see. There is hope humanity isn't completely braindead.

What happens when you get a graduate degree in CS

[professorguy]

a heuristic method can handle the problem -- a deterministic algorithm cannot.

I disagree with this assessment. Given that there are only a finite number of sensors in the touch screen, a algorithm can indeed calculate an outcome for every possible case--completely deterministic.

In fact, heuristics are in almost all cases actually 100% deterministic. Also, on a pedantic note, the definition of algorithm requires the deterministic part. When we talk of non-deterministic machines (where non-deterministic non-algorithms would play) this precludes CPU-controlled devices which are simple finite-state machines.

Your observation, therefore, is even more to the point: So I can't write a program to figure out user input? WTF?

Also: check out this guy's web page...

[gundersd]

Bill Buxton's multi touch history (in particular, check out 1992 onwards, starting with a system called "Starfire")..

I don't mind protection of truly novel ideas, but multitouch seems to me like one of those things that would be pretty obvious to any half-decent geek who's been presented with a piece of hardware capable of accurately reading such things.. (witness Jeff Han et. al).. Hell - the movie 'Minority Report' was released before the patent was claimed - doesn't that count as prior presentation of the idea?

It seems to me that iPhone-esque multitouch is the sort of thing that has probably been discussed over beer & pizza by literally thousands of wannabe dreamers who lack only the [ materials science background / electrical engineering knowledge / financial backing / time / etc / etc ] to pull it off...

*sigh*

Touch screen not invented by Apple

[forrie]

I recall seeing an article, perhaps here on slashdot, about the invention of the multi-touch interface; wasn't it at a college in the UK or somewhere. That being the case, Apple didn't invent it. It's possible they bought the rights to it - though, other companies have already begun jumping in to the "touch screen" interface market. You'd think that if there were danger of patent infringement, this wouldn't be the case? Doing a Google search for "invention multi-touch interface" brings up a few links, including one from freshpatents.com (patent #20090002328).

Re:Apple learned previous lessons

[Teese]

It's not the 1st time Apple does something like this. Years ago after "borrowing" Xerox's GUI they copyrighted the "use and feel" of the Lisa and Mac GUI.

Apple paid xerox in apple stock, to let their engineers see what was going on - so I don't think stealing is the right thing here.

Apple's copyright was invalidated by the time Windows 3.0 was released. :)

Apple's copyright wasn't invalidated, there was a contractual agreement between microsoft and apple that allowed microsoft to copy some elements of apples design. My understanding is that the contract was supposed to be for developing apps for the mac (apple's side of things), but microsoft claimed that it protected them in windows too. The judge agreed with microsoft in some places, threw out claims in others. The original lawsuit's copyright claim wasn't even considered, as it all became a contract dispute.

Open Source to the Rescue

[Awake7]

An open-source alternative published widely would be an interesting challenge.

I don't get it

[PlayerMissle]

How about if a small company was to invent the iphone and patent it, would that be a good thing?
Isn't the idea of patents suppose to encourage novelty and protect those who bring it forward?

Now Apple has accomplished the iphone and not some small company that would easily be trampled by a huge corp. Now what? make two sets of rules for large and small companies?
Patents are the price we pay for our way of life where everyone wants the new shiny thing. If patents were not around most of the things we now take for granted around us would simply not be.

Actually claim is very narrow....

[kansas1051]

Despite all the FUD in the comments, Apple has patented a very narrow set of gestures. The claims of the patent determine its scope and not anything else. Claim 1 is:

1. A computing device, comprising: a touch screen display; one or more processors; memory; and one or more programs, wherein the one or more programs are stored in the memory and configured to be executed by the one or more processors, the one or more programs including: instructions for detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display; instructions for applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device; and instructions for processing the command; wherein the one or more heuristics comprise: a vertical screen scrolling heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command rather than a two-dimensional screen translation command based on an angle of initial movement of a finger contact with respect to the touch screen display; a two-dimensional screen translation heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to the two-dimensional screen translation command rather than the one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command based on the angle of initial movement of the finger contact with respect to the touch screen display; and a next item heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

Although silly and probably invalid, the claim is limited to a very specific method of differentiating 1D vertical scrolls from 2D panning (using an angle of finger movement). One could easily implement multi-touch--and even 1D and 2D screen translation commands--with other methods.

Give them the "finger"

[whyde]

This patent reads to me to be too "finger"-centric. If the claims didn't specifically limit their utility to contact of a "finger" with the device, it could be improved upon if you could press anything (even a stylus) to cause the "touch." The motion and heuristic would still be triggered just by physical contact or close proximity with the detector, whether the detector was the display itself or some other part of the device.

There's lots of ways to design around this patent. It's not the end of the world. Innovators will innovate.

Re:Cost to develop drugs

[CrankinOut]

The last time I looked into this (several years ago), it was over $50,000,000 USD to bring a single drug from research to first market in the US. That cost includes development, manufacture, testing, and regulatory oversight. For a drug that doesn't make it through testing, some portion of that is expended with no return (other than knowledge).

Smells Like Prior Art ... Multitouch Timeline

[robotissues]

I dug a little and found this ... http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Loopholes leave hope

[PhreezeVi]

Actually guys hold up. All Apple did was take advantage of the part of the patent law that says that you can patent an improvement of any process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter. So by slapping some best guess software on an invention thatâ(TM)s been around since 1974 â" namely the touch screen â" they get to patent and control the market by standing on the shoulders of those that came before.

Solution? Improve on their idea just enough to slip through this rather large loophole in the patenting process (and survive Appleâ(TM)s armada of lawyers). Or have the patent laws changed so as to end these ridiculous abuses. In reality it should have been their code that they were able to patent but instead they are able to choke out the competition through this little loophole based on incremental change.

There is still hope for the advancement of technology even in the face of this old and painfully outdated system of patenting.

Prior Art?

[pappin]

Isn't there prior art for this stuff? I remember seeing a multi-touch interface done on Linux a few years ago and then Microsoft did one as well. What exactly does this patent cover?

Touch Gestures on a hand held device are not new.

[beekeepingenthusiast]

While the iPhone represents a great design effort, there is very little about the interface that is new. I do not expect these patents will get in anyone's way.

The ParcTab at Xerox was a hand-held touchscreen device with similar aspirations as the iPhone, and existed back in '92. The pinch gesture was described by Tognazzini at Sun also in the 90s. Lots of and lots of similar hand gesture and multi-touch work has been in the lab for years before the iPhone. Apple may be able to protect some very specific implementation decisions, but nothing the average user will even notice.

The novelty of the iPhone is the smooth, seamless integration of all these existing parts, but how do you patent seamlessness?

Apple and MicroSoft the same age

[peter303]

Founders are the same age too. Both did well in the 1980s. 1990s was good for MicroSoft and bad for Apple. Vice-versa for 2000s.

Re:Prior art is available

[Theaetetus]

I believe you are not allowed to publicly disclose a technology before filing for a patent if you want protection in most cases.

You're partially wrong. There's a one year grace period during which you're allowed to disclose it and even sell it in a product.

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

[keytoe]

Nobody seems to have brought this up, but Apple patenting this at the level they are basically makes it impossible to develop for the iPhone unless you are using the default framework widgets. If you want to do any of your own event tracking and gesture handling, you are violating the patent.

The UIKit framework provides all kinds of interesting controls for you to use that implement the behaviors they are talking about in this patent, but it also provides a generic touch tracking API that you are supposed to use to do your own gesture tracking. The problem is, anything you do in those touch tracking methods will require you to apply 'heuristics' to determine a 'command'. That is, in fact, exactly the way the low level touch tracking API is designed to work.

Want to have a custom view that allows you to scroll but don't want to use Apple's bundled UIScrollView? You violate the patent. Want to show a list of items and allow clicking one to view details without using Apple's UITableView? Patent violation. Want to follow the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines as published by Apple and make pinch/spread handle zoom but don't want to use a UIScrollView? Violation.

There are already countless applications on the App Store that violate this patent. Can we really expect Apple to start filing lawsuits against the very developers who make the platform interesting? Are they really saying "You can develop for our platform, but you can't actually do anything that includes handling touch input."?

Re:Prior art is available

[steelfood]

Touch screen technology has been around since the 70's. People have been waiting for the relevant patents to expire, which they did recently.

Flaws and solutions in the medical research system

[Jamie Lokier]

Would the research get done if the investment was not protected?

The question is loaded. Yes the research would get done, because there are other ways to protect investment and fund research than the current patent and licensing methodology.

In the UK, the NHS (national health service) is criticised for not paying £10,000/year for some expensive drugs that may save a person from cancer. The reason is that you can save a lot of other people from other things for that money.

But they do pay for some drugs at that cost. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that they pay for 1000 x £10,000/year drugs from some company.

Let's also say, because this is realistic, that the same drugs could be used on 100,000 people effectively instead, but the NHS cannot afford 100,000 x £10,000/year for the benefit likelihoods.

Research and testing are the reason for the high cost, as everyone points out.

Manufacturing costs are low for many of these drugs. This is obviously true from the low cost of generics as soon as patent protection expires, or in countries where patents are ignored or don't apply.

So, why can't the NHS pay the same company 2000 x £10,000 and have 100 times as much of the drug manufactured?

That would treat 100 times as many people, while providing the drug company with substantially more revenue. Everybody wins.

It would lead to more research than now, because of the increased drug company revenues.

So would the research get done if the investment was not protected at all? Perhaps not if there was literally no protection of any kind.

But it's clear as a bright day that the present system of private patents results in vastly more suffering and death than necessary (100 times as many deaths in this example, which is a realistic figure for expensive drugs which are cheap to manufacture).

Clearly, there is sufficient money, and sufficient organisational scale, to fund the same or more research and get those kind of drugs to vastly more people at the same time.

When that's not happening, the system is broken and should be changed.

Complete dismissal of private investment protection is probably not the answer; neither is motivating companies into keeping secrets to protect their research investments.

An independent body of medical economists and drug company auditors, having the power to enforce prices, and sometimes enforce the ability of generic manufacturers to play a part, in exchange for commitments to buy in large quantities, and required to follow sound, sustainable economic criteria when setting enforcements. That may be part of the answer.

Don't like big government? Before jumping to a gut conclusion, evaluate rationally in which scenario there is most benefit for each party. And when it's a win-win for all parties: the patients and the drug researchers and the drug company owners, it should be considered seriously don't you think?

Summary: Would the research get done if the investment was not patented and licensed as now?. Yes, it would. There is room for great improvement to everyone's benefit.

maybe it will just get thrown out

[jipn4]

Apple patent is one of the more ridiculous patents, for many reasons. If this really becomes important, it will be challenged and probably thrown out.

However, I'm not convinced that multitouch is even all that important to begin with, beyond the kind of multitouch that some touch devices have had for decades anyway. In particular, the pinch, rotate, and zoom gestures are mostly gimmicks.

The example of Fingerworks

[snowwrestler]

Hell, Apple's the one that bought out FingerWorks, the original patent holder for lots of other multi-touch tech, but wasn't really getting anywhere in their implementation.

Without those patents, would Apple have bothered to buy Fingerworks? Or would they have just used all of the Fingerworks ideas and built the iPhone anyway?

Patents exist in part to protect the small from the large. Without patent rights we'd probably still have the iPhone, but the Fingerworks guys would have gotten nothing in return for their pioneering work. By your line of thinking, we could say that Fingerworks was retarding innovation since they weren't getting anywhere in the market, while Apple had a good use in mind for the IP.

Property rights--intellectual or otherwise--are always somewhat inconvenient to business. But we protect them anyway since without them there is not much point to being in business in the first place.

Re:The example of Fingerworks

[Fallen Seraph]

No one's saying that Fingerworks shouldn't have received anything for their work, but the fact is, they WERE retarding innovation. And the reality still is the fact that the iPhone only happened because Apple was large enough to buy Fingerworks. If someone like IBM held the patents, and didn't want to give them up, or do anything with them, then this is bad for consumers and for technology in general.

The easiest solution I see is to require mandatory patent licensing after, say, 5 years or so. That way there's still some exclusive rights, but it allows others to build upon your work after a more reasonable amount of time.

U.S. is first-to-invent not first-to-disclose

[snowwrestler]

We know from Apple statements that they were working on the iPhone for at least 2 years prior to the public release. They bought Fingerworks in mid-2005, and Fingerworks was founded in 1998 based on multi-touch research done before that in graduate school. This is probably one reason that Jeff has been careful to point out that his work is not necessarily patentable. But that does not mean that Apple's technology is not patentable. If it came to a court case Apple would just need to be able to prove their IP predates other similar developments, like Jeff's. Since they bought IP from Fingerworks that might be true.

Re:Prior art is available

[snowwrestler]

Minority Report was a fictional movie. I don't think imaginary technology counts as prior art in the U.S.

Re:Steve Jobs heart-lung transplant surgery next w

[Rudd-O]

It would not be ironic. It would be fair.

Re:Prior art is available

[gundersd]

I thought that the "novel" part of the invention was supposed to be the "gestures" used over-top of multi-touch (as others have pointed out, multi-touch has been around for a long time before Apple started using it). Surely, if nothing else, 'Minority Report' shows that such tech is 'obvious' to anyone with an inkling of UI imagination...

Re:Steve Jobs heart-lung transplant surgery next w

[DECS]

Well actually, "ironic" would be an iPhone-interfaced hospital device failing, causing his death. But there is nothing to suggest that hospital equipment should be outfitted with mobile touch interfaces. It sounds like a terrible idea in fact.

On the other hand, recall that Apple developed unique, sophisticated IP on top of the basic UI concepts originating at Xerox, and those were stolen wholesale by Apple's key software development partner, Microsoft. Much of the world now thinks that MS invented or co-invented much of what it actually ripped off from Apple in the early 80s, and then forced Apple to agree to license to the company in exchange for two years of Excel exclusivity in 1985.

Microsoft continued to steal Apple's IP, including direct theft of portions of QuickTime that MS, using Intel, included in Video for Windows.

So the REAL IRONY would be Apple spending millions to make multitouch usable in a mobile device, and then letting its competitors once again rip it off and claim ownership again.

"Fool me twice... can't get fooled again" or whatever.

Anything in Apple's patents that isn't a valid, unique invention will be thrown out by the courts, just as Apple threw out half of the burst.com patents.

It's also useful to remember that the media is now made up of lying whores who say what they think will get the most attention, rather than journalists who are reporting what is actually happening. There is good reason to believe that Apple will not sue Palm, but is rather wielding its patents defensively, just as it has with the iPod. Remember when Apple sued Creative out of business? Oh right, that didn't happen. It was Creative who sued Apple, which in turn used its patent portfolio to turn Creative into a partner.

Why Apple's Tim Cook Did Not Threaten Palm Pre

Beating the patent system

[duden]

Agree with the posts about patents often being restrictive to innovation rather than promoting it. However, when thinking about how one could improve things, the route towards campaigning for patents as a whole being abandoned appears futile given the considerable commercial interests. Now, how about taking advantage of one of the pillars of the patent system, prior art. Imagine a website which would allow anyone to describe an idea at a high level and would certify the entry with a timestamp. This would presumably prevent anyone from being able to patent a similar idea in the future, but allow anyone from picking up the idea, implement it, and profit from it. Think of it as a 'open ideas' repository. Would that actually work? Has it been done? -if not, here's your chance, but you can't patent it ;-)

palm?

[dreemkill]

fair well Palm Pre, we hardly knew ye.

I'm not convinced.

[GPS Pilot]

two competing steam companies couldn't use each other's improvements

They could have licensed their improvements from each other. That way, both companies' products would be efficient, and at the same time, the company that came up with more/better improvements would receive greater financial reward, as it should. The idea of IP licensing probably was not as widespread in the 1800s as it is today; still, there was nothing stopping them from doing so.

suppose someone patented an affordable, powerful, stylish 100 mpg car (urban legend, I know). We'd have 20 more years of other car companies selling gas guzzlers because the one company sat on that patent.

If that company "sits on" the patent, as opposed to putting its 100 mpg car into production, it was probably never a viable product to begin with. (As is the case with many patented ideas that never go into production.)

Or suppose it was medicine -- you'd have people dying because they couldn't afford the prices of the main supplier, and their competitors couldn't use the formula.

Better that only rich people receive the drug for the first 20 years of its existence, than that the drug had never been developed at all due to insufficient incentives. It's not harsh to say that. It's compassionate. Think about it. If you want to make life-saving treatments more affordable for low-income people, by all means contribute to one of the existing charities that subsidize medical care for the poor. But please don't mess with the incentives that have spurred the development of myriad of remarkable life-saving treatments -- and might spur a treatment that will save your own life someday.

Re:What happens when you get a graduate degree in

[raap]

Heuristic simply means that your algorithm is not 100% correct. Top level human chess players use heuristics to play, they do not calculate all possibilities. Doing things by heuristics means guessing (and hopefully guessing right most of the time),

Re:Steve Jobs heart-lung transplant surgery next w

[hdon]

So the REAL IRONY would be Apple spending millions to make multitouch usable in a mobile device, and then letting its competitors once again rip it off and claim ownership again.

Yeah, but isn't the real point that this isn't a valid patent?- that the USPTO doesn't really make that judgment very well?- that the patent has been awarded and when it shouldn't have been?