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Is Apple's Multi-Touch Patent Valid?

Posted by timothy on from the what-the-judge-says-it-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There is evidence that Apple's multi-touch patent application may have failed to list some prior art that showed gestures in multi-touch interfaces as early as the mid 1980s. Some of these examples even appear in the bibliography of Wayne Westerman's doctoral dissertation, and he's one of the inventors on the application's list. If true, that could leave them wide open for legal attack, should they try suing someone like Palm for patent infringement. Also, Apple may be infringing some key multi-touch patents owned by the University of Delaware — and co-developed by Westerman while getting his doctorate."

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. If this follows the Bluetooth patents scenario... by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Apple will end up paying the University of Delaware a few million, and then happily proceed unencumbered - which is what happened when the University of Washington's Electrical Engineering department took on Matsushita et. al.

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  2. Problems with patenting... by Darkness404 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The problem with patenting multi-touch gestures is it can lead to a huge learning curve challenge. For example the Linux/Windows/BSD/etc multi-touch is going to be totally different than OS X's methods because of these patents, making it not only hard for people going to OS X but from people who primarily use OS X but can't use the gestures they are used to when on a different computer. This is similar to patenting QWERTY so every other keyboard manufacturer has to pick different keyboard layouts to typing becomes unbearable on different systems.

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