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New Apple Multi-Touch Patent Is Too Broad
adeelarshad82 writes "Nearly three and a half years later, Apple has finally been awarded the U.S. patent number 7,966,578, which according to the patent experts should worry rivals. According to exclusive interviews with patent experts, the incredibly broad patent puts Apple in a strong position when it comes to displaying content and using certain finger gestures on smart phones. The patent is so broad that not only will Apple's legal team target iPhone competitors but will also look to go after iPad and iPod rivals. Experts also discussed the scenario of Apple licensing its patented technology or for that matter, the courts completely scrapping the patent in public's interest."
If companies like Nokia can hold broad patents and require Apple to pay them $10 for every iPhone in licensing fees. Apple should be allowed to do the same to Nokia. The patent system has upheld these broad patents time and time again. If you want to do something in the publics interest, the entire patent system should be reformed.
Apple and others will continue to try for broad patents like this for the forseable future in order to protect themselves from crazy lawsuits made by others who have broad patents. Vicious cycle...
Don't hate the player, hate the game. The problem isn't so much specifically that Apple applied for (and got) this patent. It's that the patent system itself is out of control and stupid, and encourages companies to apply for overly broad patents.
I'm sure if Microsoft had a product in the works at that time, they'd have applied for this patent -- same goes for IBM, Google, or pretty much anybody.
If the courts are going to start scrapping individual patents in the public interest, they should do this for a very broad set of patents which do nothing but patent something which lots of people independently came up with.
Overhaul the patent system or fix the damned patent office ... but don't cherry pick which patents we figure should be over-turned so other companies can come out with products as well. Because there's a lot of patents which are just as fundamentally blocking to developing products as this multi-touch one.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I've got your patent *right* *here*.
The CB App. What's your 20?
This is one of the few widely-publicized patents in recent memory that I think is probably justified.
It's hard to remember back to before the iPhone existed, but devices like it weren't even on the radar of any major phone manufacturer until after Steve Jobs' announcement. Sure, the individual technologies had existed, but real progress comes from combining those technologies in completely unexpected ways. The iPhone was neither obvious nor derivative, and all the devices that have come since have benefited greatly from the research and development time and funds that Apple poured into the concept. This seems like exactly the sort of situation the patent system is meant for.
No comment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ
SeqBox
I'm pretty sure I was born with 10 fingers, so 'life' and 'reality' invented a multitouch universe
They're not defensive. They go after people with their patents. Good luck trying to prove they actually invented this crap in court though.
I personally hate gun makers for lobbing in a broken system to keep guns legal and to keep regulations at a minimum so they can sell as much as they can, but if I get shot in the leg by some person on the street, depending on the situation I think I'm well within my moral rights to hate the person holding the gun, no matter who gave it to them.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Well, ok then. Isn't that what patents are all about ? This is the system *working* as designed. You can argue that the system itself is broken, but this seems to be exactly how it ought to be, within our current frame of reference. Apple designed a totally new and radical way of interacting with phones, and patented it. Sounds ... reasonable.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
A few things to note that in the broadest reading of the patent, it applies to portable devices. Second is while Han had probably been working on multi-touch for years and first demonstrated it in 2006, Apple acquired FingerWorks in 2005 specifically for multi-touch products and technology.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Since the beginning of touch sensitive technologies, people have been putting more than one finger on the surface for a very long time. And while it didn't work, users were WISHING it worked because those clumbsy mistakes can be annoying. Wishing for multi-touch does not make for "prior art" but I think it qualifies as "obvious."
Because talking about something in public first, does not mean that you were the first to work on it.
Apple probably has prior art that preceedes the TED talk that just wasn't public (they are infamous for their secrecy after all). I haven't looked at the patent in question, but if Apple had evidence that they were working on this prior to the TED talk in 2006, and Han didn't already have his own patent application in to the patent office, then the patent office missed nothing.
From what I've read earlier, Apple's original patent application is dated December of 2007, and incorporates some provisional applications that date back to January of 2007. That suggests that they had R&D documentation from at least 2006. Plus they purchased Fingerworks and all of it's IP back in 2005 and it would be surprising if the patent in question was not based, at least in part, on that IP, which most definitely predates a 2006 presentation at TED. Now, Han's company may have even older R&D documentation, but that would be an issue for the patent court to sort out.
It is far from clear who worked in this technology first. All that is clear is that Apple was the first to get their ducks in a row and file a patent.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Actually, they don't. A perusal of the Apple Litigation page on wikipedia gives the impression that they are the recipient of as many lawsuits as they file. Now I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list, but remember Apple is not a Patent Troll. They actually release products based on the patents they get into lawsuits over. Competitors can license their patents or come up with a novel way to achieve the same end. Remember, patents are not for "what you do", but "How you do it". I doubt that Apple has just recieved a patent for the ONLY way to make multitouch work on a phone or tablet. Quite possibly it is the easiest, but probably not even the best.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Was that before or after the stuff FingerWorks was doing before they were bought by Apple in 2005?
Because the iPhone was totally new and original ... and Apple is an 'inventor' .. whatever.
There were Pocket PCs sold around 2001 running Windows CE that had a phone. These were slow but still usable,
IIRC, they had styluses. That makes them not usable. A phone that you need a pen to use? Are you shitting me? Or how about those shitty Crackberries that you had to use a miniature trackball to move a cursor around the screen? MS and RIM: two vendors that just couldn't conceive of a UI that wasn't related to a standard Windows PC.
There was a development community but apps were not supplied by the vendor.
Ok, where was the app store? I don't remember anyone putting much effort into developing apps for mobile phones until the iPhone came on the market. Now Zynga's a multibillion dollar company, and there's tons more companies making a killing on mobile apps.
There were quite similar phones on the market from Samsung, LG and others at the time the iPhone launched.
Were they as easy to use as the iPhone? Did they have touchscreens (and no, a screen that needs a stylus doesn't count)? Did they have app stores? It's not just the touchscreen UI where the iPhone revolutionized phones; it was the app store, allowing nearly any software maker to sell apps to customers, directly on the phone, without having to hook up a USB cable or do a bunch of bullshit. Suddenly, there were all kinds of revolutionary apps for phones, from games to grocery-buying aids to Trapster for helping you avoid speed traps. No, Apple's app store isn't perfect; lots of apps are crap and Apple has too much of an iron fist, but nowadays we have Android as an alternative, but before the iPhone, there was nothing.
These screens would have appeared on the market anyway if the iPhone were never invented.
What was taking so long? You can make that claim, but there's no way to prove it. If it was "just around the corner", why didn't one of the established players make a phone with an easy-to-use touchscreen? Why did it take a total newcomer to do it? It's not like there weren't tons of companies in the mobile space already: MS, RIM, Nokia, Samsung, etc. It's not like touchscreen technology is all that new, and surely the idea of using your finger to interact with your phone instead of a stupid pen or trackball isn't all that brilliant, but apparently it escaped all these other companies.
I don't remember all that much marketing with the iPhone introduction. All they had to do was put them in their retail stores and let people try them out, and suddenly everyone was willing to pay $600 for a freakin' phone, even though they could have easily gotten some shitty WinCE phone for a lot less. It's not always marketing that sells products, sometimes the products sell themselves, especially in a market totally devoid of decent alternatives. Of course, the market is much better now, and we can thank Google for that (another company that was a complete newcomer to the mobile phone market--how about that? Really says something about the established players doesn't it?), but back when the iPhone came out, there was no Android and everything else was total crap.
Now all we need is a third company, again totally new to the mobile phone market (since the non-Apple/Google established players have all proven themselves to be totally incompetent), to come up with an alternative to iPhone and Android, so we can have a "big 3" situation with three primary competitors, as competition in mature markets seems to work best when there's 3 main players. And no, Windows Phone 7 isn't it, it sucks just like everything else MS has ever made. MS has been working on smartphones for over a decade now; what kind of idiot would bother with a company that takes this long just to come up with something that's a poor imitation of the two dominant products on the market?