Slashdot Mirror
Apple Patents Portrait-Landscape Flipping
theodp writes "On Tuesday, the USPTO granted a patent to Apple for Portrait-landscape rotation heuristics for a portable multifunction device (USPTO), which covers 'displaying information on the touch screen display in a portrait view or a landscape view based on an analysis of data received from the one or more accelerometers.' Perhaps the USPTO Examiners didn't get a chance to review the circa-1991 Computer Chronicles video of the Radius Pivot monitor before deeming Apple's invention patentable. Or check out the winning touchArcade trivia contest entry, which noted the circa-1982 Corvus Concept sported a 15-inch, high-resolution, bit-mapped display screen that also flipped between portrait and landscape views when rotated, like our friend the iPhone. Hey, everything old is new again, right?"
If those previous models did rely on accelerometers, how does one exactly go about challenging this ruling and show prior art?
I'm going to patent the First Post.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
Watch out android Apples coming after you with a lawsuit now.
Neither of the two cited examples of "prior art" cited in the summary were portable as is claimed (also according to the summary) by the Apple patent.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The others used other gravity sensors like little metal balls and contact sets or mercury switches not accelerometers. And they weren't touchscreen devices. Trivial differences, but different technology. Better to argue it was obvious than say the others represent prior art. Still accelerometers in portable media players and phones is pretty much an Apple thing for display orientation, since everyone before had an attached keyboard!
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Did the Radius monitors use accelerometer data? Nope, they used a positional switch mounted on their stationary base. Since this specifically addresses use of accelerometer data (no fixed mount on a netbook or smartphone) that isn't prior art here, sorry. Making in-jokes about the patent system mocks its all-to-real deficiencies, of which this is not one. Oh, and way to write a terrible headline - Apple hasn't patented portrait-landscape flipping. You really did read about this before writing.....didn't you?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Even if poster were right and the prior art applied, what would be the big deal? An unenforceable patent is hardly anything more than no patent at all. You might pay someone a little money just to get it out of your face (i.e. it's not worth your time), but you know it'll almost certainly be defeated in court if push comes to shove. The USPTO rejects more than half of the patent applications they receive--but if litigation ever arises, prior art gets a MUCH more thorough review.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
it demonstrates obviousness.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Can we just patent the action of patenting something so that we never have to read another news story on patenting?
So the submitter believes that a 15" monitor constitutes a portable devices?
When it comes from the mind of Steve, it's an INVENTION !! Even out Steve's ass, it's an INVENTION !!
I might if such a thing ever happened.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Many cameras - not phones - cameras, had this functionality way before the iPhone did. Granted that in most circumstances it was only available in a camera application, but I had my Nokia N95 about three months before the original iPhone came out, and it used the exact same chip to do the same thing...
I'm pretty sure that some high end digital SLRs had this function, possibly as far back as 2003 if memory serves me correctly.
Apple is the same or worse than Microsoft, just smaller.
People, it's not trendy, it doesn't "just work" - it is just the same bullshit with a better marketing campaign. Gods help us if Apple ever attains a real market share in PCs.
Great Intellect...
Good! Now maybe none of the decent phones will be burdened with this fucking useless "feature." I would absolutely love to have a button to rotate the screen when I want it rotated. It is so annoying to have the damned screen rotate when you move then have to wait two seconds for it to rotate back the way you want it. Or when you hold your phone horizontally and it can't decide which way it should be. Or even worse is when laying on my side and trying to read the screen it's impossible to get it the way I want it.
Apple will want to patent buttons and 12v current
SLR's weren't multi-function devices, and they didn't (at that time) have touch screens.
I was playing around with a Wiimote on my Mac a few years ago, looking at the plots generated from the X/Y/Z accelerometers. The first thing that I noticed about the readings for a stationary Wiimote was, "oh, one of the accelerometers is giving a non-zero reading." My second thought was, "like duh, that's acceleration due to the gravitational field." Then I tested the theory, and it worked.
Now I'm not going to claim that I came up with rotating a display based upon the readings from accelerometers. On the other hand, if you put me on the design team for a portable device and someone said, "how can we implement a rotating display based on orientation?" Well, I would know the answer in an instant. And it's not because I'm a genius or invested a huge amounts of money in it. It is simply a case of knowing that part A worked and part A would solve the problem posed. To me that qualifies as obvious. To a court, well, I can't claim to understand what goes through the minds of judges and lawyers.
it's whether you can get away with patenting it. George Lucas (Verb) Lucasing, Lucased (a) The act of committing graphics overkill.
Sadly camera isn't a "multifunction device". To me this is a bad patent but I'm sure a jury in East Texas will disagree with me.
patent system is workable ? we are one step away from someone being able to patent a basic logic process.
Read radical news here
"Patents are anything you can get away with".
IBM thought of that.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9803429-16.html
Better luck next time.
The patent standards need to be evolving with the technology itself. So the number of things that fall under "obvious" should be increasing as quickly as the pace of technological progress is by the law of accelerating returns. Also the patent expiration period should be decreasing at the same rate.
Stupid question I know, but Apple is NOT patenting rotation, but rather two gestures to lock the screen in either portrait or landscape mode, regardless of detected orientation. Whether or not such a matter is patentable is another kettle of fish.
On a related matter, Apple long ago bought a patent from British Telecom that appears actually to be for screen rotation.
Look at Google. They've (seemingly sensibly) not accumulated a huge portfolio of patents. The unfortunate consequence of that is that Android is going to get squeezed more and more by patent claims.
Patent trolls' strongest weapon is the fact that they don't make anything, and so there's nothing against which a counter-claim can be made.
The long-term bright side of this is that sooner or later Google and others will have no choice but to mount a campaign for sweeping change in the patent system. But until then, small developers will find it harder and harder to produce useful software and devices without spending all their income defending patent claims.
Right, this madness has to END, NOW.
...that a /. title is inaccurate!!!????
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
That makes it different.
Right?
right?
write
Read much?
Anyway, I'd wager that this was in cameras before phones, and I'd also heard that some mobile phones were earlier to the accelerometer gig.
The *stated* applications for MEMS accelerometers in the parts books included orientation determination. I have a hard time with "on a mobile device" becoming the new "with a computer."
I need a rush on this patent to change things back from portrait to landscape once they have rotated the screen back..also the other way. ..taps toe...
Do not work for the government, and this includes the USPTO. There are many people who are young, smart, idealistic, and/or unaware of what it means to work for the government who go to work for the government, but they do not stay for long because they immediately see what a hopelessly dysfunctional soup of sociopaths it is. They leave. What remains are, you guessed it, sociopaths and the lowest common denominator denizens of DC for whom Uncle Sam is a big sugar daddy that gives you get full health benefits, lets you work from 10-3pm, and expects nothing of you but putting an ass in a chair. The sociopaths don't even pretend to work because they're sociopaths and devote 99.9% of their energy maintaining the facade they use to fool everyone. So that leaves the mouth breathers to do things like evaluate patents. Small wonder that they make great decisions like granting patents for things that clearly have prior art like the Thinkpad convertible tablets that had the ability to convert to/from landscape view based on position and whose touchscreen worked with a pen.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Google is your friend.
Here is an example: http://www.michaeldolan.com/1103
When was this software made available to outside people, perhaps by storage in a public file server or other publication?
That article leads to the following article (published mid-2006) which discloses the availability of software to control On-screen display orientation in response to an integrated accelerometer.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-knockage/index.html
Actual developers would know better when this idea became available to the general public.
Rooting around, I found "gyro.tar", distributed in 2005 by Eric C. Cooper, which simulates the rotation of a portable device display based on an accelerometer.
Obviously, this idea was widely known years before Apple filed it's application.
The patent office seems to be having it's way with the public again. Don't they know about Google?
tell me how many people visit ur site because of that "nice" bot u set up? 1 for every 100 comments u post?
warning pointless sig
Hi all !
I've followed the link in the story , and discovered that Apple also made this claim : http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7,979,462 : Head to head comparisons . Well it's so so so obvious ! How such a patent could even exist, furthermore it makes me laugh (sigh) because such comparisons exist for years, and ironically many web sites from the US government provide these features : http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/sbs.htm (compare cars side by side ) for instance... Ouch !
It's time to reconsider globally the US patent system, not to modify it, but create a new patent system restricted on true inventions AND very complex processes, excluding software, pure ideas and of course any math developments.
In addition, all USPTO "civil servants" should be fired immediately, and all current patents related to software dismissed.
Well, is it legal, within the current system, to patent a way to encourage customers to avoid products from non friendly companies by choosing them accordingly to their patent troll history using a specific algorithm? The algorithm takes in account the obviousness of the claims, the number of claims during a given period and some other parameters. :):):):)
No, it's not a boycott , it's novelty because in this claim the novelty is to consider the patent troll history of a company and also to use a specific algorithm to determine which company to avoid
Cheers
Wouldn't any sort of gravity sensor be measuring acceleration due to gravity? They're basically rudimentary accelerometers. Any object using gravity could be spun to fool it's sensor.
*All* of the following have to be true, to infringe on Claim 1:
* It must be a portable, multifunction computer device with a touch screen
* It must use accelerometers
* It must orient the display according to the accelerometers
* It must detect a specific finger gesture from the user, on or near the touch screen
* In response to the *gesture*, it switches orientation, and *locks* it
* If you rotate the device to the new orientation, it detects that, then unlocks it
A device must do *all* of the above things in order to infringe, not just the first 3 or 4. So it's not a patent on re-orienting by accelerometers, but on overriding the orientation with a gesture.
Claims 2-6 are even more specific cases of Claim 1. All the remaining claims are slight variations on the above (7-12 patent the device itself, rather than the method etc).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Did you ever see a cell phone with accelerometer before the iPhone?
Did you ever see an accelerometer used to detect the orientation of a display? That's not the original intended use for an accelerometer.
Did you ever see a cell phone change the format and/or content displayed depending on its orientation?
What the patent covers is laid out in claim 1, and in no other place in the patent. Not the abstract, not the title, not the description. That stuff is legally required window dressing. The important stuff is in claim 1.
Claim 1 for this patent.
A computer-implemented method, comprising: at a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display and one or more accelerometers, displaying information on the touch screen display in a portrait view or a landscape view based on an analysis of data received from the one or more accelerometers; detecting a predetermined finger gesture on or near the touch screen display while the information is displayed in a first view, wherein the first view is one of the portrait view and the landscape view; in response to detecting the predetermined finger gesture, displaying the information in a second view and locking the display of information in the second view, wherein the second view is the other of the portrait view and the landscape view; and unlocking the display of information in the second view in response to a determination that the device is placed in an orientation where the second view matches an orientation of the display based on an analysis of data received from the one or more accelerometers.
So this has to be a portable touchscreen with accelerometers, using an interaction between the touchscreen gesture and the accelerometer to rotate the screen.
The prior art cited in the summary is completely irrelevant.
Why can't slashdot editors read claim 1 on these patent submissions before posting them? It only takes about 10 seconds.
...they will get away with it. Even judges has gots to haves they shiny!
Seriously, Apple == Microsoft. Er, exsqueeze me jobs fanbois, "Micro$oft".
Interesting, a can of beer, being a mulitfunction device (tastes good, has an effect on the nervous system, classified as medicinal in some societies), has it's own orientation detection and changes its contents accordingly when changed from vertical to horizontal.
Task Mangler
Silly Apple, all they'd have to do is add "on computers" and make it a whole new patent... oh... wait...
Sorry. Usually that works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except I was playing 3D games on my Nokia 5500 Sport using it's built in 3D accelerometer in 2006.
Groove Labyrinth kicked ass back then.
Did I mention it was an MP3 player, built in FM radio, text to speech to read text messages, built in 2MP camera, but I'm sure the iPhone did those things first before it was even out though too.
..than to develop the invention in the first place.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
every US corporate argument about the necessity of our wonderful IP laws is kind of silly considering they outsourced their entire manufacturing operation to a country where IP has meant, basically, nothing, for a long, long time.
China is 'improving' by putting people in jail for making iPad2 cases... i guess... uhmm. somehow i dont feel like that is a good thing to have a single party state start enforcing IP law with a court system that is not anything approaching independent.
if big business back in the 1980s had come down on Apple like Apple comes down on joe blow hacker nowdays, Apple could never have gotten out of the garage.
a linkage to make the engine connect to the wheels, thats a patent.
a method to make the engine work reliably, thats a patent.
a device to crank the engine through a battery, thats a patent.
"stick motor on wheels" should not be a patent.
if big business had been patenting stuff like this in the 80s, apple could never have existed.
The Maxxum (Dynax in some parts of the world) 7 from Minolta was a 35mm SLR released in 2001. It had a large LCD display on the back that changed orientation when you rotated the camera around the lens axis. This was particularly useful when shooting with the vertical grip attached. Great camera, I still have mine but don't use it much any more.
I'll force them into a tradeoff when my patent for "a method of drawing oxygen into the lungs while viewing the internet" goes through...
Sadly camera isn't a "multifunction device".
I don't know if this camera has an accelerometer, but I'd say that running Doom is a quite separate function from taking/viewing pictures :)
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
So how can they detect orientation? Oh, that's right MEASURE THE ACCELERATION DUE TO GRAVITY.
And if you have a sensitive axis, you can tell how much that axis is aligned to the gravitational one.
And if the axis is directly aligned, would that mean the axis is oriented UP-DOWN?
I believe it is.
Innovation is NOT dead thanks to lawyers. It is dead to thanks to people like Steve Jobs who HIRE lawyers. Let me guess, you hold the hitman to account while letting the mafia boss who hired him untouched as well right? Prosecute the soldier but not the general?
Lawyers are a tool, don't blame the tool, blame the person wielding it.
Or would that make every iPhone owner here to uncomfortable because they are financing all this?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
As others have pointed out, they have.
Before accelerometers were small enough, they used mercury (elecrically conductive).
Before portable devices were powerful enough to be multifunction, they did.
Note also that cars use accelerometers to detect when the car is being jacked and create an alarm. Despite that, nobody's patented the idea.
Quite annoying that you can patent something existing by adding "on a ..." to the end of it.
If you try patent something that's been used for years before... you should be banned from using it.
I know Canon has implemented this in some of their 2006 models, if not earlier.
The camera I have, which came out before the iPad and the full screen iPod allows you to flip the image by turning it. It allows you to take pictures and view pictures, making it multi-function.
I may be stupid (probably), but does this mean that an Apple->Google lawsuit is in the works? This seems like positioning for just such an act.
The other day, I was carping about the fact that I have to deal with some 7 different patents that were based on prior art. My point was that the reason why ALL OF THOSE patents were approved was that we had hired a number of foreigners (6 of those were chinese, and I did not know the 7th). At that time, I said that foreigners do not have prior art experience. Now, we see if over and over and over again. All of these issues here are about companies that are FULLY aware of prior art, but know that USPTO hired all of these foreigners that have ZERO PRIOR ART EXPERIENCE. NONE. NADA. ZIP. ZILCH. Why? Because there were foreign born and raised. They did not have access to our press, or items. etc.
And I was called racists for it, by a european, no less.
Until we get past idiots like that, and start hiring ppl WITH KNOWLEDGE and not just cheaply, we will continue to see our USPTO go down. BTW, one way around this, is to have older Americans with mechanical or electrical knowledge doing prior art reviews on these things. Yet, they will not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
468 corporate lawyers wring their hands in glee...
I haven't thought enough about patents to form an opinion on whether they should be abolished in general but I definitely lean against software patents. The problem that I see with these type of patents is how do you assign the value of them? Any device as complex as a smartphone will benefit from all kinds of innovation and patents many of which would not be practical to implement in the original form that the inventor(s) envisioned. Setting aside the question of whether the patent should have been granted in the first place, what are fair rules for violations of that patent? Should it be an injunction against importing devices with that idea? If licensing fees, why X number of dollars versus Y? In my opinion, the punishment for violating a patent should be a government imposed fine in proportion to the amount of worth that that patent contributes to the overall product in relation to the other innovation that went into it. So the Lodsys patents would be almost worthless because the innovation contained therein would be almost nothing compared to the other innovations that went into implementing an electronic payment system, a smartphone that people would want to buy and the apps themselves that were good enough for people to want to make in-app payments with them. On top of this, patent disclosures would have to be understandable by an average engineer or practitioner in the field. If not, then the patent is invalidated automatically. The purpose of patents are NOT to make inventors rich (that is simply a possible side-effect), it is for the public disclosure of innovative and useful ideas in exchange for a LIMITED monopoly over control of that particular idea.
What ever happen to fair use, software is not like chemistry or hardware enginerering were things are hard to repeat. How can you patent something after it is in wide use. Software patents are not about innovation but racketeering , its become a cash cow for microsoft brow beating HTC with a , its not surprising apple would the same. (aimed directly at google/android). its sad that being a spammer becoming a more honorable a professional that being a software developer with these horrid patents
Examiners get credit towards their quotas by saying no.
First action on a case gets 1.25 "counts" a final rejection gets .25 and a disposal gets .5 counts. see http://ipwatchdog.com/2010/02/26/uspto%E2%80%99s-new-examiner-count-system-go-into-effect/id=9310/
An examiner can get 2 counts if they allow it at the beginning but that is exceedingly rare as applicants usually make overly broad claims the first time around to get an idea of what art is out there. If the applicant gets an allowance from the start, then perhaps they did not claim enough and the patent is a weak patent in terms of value/protection.
Another reason that examiner's don't willy nilly allow cases the first time around is that there are multiple layers of review (depending on the art unit), even for primary (more senior examiners who approve their own work). The IP community has been at odds with this as these reviewers may come to a conclusion without ever having had any discussion with the applicant themselves.
One may not be aware that right now you have examiners examining outside their speciality in order to move cases out of overly backlogged areas (COPA). Sure this decreases the wait times, but applicants may recieve rejections that do not have the best possible art out there prolonging the process, leading to higher costs, and potentially worse patents for similiar reasons as those for brand new examiners examining cases with little oversight.
If one wants a better examination system look into the EPO and JPO processes. JPO rejections are super short and to the point, the US ones are not, as they spoon feed the applicant. Alternatively, have the courts and BPAI stringently enforce the broadest possible reasonable interpretation standard to be in line with the specification.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Everyone who thinks this should not be patented should try coming up with something no one else has, and upon failure to do so, promise to give more credit to people who make things as compared to those who don't. Also, if this were your patent, anti-patent people's tone would change to the amount of x dollars per smartphone sold today.
Yes, some patents are erroneously granted, but there is an established process for invalidating those and its not as difficult as people think.
This is ludicrous - and will cost someone millions to get reversed, since it is clear others came up with, and implemented this technology years ago. This is why the entire patent system of the US needs to be scraped.
WOW, someone remembers the Radius Pivot monitor!! I had one of those, you had to have a special video card and it was a beast of a monitor. Very heavy and clumsy to move around. It worked nicely though!
Amazon released the same feature in the Kindle only months apart from Apple. I'm guessing it took them some time to develop and tune the feature. But they probably didn't file a patent because it is totally obvious.
Any Canon digital camera since 2003.
You didn't mention the UI elements on the display changed with orientation of the device, in response to accelerometer input, because they didn't. The iPhone revolutionized that. Hence, a patent.
Yes, because the Radius monitor weighing 30 lbs. was a portable multifunction device....
Kodak DC260 -- 1998.
Generated a 1536x1024 JPEG if held horizontally, and a 1024x1536 JPEG if held vertically.
So what if someone was granted a patent for breathing? sounds crazy right, but it is just as insane as this latest APPLE attempt at attempting to patent technology that has been in existence for more than a decade, so how does that sound, a company patents breathing and everyone on earth has to pay a royalty every time they take in a breath of air.
You know what, this is just stupid right, sure it is, breathing is a right that all humans have, because air is free, or is it?
Hopefully someone will not someday grant a patent on air, that might be a real problem for a lot of people, but you know what not even that will stop the reaper, because eventually Apple will bit off more than it can chew and at the rate they are going it will not be long at all.
The displays on the Patent office's patent research machines flipped in the 1980s.
How does one patent something after the door was opened & everyone is already using it? What a load of tripe. The Patent office is patently full of fools...