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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?
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.
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?
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...
Compared to my 60" rear projection TV, yes, it is quite portable.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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".
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.
...that a /. title is inaccurate!!!????
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Unenforceable but widely applied patent is an extremely powerful tool in big corporations' hands. It can be used as a part of a package to hit smaller companies who simply do not have the resources to debunk such attacks, as a deterrent to competition, as an additional bargaining chip in patent negotiations, etc.
The sheer amount of effort and costs associated debunking the patent against a crack team of lawyers backing it up, and en-masse usage where focusing on these elementary patents takes away from harder aspects of the case are what makes it valuable.
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...
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.
The problem is that it can cost a lot of money to fight, no matter how broken the patent is. Not a little amount money at all, especially not for an individual developer or a smaller company.
These sorts of things are clearly worthless and should never be allowed to get to that point.
*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"?
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.
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.
The problem with going the other way--fully active evaluation rather than a mix between active and passive evaluation--is that it increases delay times at the patent office, increases the administrative burden of getting patents (making it much harder for individual inventors or small entities), decreases the incentivization for actual invention, increases the amount of ambiguity in the rejection process, and wastes many more man-hours for EVERY patent application, without significantly mitigating the number of man-hours involved during actual litigation. It is possible that the transaction costs of having unenforceable patents outweigh those costs--but absent a really good economic analysis to that effect, my tendency is to believe that the problems outweight the gains. I think we need patent reform--but we should be very careful about raising the obviousness bar too high. (We might try a different approach--e.g. at application time, ask a person of skill in the art how he would solve the problem. What he comes up, if close enough to the invention, might influence the obviousness determination, absent evidence that the invention was already known in the field based on the inventor's work.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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.
What you said.
I've spent too many years reading about crap like this; too many years knowing the USPTO is staffed with over-worked cretins without a clue, and a Congress that does its very bestest as money can buy to keep its collective head up where the Sun doesn't shine. I'm starting tp be more and more glad that I'm nearing the end of my life.
Canon Powershot cameras (s2/s3 if my memory serve), cca 2005-2006. When exploring the shots already taken, images displayed on the LCD would switch between portrait/landscape based on the orientation of the camera. A good chance (though not sure about) that this was done with accelerometers, these cameras sported image stabilizers.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
..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.
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!
[...] increases the amount of ambiguity in the rejection process [...]
Your other points are a matter of perspective, but this one makes Baby Jesus cry. By that logic we would have less ambiguity in the legal process if court cases were decided not on the details of a case but on a broader more generalised summary of roughly what went down, written entirely by the defendant. If looking more closely at patent applications causes issues, maybe the patenting process is faulty?
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
Just the N95, first available in March 2007? Accelerometers were basically unheard of when the iPhone was introduced in January 2007.
You're being purposefully misleading:
Dates announced:
N95 - September 26, 2006
iPhone - January 9, 2007
Dates released:
N95 - March 11, 2007
iPhone - June 29, 2007
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
Quite annoying that you can patent something existing by adding "on a ..." to the end of it.
I never disputed that accelerometers can measure orientation, I merely disputed that that was their sole, or even primary, purpose.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
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.
It's not looking at it more closely that I'm concerned with (in that point--looking at it more closely does have other costs). A higher obviousness bar usually gives examiners much more discretion to reject things unless it is done incredibly well. It's also not written entirely by the defendant [i.e. applicant]--the office also conducts a search, and the examiner rejects applications with enough detail that the applicant has to respond if he has a prayer of getting the patent until the examiner is satisfied, and if the applicant deliberately omits things the consequences are quite high. (i.e. inequitable conduct.)
Raising the obviousness bar is not looking more closely at the applications--it is fundamentally changing the standard. That's an important distinction. In one case, things that were patentable are no longer patentable. It is conceivable you could raise it in a nonambiguous way, but it is extremely unlikely that that is what actually will happen. KSR was probably the right ruling on that combination of patents, but the result is a lot of obviousness rejections and a lot of discretion on the part of the PTO, which makes the whole process more problematic for anyone who actually wants a patent, including good guys.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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.
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!
actually there is a way to lock it !