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Apple Denied Trademark For 'Multi-Touch'
suraj.sun sends this excerpt from MacRumors:
"In a decision handed down by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Apple has been denied an application for a trademark on Multi-Touch. ... For trademarks, 'the greater the degree of descriptiveness the term has, the heavier the burden to prove it has attained secondary meaning.' The trademark attorney pointed out that the term 'multitouch' has taken on generic meaning, being used by a wide variety of publications to describe the touchscreen technology on Android phones, tablets, and notebooks."
It's good to see a common sense result come out of the USPTO, I'm really hopeful that with additional funds gained from the recent patent bill the USPTO will be able to reach similarly sane conclusions when bad software patents are files too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hurray!
the USPTO would start rejecting vague software patents instead of granting them to every patent-troll that asks for one, the world would be a better place...
-Keeps dreaming-
How could Apple try to trademark 'Multi-touch' with a straight face?
This is like Ford trying to trademark 'Four-wheel drive' or Sony trying to trade mark 'Entertainment Center'.
Blatantly trying to abuse the system like this should warrant a paddling.
This was not about patents (which Apple richly deserves to own). It was about a Trademark.
Correct, BUT.
It's the same general organization. All I am saying is, it's good to see a result come out of one part that is reasonable - and that hopefully the OTHER part will start to issue more reasonable verdicts also when they have enough money to do proper patent examination.
It's a ray of hope from a very large cloud that until now had been raining on us.
It has always seemed to me rather loose language to say something is "multitouch"
Yes, I didn't even know they were trying to trademark the term. it does seem overreaching, and as they said it's obviously a term in widespread use. If they had tried to trademark it many years back, they might have had a case... possibly. The term is awfully generic.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It should be easy to come up with a less-descriptive name. They could call it "Squidly", "Octie", "Starfish", or "Tentacular", something that makes people think of multi-touch creatures.
Or they could do it like companies did in the mid 20th century, by deliberately misspelling parts of the name: "Multy-Tuuch", "Mani-Fyngers", or "Repeat-O-Poke". Or maybe something more 90's, like "Apple Bob". In the 2000's Apple did a great job marketing the iFixing of nouns, so they could use something like "iSteve" or "iMultitouch" or "iShocker" (rule 34 dictated I had to place that one in here.) They could stick with the Apple theme and call it something like a "Granny Smith" or "Honey Crisp".
Anyway, there are lots of names they could trademark. They just have to pick one.
John
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox, et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Strangely enough, this story had nothing to do with patents at all. The only thing "patent" about it is the P in the USPTO acronym, but that's not what this is about. This is about the T, which is the Trademark portion of their office.
Not only did the summary say "trademark" but the article title even used the word "trademark." Feel free to yell about patents in context, but for now, this isn't it.
John
Google Patent gave me 991 hits for "multitouch". The oldest was from 1972 and used as:
"In an example of practice of the invention, a foil electret for use in a multitouch selector was prepared from a 1 mil (25.4 micrometer) thin film of polyfluoroethylene-propylene plastic material, marketed commercially under the tradename TEFLON FEP, with a 1,000 A. metallic layer on one of its surfaces."
Sure sounds like people understood the concept of multitouch years before Apple was even founded.
While Apple may have been one of the first companies that implemented multi-touch, there is nothing novel about the concept. It was made possible by the invention of capacitive touch screens (which Apple had nothing to do with - Apple was simply one of the first companies to use a capacitive touch screen) and it was widely known that one of the advantages of capacitive touch screens over resistive touch screens was that capacitive touch screens were superior for multi-touch. Therefore, Apple patented the concept of using someone else's new technology for one of it's primary intended purposes.
From TFA:
Apple originally applied for the trademark on January 9, 2007, the day the iPhone was introduced.
...and I'm writing this post on a Thinkpad X60 tablet that was marketed as a "MultiTouch" model in 2006.
It's stunning that Apple would even ~try~ to trademark a term that other manufacturers were already using in mainstream marketing & press releases.
The Apple trademark lawyers in this instance were either very stupid, very lazy, or very self-interested. ;)
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox, et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Not only is TFA (and even TFS) clearly about trademarks and not patents but Apple do have a patent on multitouch.
Uh, it's the patent and trademark office (USPTO). And we're talking about trademarks (oranges and oranges). Read more carefully.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
If you are really serious about reform, and you applaud USPTO's rejection of this term, you must also support revoking the Microsoft trademark on "Windows".
Is it really still not obvious to some people why Windows is a valid trademark? Same as Apple? Yes they are generic words but they aren't generic words describing the entity/product. Windows (the Microsoft trademarked name) is not a windows, it is an Operating System. Apple (the Apple Inc. trademarked name) is not an apple, it is a Company. MultiTouch would be just describing the invention multitouch, just as App Store is just describing an application (or commonly termed 'app') store.
Damn, you beat me to the punchline, I was going to say the Catholic church had prior art.
Windows is trademarked as the name of an operating system, for which it is not a descriptive term. Perhaps you'd also like to bitch about GM trademarking the name "Volt"?
You can describe an operating system without calling the whole thing Windows. It is very difficult to describe a touch interface that tracks multiple fingers at a time without calling it Multi-Touch.
Sometimes when we touch, the feelings get to be too much.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Americans would fund their government departments instead of asking them to be commercially indepedent so that instead of focussing on collecting as many fees as possible they can focus on quality.
But then, an American might have to pay TAXES! Boogaa boogaa! Cut funding to the bone and yet get bare bones service.
The USPTO is as good and as bad as Americans are allowing it to be through their votes for tax cuts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Microsoft knows the Windows trademark would never stand up in court. It protects it with intimidation and bribes.
404: sig not found.
How about TouchMi? http://touchmi.jp/
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
If you are really serious about reform, and you applaud USPTO's rejection of this term, you must also support revoking the Microsoft trademark on "Windows".
The trademark term is "Microsoft Windows", and that's obviously permitted. Had Apple tried to get "Apple Multi-Touch" then they'd have had no problem (but it wouldn't have had the squatting-on-a-term effect that they wanted).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I don't know if anything like that can be considered art.
you don't know what you're talking about http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2004/02/11/lindows-wins-in-us-court-microsoft-ruling-39118328/
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Except that Windows was a windowing system in its original incarnation, leaving us with another descriptive trademark.
Yes. But you can't take a pre-existing word in use by multiple people to describe a particular technology, trademark it, and then prevent those same people using the word they've been using for longer than you to describe the stuff they invented. (Here's some of that UToronto work the OP was talking about, if you're unsure as to whether they were using the same term to describe it).
Give the person who finds prior art , double the fee that the patent applicator paid for. If its ibm or the big wigs, charge them the 'cancellation' fee.
Or like RIAA, make the bogus patent fine, like 1000x the fee.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Fake security is more important, and also they need to hire 50,000 deadbeat theives and sexual perverts who like to finger super models vaginas.
Oh did I say they steal ipads/iphones too.
Makes 1940s germany a very nice place indeed.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=multi+touch&t=weekly#
Perhaps because it's not a patent, but a trademark?
Did you read the summary?
Either way, trademarks are designed to differentiate company products from competitors (so Burger King can't sell you a Big Mac, for example), but in the case of multi touch being descriptive the decision was correct - it is a generic term, so the trademark was rejected. It has taken them since 2007 to come to the decision though.
Apple?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Not a patent, but thanks for playing ;)
If you quietly glance out the corner of your eye, you might glimpse the most successful company in the nation floundering, losing its guts, for want of the vision of a charismatic individual.
I don't get it, is Arthur a Prior or a Priest?
Fandroids hate facts.
OMG! The USPTO actually denied something? Maybe Apple should have tried patenting multi-touch "with a computer," seeing as that phrase is the secret pass code for getting a patent on otherwise unpatentable trivialities.
Just to be absolutely clear, for everyone who doesn't know, Apple's multi-touch technology was bought from a company called Fingerworks, which sold a multi-touch gesture keyboard a decade ago. I bought one then, and still have it. We all called that thing a multi-touch keyboard, and I'm not sure but if Fingerworks didn't trademark "multi-touch", then it seems to me that Apple officially missed the boat.
When Apple released the first mobile multi-touch device. And the trademark application is restricted to mobile applications.
However, it is so basically descriptive I can see denying it. I just hope the USPTO didn't factor in the use of the term today, after Apple already made it popular. That's basically ripping off Apple's work.
Perhaps you'd also like to bitch about GM trademarking the name "Volt"?
I would. WTF? GM gives their electric car the most generic name possible next to "GM electric" and then wants to trademark it? And gets it? Wow.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Have you heard the term tyrosine kinase inhibitor? Well people in cancer research know it. If some major cancer cures come out based on it .. it'll be a household term. Similarly people in the human interfaces business have been using the term multi-touch. Here is an example from 1999:
http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf
The USPTO described how the term has taken on generic meaning, specifically mentioning its use on Android phones and tablets. My problem is that they all started using this term well after Apple applied for the trademark.
The USPTO's two-year wait before official decision itself may have allowed the term to become generic. Had it been awarded within a year, Apple would have had a trademark to defend before Android was even released.
That's not to mean other reasons for denial are invalid, but this one does stink.
Buying a faster CPU isn't a patentable improvement.
What about switching to a smaller CPU because I found a way to program it more efficiently?
I agree that most of the "software" patents are terrible, but there's no sense pretending that software is always separable from hardware. It would be silly to have rules where two otherwise-identical products have different rules depending on their "guts". An electric toothbrush with a motor speed controlled by resistors should be no more or less patentable than an electric toothbrush that uses a firmware controller.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Since trademarks are about protecting punters from being confused by similar but confusing branding
Since when does trademark require the products be different? Is a Chiquita banana different from other bananas?
PS isn't it a little two-faced for Apple Computers who used a logo *confusingly similar* to that of Apple Records, agrees to restrict themselves to computers so that their trademarks don't clash, then moves into the music label business and now is claiming trademark on everything that anyone else is doing?
I'm not going to let Apple's corporate behavior change my opinion of how trademarks should work.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Not only is TFA (and even TFS) clearly about trademarks and not patents but Apple do have a patent on multitouch.
Sadly, since they added "A method, comprising: at a portable multifunction device with one or more processors, memory, and a touch screen display" to the front of every description of technology that already exists.
But yes, this is about Trademarking the term "multitouch," not any more absurd patents.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
somone get on MultiPass
No, I'm pretty sure that the Windows trademark is deserved. Windows was, and still is, a term coined by Microsoft, and used to uniquely identify their product.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
In this argument, the digital electric toothbrush can be patented; its digital controller can even be patented, if it's novel enough. (Perhaps the manufacturer finds a way to make the circuit waterproof that isn't just smearing the whole thing with epoxy) The software/firmware that drives the controller can be copyrighted.
What can't be patented is the bit of code that says "if (time > 120 seconds) motor.stop();" It's not novel, it's not advancing the state of the art in any way -- it's an extremely obvious way to implement a desired function. Perhaps you've forgotten Amazon's 1-click patent?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
What can't be patented is the bit of code that says "if (time > 120 seconds) motor.stop();"
Can an electrical circuit that does the same thing be patented? I'd say no, it's not novel and not advancing the state of the art in any way - it's an extremely obvious way to implement a desired function.
So yes, the example you picked of a line of code that does something trivial and obvious should not be patent-able. But then neither should it's analog or mechanical equivalent.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Except that Windows was a windowing system in its original incarnation, leaving us with another descriptive trademark.
A windowing system, not a 'windows' and there is a GUI element called a 'window' and you can have multiple 'windows' and you can most certainly use that term without violating the trademark because the trademark isn't for a product describing the GUI element.
you don't know what you're talking about http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2004/02/11/lindows-wins-in-us-court-microsoft-ruling-39118328/
Actually it appears you don't know what you're talking about, that article in no way whatsoever refutes my comment, i'm guessing you didn't even read it.
Daniel Harris, Lindows' lead trial counsel, said in a statement that the win was a major blow to Microsoft. "The court's ruling confirms that a company, no matter how much money it spends, cannot buy a word out of the English language. These repeated filings by Microsoft are just another attempt to deplete our resources by dragging these legal proceedings on for as long as possible."
i probably should have added that after this trial microsoft payed lindows 20 million dollars to change their name to linspire and protect their windows trademark.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
No-Touch and One-Touch are current trademarks for devices that operate with no touch or one touch.
Pretty hilarious, this intellectual property stuff, huh?
I think it is actually NoTouch and OneTouch. Neither "no" nor "one" is a generally accepted prefix to a word, so those two words are nonsensical unless they are a product name. You could still advertise your product as "backup with just one touch" and be okay, whereas if you said "backup with OneTouch", you'd be in trouble.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No Touch, One Touch and Multi-Touch are descriptive.
Notouch, onetouch, no touch, one touch, no-touch, and one-touch are all active trademarks.
"Uni-Touch" and "unitouch" were also active trademarks (since abandoned). "Duo-touch" is an active trademark, as are "micro-touch" and "autotouch." Uni, duo, micro and auto are generally accepted word prefixes.
"Manipulate your screen using multiple touches" vs. "Manipulate your screen using Multi-Touch®"
Copyright and patent can be general. If you're first to invent (or, now, file) or first to write, you get it.
Trademark, not being based on constitutional authorization, is a lot more squirrely. It's about consumer protection, it's just business trade law, and it is extremely dependent on the individual case, that specific use and the market.
I haven't been able to read the whole rejection notice yet, so I don't know any specific reasons for the rejection. I'm just saying that in general "multi-touch" can't be rejected just for being descriptive.
I also don't think decision of it being generic should count the time after Apple applied for the trademark. Imagine a term wasn't in popular use for the specifc market you're in. You decide to use it with a product you release, and simultaneously apply for a trademark. Two years later, due to your product being successful, the term is in common use in your market, so the USPTO rejects your application.
That is total BS. By this logic, no highly popular product or feature could ever be trademarked.
The US District Court in Seattle ruled Wednesday that the jury in the case should "consider whether the Windows mark was generic" before Windows 1.0 entered the marketplace in 1985. It also said that even if the "primary significance" of the term is not generic today - that is, has been displaced by the proprietary use - the trademark is not necessarily valid.
The ruling was absolutely nothing to do with the Windows trademark being generic, it was that Lindows didn't infringe upon it. So while they should consider it there is no reason to believe it would be ruled invalid.
i probably should have added that after this trial microsoft payed lindows 20 million dollars [sys-con.com] to change their name to linspire and protect their windows trademark.
And? Again, nothing to do with the Windows trademark being invalid. And not only that but the statement from their counsel ignores the fact that millions of trademarks are of regular English words, it's the context in which they are taken that matters, i mean Apple has a trademark on AirPort and the French word 'bonjour' among many others. No-one calls a computer operating system a 'Windows' just as no-one calls a router an 'AirPort'.
Erm, in none of the articles mentioned so far was it stated that Lindows didn't infringe on the Windows trademark, only that the trademark is not necessarily valid - even in the quote you just put in there it says "the trademark is not necessarily valid", feel free to make up whatever you like though, i'm done.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Erm, in none of the articles mentioned so far was it stated that Lindows didn't infringe on the Windows trademark
That is what the lawsuit was about, like i said:
The ruling was absolutely nothing to do with the Windows trademark being generic, it was that Lindows didn't infringe upon it.
Lindows weren't saying Windows is generic, they were saying they didn't infringe on the Windows trademark.
only that the trademark is not necessarily valid - even in the quote you just put in there it says "the trademark is not necessarily valid", feel free to make up whatever you like though, i'm done.
Yet here we are, with a valid trademark and absolutely nothing whatsoever to suggest it would be invalid, feel free to mindlessly buy into the conjecture though. You don't actually have any idea why you believe the trademark might not be valid, you're just taking that quote, believing it without question and propagating it, pretty dumb thing to do.