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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.
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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.
The problem is that it's relatively easy to conclude that a trademark is descriptive. It's relatively hard, unless you are an expert in a very narrow field, to cut through the B.S. of a typical patent, figure out what it is really supposed to cover, and realize that IBM already did it back in 1963.
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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.
You know, there's a very simple solution to that:
Allow people to file amicus curiae-style briefs on any pending patent. Bored Slashdot posters alone would be filing "examples of prior art" for pretty much everything.
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.
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.
The obvious solution to software patent is to simply not allow them. That requires no expertise in a narrow field, it simply requires that if it is not a mechanical or physical invention, you can't patent it, so applicants can fuck off.
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Unfortunately, 99.9% of that "prior art" wouldn't actually fit the patent claims, and would be more along the lines of "art that does a similar job differently, and probably happened before the patent". The remaining 0.1% would be mostly things already included in the patent as prior art, but the submitter didn't bother to check that.
Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Innovation doesn't count in trademarks either - it is the mark that you use for your trade, that is all. You can be a car mechanic, innovate nothing, and still get the trademark "Fastest Car Care" for your shop.
If Apple had invented a phrase that wasn't a simple description of what their technology did, they would have been granted the trademark.
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