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Apple Granted Patent For Slide To Unlock
generalhavok writes "The United States Patent & Trademark Office has approved Apple's patent on the slide to unlock gesture used on iOS devices. Interestingly, this patent was earlier dismissed in Europe due to prior art. With many Android phones using a similar slide gesture, it will be interesting to see how this new patent will affect the patent wars between Apple and Android vendors."
Go away apple!
Manufacturers will simply ignore US patents everywhere else in the world and provide a crippled product with various functions disabled for the US market if this sort of nonsense continues. It strikes me the US patent office still thinks its 1950 with the US deciding the direction of technological advances. Someone should throw some strong coffee in their faces and wake them up to the reality of the 21st century before they fuck up US industry for good.
(And I'm not a US citizen).
To The US Patent Office
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Here is an article from the FOSS Patents Blog with some details on the case ruled on in last August in the Netherlands, which is what I guess is being referred to as "earlier dismissed in Europe". It's certainly amazing how one judge can say "this clearly existed before" and another can say "no it didn't" based on the same info.
I think someone already beat them to it.
You truly thought we were an intelligent species? Really, now?
Does this mean that Nokia's physical slider for unlocking phones is patentable? I wonder if Nokia has a patent for that and if not, whether USPTO would grant one?
All I see is "wahh, waah, we want to be a monopoly!" I hear that doesn't get people attention from the government at all.
Move sig!
Given that the Neonode N1M is likely to be considered prior art, how would one go about getting the patent ruled invalid?
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
No, the first claim of the patent is for a gesture dragging a graphic along a "predefined, displayed path". So if the unlock gesture isn't a fixed path (like the Samsung S2, which can unlock in any direction; or the path isn't displayed, like a puzzle piece which moves along a fixed path to its destination but that path isn't visible, then it's not covered by the patent.
I know what you mean but you have it backward. Ford was trolled by the Apples of his day (the low volume high cost carmakers) who claimed to have patented everything from the wheel up. He had to spend years and a lot of money fighting them. He won, and the car was democratised. Whatever his faults, Henry Ford ought to have some special place as a Slashdot hero, because in a sense he "open sourced" the motor car.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No, notably, it covers *only* gestures that involve having your finger in continuous contact with your screen *and* having a GUI widget moving continuously under your finger. So all the hype about prior art like entering codes by tapping is bullshit (because your finger isn't in constant contact), and all the hype about android's various unlock mechanisms being in violation are similarly bullshit (because no widget follows the finger continuously).
An article about patents explains the patent in such a broad way that it sounds like it covers everything under the sun? Who'd have thought it!
Announced 1Q, 2005
...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0
Go to 4:00 to see the slide to unlock in action
Now Apple requested the patent on December 2005, I am guessing some form of prior art should kill that.
Why don't we see a drugs manufacturers killing themselves with an 'oval shaped pills' (or as they would put it 'an anatomically efficient vessel for introduction of effective chemicals into the gastro-intestinal system') patent?
What the hell is the department of the Patent Office responsible for SW doing?!
When a patent gets invalidated, the USPTO should be forced to return the fees.
Then it won't take long before they finally learn how to do their work properly.
We would still have phones with thousand of buttons and switches if apple would not have shown an other way.
Guess you never used a Palm Pilot?
Unless you are much more diligent with the little microfiber cloth than everybody else, or some kind of desiccated reptile-man, there is probably a grease trail on your screen containing a significant percentage of your unlock pattern for much of your phone's life...
It's certainly incrementally more secure than slide to unlock, since that is merely supposed to protect against spurious unlocks; but touchscreens bleed usage data if they aren't cleaned obsessively.
Lick to unlock.
It's not as popular, but I can call their patent a ripoff of mine!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It is not anachronistic in other fields. The problem with patents on software is not the length of time that the patent is valid, it is the fact that people are being granted patents on mathematics and pictures. Software is already covered by copyright law; why should it also be covered by patent law?
Palm trees and 8
If it gives you an idea what kind of idiots work for the USPTO, let me give you an example:
A company I know of applies for a copyright to a word (not common everyday word, but the name of a famous person from old times). There are hundreds upon HUNDREDS of other patents that were granted the copyright because each one of them fits into a different category. Let me repeat, it's a one-word name, and hundreds of copyrights WERE granted. The copyright that this particular company applied for was not only under a different category than all of the above, but it even had another acronym attached to the name, so it was TRULY unique.
USPTO denied it because they said (and I can't recall the phrasing exactly) already granted to someone else. There is no one else that applied for it!!!!!! *bang head*
So moral of the story is, you can have prior art all you want. You can LACK prior art all you want. The ones who make the decision at the USPTO are individuals, and the whole process doesn't have a voting system. It's just a "so-and-so decides that you are the first; you're clear to go."
The USPTO needs a damned voting panel system. Public voting would be the best, but hell, that ain't happening in this lifetime. At least an internal voting panel would be nice.
I thought the two main criteria for a patent are: It hasn't been done before (prior art) and it's non-trivial. Like as in holy crap! What you just made there is awesome!! Please patent how you did this so society at large benefits from this and it is never lost!!
I don't think a swipe to start using a touch interface qualifies...
Shakespeare had one of his characters in the play Henry VI utter "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." Of course no one would urge that in real life. But it seems like Shakespeare missed a couple of even bigger evil bastard fuck-ups from hell. Politicians and bureaucrats.
Quoted out of context. The purpose of killing lawyers in the play is to eliminate anyone who could try to get justice for people against a tyrant. Like what Pol Pot did in real life, starting with lawyers, school teachers, engineers, and so on.