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."

Comments

Oh ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Go away apple!

The US will just cripple its own tech

[Viol8]

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).

Re:The US will just cripple its own tech

[melonman]

I think a more likely outcome is something like the patent pool that was forced into place by the US government around the 1920s to avoid a situation where, basically, no company could build a plane without infringing another company's patents. Otherwise, sooner or later, Android will be in trouble, but so will Apple and all other US companies.

Re:The US will just cripple its own tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as an American who lives abroad and works in Europe... this is how it has been working already for some time. The company I work for sells a software product globally. The version shipped into the US market was up until recently crippled to avoid infringing a ridiculous US patent that was granted in the mid-90's and just recently expired. Now we can finally ship a full featured product to the US.

It's utterly amazing that the patent system in the US is still this bad. Where is the reform we keep hearing about?

Re:The US will just cripple its own tech

[Anonymous Coward]

As a non-American myself it is incredibly disheartening to see so many innovations created by American companies being denied to large segments of the American populace itself thanks to it's own utterly absurd patent system. Whatever people think about US...foreign policy, popular culture, overt consumerism or whatever..the one thing you cannot deny is that quality of life has been drastically improved for so many thanks to technological advances made by US companies. To then go and deny their own population the benefits of those advances because of bizarre and outdated patent laws just seems morally and ethically wrong on so many levels.

Re:The US will just cripple its own tech

[TheRaven64]

We're already in that situation. Unfortunately, rather than just cross-licensing the patents they're all suing each other and using temporary injunctions to gain first-mover advantage.

Re:The US will just cripple its own tech

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that these sorts of features are increasingly implemented in pure software, or in hardware where every unit has all the features(because spinning a new mask is crazy expensive), but only some features are firmware-enabled, for price-discrimination or IP reasons, it will be interesting to see whether the "cheap DVD player" phenomenon crops up...

In the US, at least, back when DVD players were something people cared about, there arose a curious little wrinkle in the market:
The pricier hardware, with the traditionally respectable brand badges(Sony, etc.) had nicer build quality, and was more likely to include features that were genuinely expensive in hardware(DACs that didn't suck, absurd numbers of outputs); but also enforced the various region locking, macrovision, and other user-hostile features of the DVD spec to the letter.
The cheap seats tended to have the usual downsides(somewhat... functional... build quality, dadaist user interfaces, a bit of scrimping and saving on BOM); but tended to enforce user-hostile requirements rather tepidly. There would either be some trivial 'debug code' that you could tap into the remote, or a 'test firmware' would 'leak' about 10 seconds after release that would remove all DRM features. The cheapies also tended to have the cheap-because-it's-software pirate-friendly features, like support for assorted audio and video codecs in files just burned to data DVDs and the like.

If the patent wars become too hot, a similar phenomenon could theoretically crop up in other electronics markets. The "US Firmware" version would be oh-so-bare-and-legally-compliant; but the hardware would be identical because SKU proliferation is expensive, and there would be a strong incentive for players, particularly the weaker players, to 'accidentally' suffer from a 'bootloader verification bug' that allows the least-crippled English-language firmware, *cough*easily available for download from our Hong Kong TLD's support page, 'only for our customers in the region'*cough* to be flashed to US devices...

Prior art?

[mykos]

I think someone already beat them to it.

Re:Prior art?

[am 2k]

But it's on a phone, so it's something completely new and nonobvious! "On the Internet" patents are soo 2000.

Neonode N1M - prior art

[__Paul__]

Given that the Neonode N1M is likely to be considered prior art, how would one go about getting the patent ruled invalid?

Well what about this ?

[giorgist]

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.

Re:Well what about this ?

[nonicknameavailable]

Neonode N1m was released in 2005