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Patent Suit Targets Every Touch-based Apple Product
suraj.sun writes with news that a new patent suit has been filed against Apple over all of the company's touch-based products. From the article:
"According to the complaint (PDF), Professor Slavoljub Milekic conceived a system that used a touchscreen that allowed children to move virtual objects around the screen, which he used to build interactive displays for the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, in 1997, and filed for a patent on his design that same year. The patent in the suit, U.S. Patent #6,920,619 named 'User interface for removing an object from a display,' was issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2005. According to the lawsuit, Milekic formed FlatWorld Interactives in 2007 to 'promote and commercialize' his invention. Curiously, FlatWorld was incorporated on January 2007, just weeks after Apple announced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo. In July 2007, just after Apple shipped the original iPhone, FlatWorld filed a reissue request for the patent, which appears to have been done in order to modify some of the patent's dependent claims."
Curiously, FlatWorld was incorporated on January 2007, just weeks after Apple announced the original iPhone at Macworld Expo.
Why is that curious? What's curious to me is that this patent was issued in 2005 and Apple began releasing infringing devices with massive publicity and advertising in 2007. Now five years later he finally gets around to filing suit? Just after Apple experiences the most profitable quarter in history of any tech company and the news outlets proclaim that Apple has too much money?
... right now the patent ecosystem is this mentality of having a huge patent war chest because if you're producing a lot of anything, you're infringing on someone's rights and the odds are you'll pay for it at the time you're making the most money. This is unfair that Apple priced out these devices and sold millions of them with the possibility that they may be paying a hindsight licensing fee for each device.
Either this lawsuit was timed perfectly or Slavoljub Milekic has been living without human contact for five or more years until recently arbitrarily realizing that Apple has been infringing on his "intellectual property."
Patents wouldn't be so bad if everyone who had them cleared their throat from the beginning and got all this out of the way and agreed upon
On the other hand, it's nice to see Apple getting a taste of its own medicine.
My work here is dung.
This worked out so well for Apple the last time a Professor claimed patent infringement:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/us/david-gelernter-discusses-patent-claim-against-apple.html
...it's lawsuits like these which make me want to get out of programming as a profession.
...that this would affect a lot more than just Apple if upheld. I understand Google's got a small interest in touch-based devices, too, and I seem to recall that Microsoft's considering maybe supporting some of this 'touch' stuff in Windows 8. (Sarcasm tag heavily implied there, which was hopefully clear.)
Seriously, I feel that patents have become sort of like nuclear weaponry; you either try to amass enough weapons in your patent portfolio that the other side won't launch, as with mutually assured destruction between the big companies, or else you get held hostage by patent-troll terrorists who get ahold of a weapon and threaten to take out everything they can unless you pay them. Maybe we need the patent law equivalent of Jack Bauer to deal with patent trolling. :P
--Rachel
... for people to realize that patents on ways to accomplish a desired goal, particularly when the goal does not involve manufacturing or processing of any physical goods or materials, are fundamentally a bad idea?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yet another variation of the popular patent "do something we already know how to do, but on a computer". Now it's "do something we already know how to do on a traditional computer with mouse, but on a touchscreen". It's not like there weren't touchscreens before Apple's products of the last few years. There are even older Apple touchscreens, so old in fact that their patents have expired or are about to do so. The previous generation's touchscreens didn't catch on because the devices were too limited. They've overcome that now.
Obviously he isn't claiming to have invented a touchscreen, since that long predates him. He presumably can't be patenting the idea of "using a touchscreen by touching it" in general, because that's the only way you can use one. Instead it seems to be an enumeration of lots of ways you can drag your finger along a touchscreen and produce UI events: it can move objects, it can produce zoom events, it can cause objects to disappear, to be replaced by other objects, whatever.
My first reaction would be that this is a pretty obvious enumeration of things you can do with a touchscreen. But since courts seem to have a strange definition of what would be obvious to a person skilled in the art, a better angle might be to ask: is there video or discussion of someone using a touchscreen for manipulating objects on a screen prior to 1997? It seems the answer must be yes, but I can't find a smoking gun. By manipulating objects I mean dragging/panning/zooming, not interfacing with a "normal" GUI like touching buttons with your finger.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The Divinyls claim prior art from 1991.
#DeleteChrome
I was a programmer for the "Earth Over Time" interactive videodisc in 1990. Produced by Digital Techniques Inc., of Burlington Massachusetts for the Interactive Video Science Consortium, the system was designed primarily for school-age children, and installed in dozens of museums worldwide including the National Geographic in Washington DC. Earth Over Time featured a touchscreen display of Continents which the user could "click and drag" to re-assemble Pangaea, the prehistoric proto-continent. This multimedia application (called an "interactive videodisc" in the days before "multimedia" was a common word) won several awards including an ITVA Golden Reel and the Best Overall Achievement Nebraska Interactive Videodisc award in 1990. I also have implementation notes from the project in my files.
Here we go, the patent troll merry-go-round...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Apple Newton, 1993.
Doesn't it count as prior art? Not to mention all the other touch devices that had been available before the Newton.
Anyone notice how these are some suspiciously common letters? What are they trying to hide?
(Std. disclaimer: I am a registered patent attorney, but I'm not your attorney. If you need legal advice, find an attorney licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.)
The independent claims of this patent appear to focus on touching an item on the screen and "throwing it away" by moving it fast. Despite the hyperbole in other comments here, it doesn't claim all touchscreen systems.
Can anyone think of a system that allowed deleting items from a touchscreen by "throwing them away" before June 12, 1997?
Hello? Yes, this is the Office of Licensing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You might have heard of us? Yes, that M.I.T., professor. It has come to our attention that your patent 6920619 is based on Intellectual Property that is the undisputed creation of this Institute.
Yes, that is correct. No, I'm sorry, but your pathetic attempt to rip off the "Put That.. There" project has not escaped our voracious I.P. monetizing department. Yes, I realize you obtained a patent in 1997 for this. It's not our fault that both yourself and the Patent Office failed to make note of the P..T..T project, which has continuously been a research project here since 1979, generating over three dozen major peer-reviewed papers and at least four PhD thesis.
No, we don't take "I didn't know" as valid remuneration. We do take Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AmericanExpress, Diner's Club, and other credit cards. The entire contents of your bank account will also be a start.
Yes, you plagiarizing twit, your Patent is invalid. Yes, we have a lot more lawyers than you (we get them from Harvard, at wholesale prices). Yes, you owe us for copyright infringement, too, since your interface design (as documented in the patent submission) is a direct copy of the 1990s work in P..T..T , and U.I. and industrial design is copyrightable (big shout out to Apple, there!).
We await payment in the sum of a mid-size country's G.D.P., and no, we don't take first-born children. That would be Harvard.
End-of-line.
It's a nice principle, but lots of recent precedents (East Texas anyone?) are weakening that defense in favor of the trolls.
It might be interesting if they applied that to Copyright too.
Day 1: Guy starts cute little remake of a 2nd tier 60's SF story. Nothing happens
Day 485: Guy finally gets viral and suddenly NOW the publishing company decides there's money to be had.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I think deep down, really deep down. I sort of wish that Apple fails to defend against this lawsuit. I am just so sick and tired of seeing the lawsuits spew from Apple with no real repercussions while still able to stand on the high ground and look down on people who dare to accuse them of infringing on patents. It disgusts me and honestly, I fear for any future where the everyday man can't even consider developing an item or the next big thing for it most likely will infringe on some random patent down the line.
1. Find some obscure patent for doing X with Y using Z.
2. Post a story titled "company/person patents doing X!!!".
3. Commenters scramble to write their own post listing the obvious prior art for X without reading the article, and therefore finding out about Y or Z.
4. Fetch the popcorn and watch the page hits grow.
5. PROFIT!
The patent says it is restricted to "A digital system that may be used by children two years old and older. " All apple has to do is claim iphones are fro people under 2 years old.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
idiots... all software patents should be void as they're just mathematical algorythms when it gets down to it... your stupid patents office should be disbanded for the harm they've caused by allowing both software and method patents...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
there were many touch screen devices before this one, so that's one issue out of the way. The real killer is that this is clearly a patent for a child's toy, as stated clearly in the patent docs. What would breach the patent would be an app that mimicked the processes described in the patent. iOS looks pretty safe, as does a hundred other touch driven devices.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
This kind of story repeats itself over and over again. Even after several posts have pointed out that the new insight here, which it's not clear to me that Apple infringes now, is about deleting something when it moves faster than a certain speed, we get more posts about just touchscreens. Is there some way to mod down the author of this story?
It's a nice principle, but lots of recent precedents (East Texas anyone?) are weakening that defense in favor of the trolls.
The key is whether the two parties in the suit were talking about licensing in the first place, not whether it reached the attention of the court. The court is just there to resolve the dispute given that the parties don't agree.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
You can see this behavior in MOST touch-screen portable devices.
And if you want to use a search engine to see how widespread this behavior is, Google "kinetic scrolling".
You didn't even read the summary and are fired from this discussion.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
So...we've had touch screen interfaces for years. Frankly I'm a little vague on the differences between using a stylus and not using a stylus, which in my mind brings us WAAAAY back to Apple's Newton project from the dawn of time. But even since then, I remember in the late 90's early 00's touchscreen monitors, overlays for monitors being used in education, tons of kiosk type systems at trade shows. My point is that I find it extremely difficult to believe that the first time this was done was 2005.
My question is this, let's assume all these people before did these things without filing patents, if you created something with an idea prior to someone having a patent on that idea, does that give you any rights at all? Or do you only get rights if you actually file with the patent office? I'm talking about something along the lines of copyright law where I can prove I published something previously, therefor it's mine.
I'm sure I'm going to regret hearing the answer, but I asked.