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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
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 patent covers something very specific: using the velocity of a swipe across a touchscreen to decide to remove an object / set of objects when a threshold is exceeds. Or in other words flicking / swiping through a collection of things, like the iPhone home screen or cover flow in iTunes. Ignoring whether the patent is valid or not (seems quite trivial to me) how is this "something we already know how to do, but on a computer"? It's a HCI gesture, not sure how it could be done without a computer...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
The Divinyls claim prior art from 1991.
#DeleteChrome
When the larger companies realize that they have far more to lose from patents than they have to gain.
I hope this guy takes them for $20 billion.
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.
Ignoring whether the patent is valid or not (seems quite trivial to me) how is this "something we already know how to do, but on a computer"?
Because it's obvious to the first engineer who actually encounters the problem in the course of day-to-day work. Consider the Apple swipe-to-unlock patent, or Amazon's patnet on one-click purchasing. The only "innovation" in either case was the original idea... and you're not supposed to be able to claim ideas. The actual teachings of those patents are obvious to any undergraduate compsci student or interested amateur, much less someone skilled in the art.
I haven't read the claims, but this patent sounds very similar. If the summary is accurate, then it is a typical USPTO rubber-stamp job... a patent on an idea, written to cover all practical implementations of said idea. Nobody wins but the lawyers when such patents are issued... and gee whiz, look who runs the country.
IMHO successful patent prosecutions should be based on the plaintiff's ability to show willful infringement. Otherwise, patents are literally a (civil) instance of thoughtcrime.
Regardless of application, I feel that all patents are a bad idea. Inventing something gives you an edge over the competition, not just because you're the first to do it, but because you possess intricate knowledge while your competitors are playing catch-up. If that means that a year from now, you will be driven out by market forces, then so be it. The way patents are used today, they artificially inflate prices by forcing producers to enter protectionist contracts, also known as "licensing". You're allowed to produce X widgets at Y price, under Z abusive terms, for the low-low fee of $(X*Y*n) or else we sue you for ($X*Y*2n)^4.
Outside of the IP industry, this is often called racketeering. Instead of breaking your legs and smashing your shop like Little Joe and his thugs, IP trolls use weaponized tomes of law. I think I prefer the thugs, because it's harder to claim self-defense when you kill a gang of lawyers.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
(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.
Actually, the only mistake I appear to have made was in crediting Apple with the swipe-to-unlock patent. It seems the truth is more complicated.
Read that article and the associated claims, and tell me how, in your professional opinion as a patent attorney, the "progress of science and the useful arts" was advanced when the USPTO granted a 20-year monopoly on all likely implementations of the slide-to-unlock gesture.
This oughtta be good.
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.