Apple Wins Mobile Patent On Displaying Lists, Documents

walterbyrd writes "Apple yesterday was granted Patent no. 8,223,134 for 'Portable electronic device, method, and graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents.' According to the patent's description, the technology relies upon a touch-screen display and includes both the function for displaying lists and documents, and how they look on a mobile product."

Comments

who owns the uspo?

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like Apple has controlling shares in the USPO

Re:who owns the uspo?

[Tancred]

We (U.S. citizens) do, and we should be telling our congresscritters that this has to stop.

Re:who owns the uspo?

[BlueStrat]

You've wasted time in your life that you'll never get back... "Hopefully soon to be" is not "is"... try speaking to the current congressperson...

You mean continue talking to the guys that routinely ignore their constituents, lie to us in the face of obvious factual contradictions, and only listen to those throwing hookers, bags of cash, and coke at them?

That's worked so well so far, hasn't it?

The definition of insanity comes to mind.

Toss all incumbents out. Demand term limits. Eliminate career politicians.

Strat

Re:who owns the uspo?

[Jeremi]

Toss all incumbents out. Demand term limits. Eliminate career politicians.

Be careful what you wish for -- there's no reason to expect that the replacement politicians would be any less corrupt than the current ones, and every reason to expect that none of them would know what the hell they were doing for the first year of their first term in office. The result would be a completely dysfunctional government after every election.

The goal shouldn't simply be to have new representatives, the goal should be to have good representatives. And the way to get good representatives is to change the electoral system so that the path to getting elected isn't "raise the most money", but rather "best represent the views of the largest number of constituents". Only then will have you have politicians who are motivated to listen to people rather than to money.

Re:who owns the uspo?

[I_am_Jack]

Toss all incumbents out. Demand term limits. Eliminate career politicians.

Because of course anyone who replaces them will spring from the forehead of Athena, walk on water then turn it into wine, poop vanilla ice cream, and give us all sweet fuzzy kittens to make us happy when we're sad.

Why not try to create a better informed electorate? One which understands that software patents deter competition and stifle innovation.

Re:who owns the uspo?

[BlueStrat]

Why not try to create a better informed electorate? One which understands that software patents deter competition and stifle innovation.

What does it matter how informed and clued-in the electorate is if the politicians won't listen?

Don't get me wrong. I fully support efforts to inform and involve more people in the process. First, however, one must have a government that will respond and be accountable to the electorate. Career politicians have the time to form networks of cronies in and out of government to secure their positions and power, and to insulate themselves from public accountability.

As far as the new politicians, if they lie about their intentions and/or behave badly they must be voted out. There's no "Pre-Crime" that can determine this ahead of time. The electorate can only try to vet candidates as well as possible, and kick them to the curb if they prove untrustworthy.

The only course we can take to truly protect ourselves against government corruption is to limit the amount of power and wealth they control, and the amount of time they have to abuse it. Nobody is going to try to bribe/influence a politician to get government subsidies, for example, if said politician/government hasn't the power or wealth to provide such subsidies.

This in turn will be a disincentive to those contributing/spending large amounts of campaign and lobbying money, since their returns on their "investment" will be greatly reduced or eliminated. The framers of the Constitution knew this, and deliberately hamstrung the central government for precisely these reasons.

The more power and wealth government controls, the more money it's worth spending to those seeking influence. The reverse is also true, which is the point.

Strat

Re:who owns the uspo?

[erroneus]

Many of us do... the problem is the other "legal personhoods" speak louder and more frequently and with more money.

Re:who owns the uspo?

[Xest]

I think it's probably harder to fix the electorate than fix the system, because the electorate is in many cases kept dumb by the system, because the system benefits from an uninformed electorate. If you want to fix the electorate you fight an uphill battle because those with the power to easily change this are working against you, whilst you, a minority, have neither power nor numbers.

Despite this I largely agree that the suggestions put forward by the GP aren't necessarily going to fix much. The fixes that are needed (not just for the US, but even countries like the UK) are:

1) Political campaigns funded purely by the public purse, relative to past popular support performance, with a cap such that the largest party has no inherent financial benefit over say, their next 2 or 3 closest competitors.

People don't like paying for politics, but this is simply the only way to ensure that parties campaign and perform in the interests of the public, rather than lobbyists. I would argue that any cost involved in this sort of thing to the tax payer would be more than made up for by the savings of having competent government that doesn't spend money handing useless contracts to lobbyists who got them in power etc.

2) A representative voting system.

There is an argument that representative voting systems like PR create governments that have little strength, but this is clearly false as Germany has proven having had coalition governments since the war. Ultimately minority or coalition governments are forced to compromise. In the UK people complain about our current coalition, citing things like the increase in tuition fees to £9,000 but they miss the fact that if it weren't for the coalition the Tories were actually going to push fees of £12,000. Our coalition has made a lot of mistakes, but it's naive to think the Lib Dems haven't had at least some degree of moderating influence on the government. The NHS changes were similarly far far worse under purely Tory proposals. Even with our shitty example of a coalition government, the coalition has led to moderation and has still been better than the alternatives - a Labour or Tory majority.

3. Limit media ownership.

Limit media ownership to say, 10% of the media, to ensure that no one media mogul can have undue influence on the media. Having a strong public broadcaster like the BBC which has a legal obligation to be impartial is also of major benefit.

Unless you do these sorts of root and branch changes you cannot have a healthy democracy, it will always be more easily corrupted, much less representative of the people and far more representative of vested interests and lobby groups.

It's unlikely America especially would ever go for these changes because many Americans have been fed bullshit about how the state is evil, but this has simply been used as a method by which to ensure corporations are strong enough to be able to control the state, which is then used as the tool by which to act against the interest of most Americans which creates this obscure feedback loop of Americans then thinking the state is evil and supporting laws that make corporations more powerful. Similarly the idea of state funding for political campaigns would probably be seen as too socialist in America, where socialism is defined to be synonymous with communism which is defined to be inherently evil because America lost the Vietnam war and failed in Korea to attain complete victory etc.

Just as religion and state should never be mixed, neither should corporate interests and state, and the only way to remove that separation is with the likes of implementations of ideas such as points 1 and 3 above. Point 2 works to limit corporate interests by itself, because it forces politicians to listen to the people if they want to be elected, it forces them to pursue moderate policies that at least half-please everyone, rather than extreme policies often pushed by corporate interests that make some people happy, whilst destroying the lives of others.

Until you solve this problem of the merging of state and corporations, you cannot have a healthy democracy and again, just as you cannot have a healthy democracy when there is a merging of religion and state.

Re:who owns the uspo?

[Digicaf]

The result would be a completely dysfunctional government after every election.

If only we should be so lucky.

I don't get it

[slashmydots]

I don't quite see the business model of filing an idiotically general patent, waiting around, suing someone for using it, spending millions defending it in court, and getting the patent thrown out and paying the competitor's legal fees.

Re:I don't get it

[Skarecrow77]

I wonder... can I get a patent on filing stupid patents?

I mean just think, that will pre-empt thousands and thousands of these things.

it'll be a god damn money pit.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't quite see the business model of filing an idiotically general patent, waiting around, suing someone for using it, spending millions defending it in court, and getting the patent thrown out and paying the competitor's legal fees.

By suing someone you slow down their ability to bring competing products to the market.

Re:I don't get it

[CosmeticLobotamy]

It's not general, the summary is just dumb. As far as I can tell, it's a patent on a scrollbar that disappears when you're not dragging the view. If that's right, it's certainly a crummy patent, but not a general one.

Re:I don't get it

[LordLucless]

How about the business model of filing an idiotically general patent, suing a new entrant to your market before they have millions of dollars to defend themselves in court, sucking their coffers dry and driving them out of the market, thus ensuring your market position?

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

How about clicking the link and reading the description. It's actually pretty specific about it.

I mean, fuck Apple, but don't just jump on that bandwagon.

"Abstract
In a computer-implemented method, a portion of an electronic document is displayed on the touch screen display. The displayed portion of the electronic document has a vertical position in the electronic document. An object is detected on or near the displayed portion of the electronic document. In response to detecting the object on or near the displayed portion of the electronic document, a vertical bar is displayed on top of the displayed portion of the electronic document. The vertical bar has a vertical position on top of the displayed portion of the electronic document that corresponds to the vertical position in the electronic document of the displayed portion of the electronic document. After a predetermined condition is met, display of the vertical bar is ceased. The vertical bar is displayed for a predetermined time period when the portion of the electronic document is initially displayed."

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for that. We had to display the list of comments in the wrong order because of a new apple patent.

you don't see a business model

[circletimessquare]

But Apple's law firm does, and you nicely described all of the revenue generating functions.

Of course there's a difference between a business model predicated on bringing something of value to society and the business model of a rent seeking parasite that only owes its existence to an unaddressed inefficiency.

Re:you don't see a business model

[jaymemaurice]

Does it make you any less of a dick (or vagina) because someone else paid you to be one?

There, I fixed that for you.

~your friendly Norwegian Microsoft Developer’s Conference Incorrectly Politically Correcting Department.

Re:UITableView

[harperska]

No, they patented the behavior of the scroll bar in UITableView, not the view itself like the summary makes it sound.

New Method

[Archangel Michael]

________ with a touch interface! Patent awarded!

Re:don't hate the player hate the game

[SurfsUp]

And what is wrong with hating the hateful player that plays the hateful game? Apple has gone out of its way to make itself perfectly hateful so I for one must comply.

What did she agree to do?

[Taco Cowboy]

Okay, so your soon-to-be congress-woman candidate gets elected and becomes a real congress-woman

What she agrees to do now?

I mean, what can you expect _anyone_ in the Congress to do, while the USPO is protected by corporations, patent trolls, and the lawyer union?

Re:Patent Experts

[drkstr1]

Who the fuck cares what it says? You shoud not be able to patent a god damn UI concept. I don't care how detailed the patent describes it. (I assume you are the same AC farther up, exclaiming how detailed the patent is, like that somehow fucking matters) ...ending rant before my BP spikes...

Re:Apple no longer a product company

[MacGyver2210]

Steve's dead, man. Nobody left at Apple has the balls to throw out aggressive new products like the Jobs did. As much as I hate the guy and his company, he definitely knew his shit when it came to generating hype out of thin air.

Re:Patent Experts

[StripedCow]

You shoud not be able to patent a god damn UI concept.

Indeed. Imagine somebody patenting the steering wheel of a car, or the order of the pedals, or the order of the gears. That would be ridiculous. You'd never be able to switch brands of car.

Now besides USER-interfaces, I think actually that one should not be able to patent interfaces in general. Because any patent in this area will block interoperability and, as a result, innovation.

Re:The "A Better Informed Electorate" oxymoron

[JazzLad]

Then they deserve the government they get.

But what about the rest of us?