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Pinch-to-Zoom and Rounded Rectangles: What the Jury Didn't Say
CharlyFoxtrot writes "Steve Wildstrom at Tech.Pinions takes on some of the what he calls folklore surrounding Apple v Samsung, investigating what was and wasn't part of the case and how the media got it wrong: 'There's one serious problem with the first sentence, which was repeated dozens of times in stories in print and on the Web. Apple only has a limited patent on the pinch to shrink, stretch to zoom gesture that is a core element of touch interfaces. And the 826 patent wasn't in dispute in the Samsung case because Apple never asserted it. In fact, this particular patent does not seem to be in dispute in any litigation.'"
In exactly what way is "scaling the view associated with the event object based on receiving the two or more input points" not "pinch to zoom?" I'm not defending the patent - there's more than ample obviousness and prior art. The link you gave simply describes ways around the claim to "pinch to zoom," it doesn't disagree at all.
The claim very clearly does describe "pinch to zoom." To say that it doesn't is simply disingenuous. That's different than saying it's a valid claim.
Oh, BTW, the link's counter-example, scrolling with two fingers, doesn't work with Google Maps, it causes a change in pitch instead of scrolling (at least it does on my non-Samsung, Android phone, running ICS).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
From the jury foreman:
"One of the most decisive pieces of evidence was reading the minutes for myself of a meeting that was held at a very high level between Google executives and Samsung executives.
It was for a tablet and Google was concerned that for the sake of their operating system that the look and feel and the methodology that they [Samsung] were using to create their tablet was getting too close to what Apple was doing.
And in the memo themselves - remember this was minutes - they stated that Google demanded that they back away from that design.
And later there was a follow-up memo among themselves, these executives, and in black and white it says: we elect to not pass this information down to the divisions that were actually involved in the design.
So, from the sake of the engineers they went merrily along continuing their design not given any orders to back away.
They knew nothing of that meeting. To me that kind of raised a light bulb in my head that when I got in the jury room I wanted to read the minutes of that meeting myself.
When we went into deliberation in the jury room we not only had all the physical evidence of everything that was presented, but we also had sealed source code in its entirety from both sides, we actually had the memos that were talked about in the trial... and there was a piece of evidence after a piece of evidence that just clearly stacked up. "
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19425052