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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.'"
The Apple '915 patent, which was at issue, does assert a claim to "pinch/zoom." Claim 8 includes:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I submitted this article because firstly this has been such a huge story in the mainstream press that it's good opportunity to investigate how reliable the information coming from them about tech matters is and secondly because there is a lot of confusion even among geeks about what was at stake in this trial resulting in a low signal to noise ratio in the discussions. Personally I do also believe we are at a defining moment in the modern computing industry so even if this lawsuit may end up being of little to no importance the close attention is warranted.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
They didn't have to take it to court. They could have worked out between themselves. But they didn't. We have laws for when people don't work it out themselves. Now I disagree with a lot about patent and copyright laws but if you don't understand how laws contribute to human society you need to study human behavior more. Ask yourself, how is a society even defined without laws? That's what makes society functional. Laws provide a common framework of expectations.
Nilay Patel of the verge, an actual honest-to-god copyright lawyer not just someone who plays an expert on the web, disagrees in his aptly named "The myth of pinch-to-zoom: how a confused media gave Apple something it doesn't own":
"So let's just be extremely clear about this: the jury ruled that 21 of 24 accused Samsung phones infringed claim 8 of Apple patent 7,844,915, which specifically covers a programming interface which detects if one finger on a screen is scrolling or two or more fingers are doing something else. It is one possible step along the road to pinch-to-zoom, but it is definitely not pinch-to-zoom itself. And — crucially — it may not be that hard to design around."
Maybe read up there too ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Does this have such a resounding life-or-death import on the tech industry to warrant such attention?
Yes, yes it does. The current patent system is choking the life out of the tech industry. At first, everyone said they were just building up patent war chests for "defensive purposes". Patent trolls destroyed many of the little guys, but the big companies were largely untouched. Now Apple has unloaded it's patents against Samsung - both major companies, both with large swathes of patents, and Samsung at least has its fingers in many, many tech pies. It's not little companies getting shaken down for lunch money any more, it's superpowers taking swings at each other. And with things like the pre-emptive ban of Samsung's products, it's not a tidy little gentlemanly fight in the courts, either. The patent war just went hot.
Now, that's all a little dramatic, but it's essentially true. This case could quite possibly be the tipping point for the patent system - one way or the other - and people in technical fields are (or should be) extremely interested in the outcome.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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
And more crucially: Is that claim negated by prior art? And should it have been considered obvious to a "person skilled in the art"?
From the comments of the jury foreman, he (they) seemed to misunderstand what prior art actually is. And thus had a conflict of reasoning in applying the patent loosely to the device in question, while requiring prior art to exactly match the device in question. Whereas, the prior art should have been loosely matched to the patent, and not to the infringing device - thus negating the claim in the patent. (Assuming the prior art did actually apply.)
I've noticed that people involved in the patent system (lawyers and inventors) seem to develop an increasingly more stringent view as to how closely prior art must be to invalidate a claim. Reworded, that means that their interpretation of novelty has the bar lowered to the point where the concept of obviousness gets watered down to be meaningless. So any 'invention' that is different in the most minor or pointless way becomes fair game for an IP grab.
Now that would be fine if infringement of the patent was taken as strictly, but that doesn't seem to be the case. If the claims are looked at more broadly when applied to "infringement" than they are when applied to the prior art that would invalidate them; then the patent system becomes a stumbling block rather than a way to 'promote science and the useful arts'.
The problem with that reasoning is the assumption that the law in question is reasonable in the first place. "Working it out" may have involved a ridiculous settlement far exceeding any reasonable demand in a world where that law did not exist.
Let's say there was no patent system. If that were the case, there would be no dispute in the first place.
Now, let's say the patent system did exist, but had a much higher expectation of "inventiveness" and "non-obviousness" than it currently does. Again, the dispute would be easily resolved as it would be clear where copying had taken place.
However, the current system is comprised of ambiguous laws and patents that have so little (if any) inventiveness that they are almost entirely comprised of prior art (and anything left is obvious to anyone 'skilled in the art'). Now the courts are forced to sort everything out and verdicts become pot-luck.
With laws that bring entitlement where entitlement should otherwise not exist, there will always be a conflict that cannot be resolved anywhere but in the courts. Samsung had no way out, but to either pay Apple money, or go to court and take the chance of either paying or not paying. Apple held all the cards and had no reason to back down.
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
No, "scaling" is what the interface does as the result of a gesture, pinching is what the fingers do which again is not defined in the document. There's a reason the patent is called "Application programming interfaces for scrolling operations": it focusses on scrolling and how that operation is distinguished from a gesture. And a gesture is just defined as having 2 ore more input points without further elaborating on the state of those input points.
Scrolling is defined in the full patent text as :
"Scrolling is the act of sliding a directional (e.g., horizontal or vertical) presentation of content, such as text, drawings, or images, across a screen or display window. In a typical graphical user interface, scrolling is done with the help of a scrollbar or using keyboard shortcuts often the arrow keys. Gesturing is a type of user input with two or more input points. Animating operations include changing content within a given time period."
So, they only mention the 2 axis.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
They are advocates. That's what they are supposed to do.
If they took your money but not your cause that would be dishonest.
Please understand. Nobody cares WHICH patents were used to squash competition like a bug. On the one side, Apple and their partisans only care that competition was squashed. They don't care how.
And on the other hand, actual thinking people only care that not just the patent system as it is presently tortured, but the very IDEA of patents is an evil, stinking, obscene insult to humanity. It is corporate welfare. It is a denial of nature and evolution. It strangles competition. It does not further the advance of useful arts in ANY WAY. It stifles the advance. While accelerating transfer of wealth to the wealthy, It hurts the economy. It props up the cancer of bloodsucking lawyers - not the lawyers who participate usefully in addressing criminal acts and REAL civil transgressions. It gives the finger to small business already reeling under the assault of the System. It even uselessly damages very large corporations like Samsung who employ many people. And Samsung will quickly move to pass the cost along to the consumer if this decision stands.
Only idiots believe that patents encourage innovation. Patents strangle innovation. In the absence of patents, innovation would flourish because it confers advantage. The real advantage comes not in planting your boot on the other guy's neck to get a competitive edge at the expense of everybody else. The real advantage comes from making a superior product at a superior price, for its OWN sake.
N.B. - most people, if they interviewed me skilfully, would conclude that I am to the right of Ghengis Khan. In actuality I deny the whole right/left fraud. If I have one message, it is: don't filter every single issue through the prism of some presumed regimented Rule Of Everything imposed from outside your own conscience.
Very interesting interview with the jury foreman on the BBC.
Especially his statements like:
"The jurors wanted to send a message to the industry at large..."
"And in example after example, when we put it to the test, the older prior art was just that. Not that there's anything [wrong] with older prior art - but the key was that the hardware was different, the software was an entirely different methodology, and the more modern software could not be loaded onto the older example and be run without error."
"And so consequently, when we looked at the source code - I was able to read source code - I showed the jurors that the two methods in software were not the same, nor could they be interchangeable because the hardware that was involved between the old processor and the new processor - you couldn't load the new software methodology in the old system and expect that it was going to work. And the converse of that was true."
I hope Samsung's lawyers are watching.
Read the patent. No, really, it's enlightening and a propos to any discussion on the subject.
It does not claim the "tap-to-zoom" gesture as novel. It claims a specific mechanism that describes how to determine which parts to zoom, when to zoom in or out, and on which part to focus and center; all using various methods and heuristics to determine user intent.
Have you noticed that in say, Mobile Safari, when you double-tap to zoom it doesn't just "zoom in"; it tries to determine which is the relevant content block that the user is selecting and magnifies that, often at the exclusion of the surrounding content. The mechanisms to determine what to do and how to do that is what is claimed in the patent.
The prior art on "tap-to-zoom" is precisely a non-contextual and non-discriminating magnification at the point of contact; which is different.
Yes, reading, it's a dangerous thing.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
"I think the jury did an admirable job making sense of the case they were given. They certainly did better than much of the tech media, which have made a complete mess of the verdict."
The jury *completely* screwed up. They started by ignoring the prior-art argument[1] samsung made, and then the foreman proceeded to sway everyone[2] with an "I got my own patent so listen to me" bullshit. The jury was an ill-fated catastrophe from the beginning of deliberations.
[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120826/23534320161/applesamsung-jurors-admit-they-finished-quickly-ignoring-prior-art-other-key-factors.shtml
[2] http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4394863/Jury-foreman-recounts-Apple-vs--Samsung-case
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