Pinch-To-Zoom Apple Patent Rejected By USPTO

freddienumber13 writes "In another patent surprise, a patent application by Apple for pinch-to-zoom has been rejected by the USPTO on the grounds that its claims were either anticipated by previous patents or simply unpatentable. This will be welcome news for Samsung, who back in April asked for a stay of the trial. However, Apple has a short period of time in which they can appeal this finding."

Comments

Pinch Me, I Must Be Zooming

[barlevg]

It seems like the USPTO is doing a *slightly* better job of not granting these absurd and frivolous patents. Love to see if they keep up this kind of thing.

Re:Pinch Me, I Must Be Zooming

[icebike]

It seems like the USPTO is doing a *slightly* better job of not granting these absurd and frivolous patents. Love to see if they keep up this kind of thing.

Whoa, there cowpoke. Let's not acknowledged them for ordinary powers of observation over one "dee-NIED!"

Now if they start making a habit of it, there may be cause to light one cupcake on fire in celebration.

Spot on.
The re-examinations are starting to show some common sense.
After the community at large finds the prior art for them, the patent office seem to fess up to their mistakes more easily than most government agencies.

I'm not saying its the patent offices job to search for prior art, (but if Joe Random can find prior art why can't they?), but voiding all of these patents only AFTER they have been issued
and appealed, and used in court, and enforced by various import bans, and inflicted untold damage on the market place just seems backwards.

Since we are now on a first to file basis, the idea of imposing a 1 year public comment period commencing just after the Patent office published an intent-to-award notice would seem a reasonable extension to the patent process. It would put the community or others in the field on notice of which patents need attention.

As it is now, thousands of patents are filed and even the community efforts can't find all the prior art on every filing and the effort isn't warranted when significant percentage of patent applications will be rejected anyway.

We probably need a Dewey Decimal System for patent claims, so that the search process would be faster.

Re:Do they get a refund?

[ergo98]

Quite the opposite, if you file and are granted a patent for something that is later ruled invalid, there should be substantial penalties for the filer, because the purpose of a patent application is a government granted monopoly, leveraging the legal power and force of government to suppress other business. If you tell the government that you've done something novel that isn't, and prevent competition through that mechanism, there are substantial social costs (none of the benefits of invention, but all of the costs of a monopoly).