Steve Jobs Video Kills Apple Patent In Germany

An anonymous reader writes "Today the Federal Patent Court of Germany shot down an Apple photo gallery bounce-back patent over which Cupertino was/is suing Samsung and Motorola. A panel of five judges found the patent invalid because the relevant patent application was filed only in June 2007 but Steve Jobs already demoed the feature in January 2007 (video). While this wouldn't matter in the U.S., it's a reason for a patent to be invalidated in Europe. For different reasons someone thought the iPhone presentation was a mistake. It now turns out that when Steve Jobs said "Boy have we patented it!" his company forgot that public disclosure, even by an inventor, must not take place before a European patent application is filed. But Apple can still sue companies over the Android photo gallery: in addition to this patent it owns a utility model, a special German intellectual property right that has a shorter term (10 years) and a six-month grace period, which is just enough to make sure that history-making Steve Jobs video won't count as prior art."

Comments

Needs to be reversed

[Anonymous Coward]

public disclosure, even by an inventor, must not take place before a European patent application is filed

This should be reversed: no patent can be granted before the inventor has demonstrated that it really works.

Screwy rule

[nurb432]

Not being able to tell people what you have before you tell the government? i guess that is so they can keep the creme of the crop on ideas.

Re:Europe

[Nerdfest]

Perhaps it's how the US claims it's still innovating, when the opposite is actually happening because of it.

Re:Europe

[arth1]

In fact, overall the US patent office doesn't do "due diligence" on almost anything anymore.

What do you mean "anymore"? They didn't before either, which is why unscrupulous people like Edison could trawl for European and Russian inventions, and then patent them in the US.
(And then have the public believe these patent trolls were inventors, but that's a different side of the story.)

Bouncing never should have been patentable

[Solandri]

The "bounce" is just the natural step response of an underdamped second order system. You cannot patent, or at least you should not be able to patent fundamental mathematical principles. The only people who think this is in any way novel or patent-worthy are those who've never taken a higher level math or physics course. But ignorance of the natural laws of math and physics is not an excuse.

Re:Bouncing never should have been patentable

[CajunArson]

Yeah so all icons and user displays since the dawn of computing are fundamentally underdamped second order systems and bounce has been an inherent property of all those systems... or not.

Guess what: almost everything can be described mathematically to some degree, and, by definition, absolutely everything obeys the laws of physics. That doesn't mean that everything *is* math or *is* the laws of physics though. By your definition, the only things that should receive patents are things that can't exist... (Yes, I am aware that this idea is appealing to some elements of the Slashdot "intelligentsia")

I'm not saying that this bounce patent should have been granted, but not on the rather thin grounds that it happens to include a graphical representation of an action that isn't contradictory to the laws of physics. Instead, it would be based on the fact that other user interfaces in the past also incorporated similar animation and feedback patterns.