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Apple Awarded iPhone and Multi-Touch Patent

zombitronic said:
This isn't as much about blocking competition as it is about protecting what Apple has created. If the competition brings something new, different, and better to the table, great. I welcome that, and as Tim Cook has said, "We like competition, as long as they don't rip off our IP."

Now, if this "competition" is merely creating an iPhone clone, I believe that they should be sent back to the drawing board and be forced to innovate for themselves. That's the competition that will drive innovation. Rip-offs will not.
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great post. apple has a right to protect what they create. if others complain, let them invest millions of dollars and years into developing something else. no reason apple should fork over their hard work in the name of copy cat competition. other phone makers should get off their asses and create something to compete.

edit: sorry, i posted twice. browser hiccuped, didn't realize it went through already.
 
Greenhoe said:
I'm not a lawyer but Isn't the Palm Pre going to be fine as long as its Multi-touch screen doesn't copy the iPhones technology and coding?

So your telling me it is now illegal for any other phone company to make a phone recognize multiple touches on a screen? That is like adobe getting a patient for image creating software and saying now other company can make image editing software.

Just because a company has a patient for something like multi-touch that just protects the way they have developed it and as long as the Palm Pre came up with its own code which is far different then apples then wouldn't they be fine?
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That's patent, not patient.
 
stefan24 said:
The voice of reason after reading a couple of posts regarding Apple's possible new rights to sue it's competition.

I do agree it is great to have a patient to protect your intellectual property, but this comes at a cost of stifling and restrict innovation.

I would much prefer an industry that allows innovation and competition for we all win due to the lengths companies will go to makes the best products and services.
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I agree with you, however this patent doesn't stifle innovation one bit, it stops copycat me-too competitors who, instead of coming up with their own ideas ride on the innovation of a leader.

If the iPhone had bombed, do you think we'd be seeing all these look-alike phones today? Apple's innovation needs to be recognized and protected so that its competitors are forced to innovate to be competitive...and THAT's how advancement comes about.

In the short haul all the imitators have diluted the impact of Apple's innovation while at the same time also made multitouch more obviously essential to a good interface experience.

There are some great innovations by Apple and others yet to come, so it's not like Apple has any Monopoly on brains, just a short-term market advantage which they can extend only through constant innovation themselves.

The day Apple adds "cut and paste" it will be somehow different from what it is now and everyone will say, "Of course, that's how it should be done." The current method was invented in the late '70s, it's time to innovate again.

Like Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have asked for a better horse."
 
dissdnt said:
Patents are so stupid, let the market decide.
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Patents are not anti-free market. A market is basically people buying/selling stuff with each other. But there is no "buying" without "owning."

So patents, as ownership-creating, are market creating/pro-market.
 
kevgav said:
Apple acquired Fingerworks. Companies do this when they identify a technology they need to make a product they want to make. They have to buy another company to own that technology or they licence said technology.
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thanks.
/thread. Apple didn't invent multi-touch. So stop going around saying "oh, but no one had it before Apple. They don't buy off companies like MS". They do. While Apple does innovate, clueless people making blanket statements such as that are incredibly annoying. It is painful reading this thread.

And yes, Patents are not always good. In the old days, patents were patents. Nowadays you can patent just about anything trivial including software (in the US). It is also a well known fact (if you work in R&D, I used to) that the US has about one of the worst patent systems, ever. In Germany for example, it is a pain in the ass to patent something. which is great. If you are a small company and trying to come up with a new product you will know what I am talking about.
 
IMHO, if Apple is prepared to license out the technology to other companies like Palm, then there's no issue.

If they don't license it out, and sue the crap out of everyone who tries to make anything even remotely similar, then people who claim that Apple is just another 1990's era Microsoft will have another piece of ammunition in their argument. I say this because multi-touch is a great idea - it has massive potential to be applied to several existing types of product out there.

Compile 'em all said:
And yes, Patents are not always good. In the old days, patents were patents. Nowadays you can patent just about anything trivial including software (in the US). It is also a well known fact (if you work in R&D, I used to) that the US has about one of the worst patent systems, ever. In Germany for example, it is a pain in the ass to patent something. which is great. If you are a small company and trying to come up with a new product you will know what I am talking about.
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Yep, a friend of mine invented a type of plastic that is so hard it has to be machined like metal. But to get it patented is so difficult in most parts of the world that he hasn't bothered.
 
NT1440 said:
Great post other than this tidbit. Software is such an immense field that it is basically required to have patents to keep others from just taking others hard work for their own.
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true, on paper. But in the real world companies try to make as much patents as possible (numbers first, innovation second). In my past job we had patent objectives and my group had to generate at least 4-5 patents per year which were used solely for cross-licensing with other companies. Companies like IBM can make around 2000 patents a year. Do you think all of them are genuinely earth-shattering ideas?. No.

When I had a couple of ideas (I thought were patent worthy) I had to look up patent databases to see if I am infringing on any others patents. I was shocked during my search as to the amount of crap in there, you know...things like "a method of using a mouse to select blah blah".

The patent system "used to" be good. But not anymore. It is now used to crush small companies and make deals between bigger ones. I am not saying this Apple patent is like that, but I wanted to put this whole "protecting peoples hard work" thing into perspective :)

Ninja Edit: for more information onto why software patents can (and usually are) a bad thing you can read this Wikipedia debate article.
 
RIP Palm Pre, LG Dare, Samsung <insert crappy touch phone here>, and maybe Blackberry Storm.

I don't see the Pre seeing the light of day now without a licensing agreement.
 
Now an opinion from a touchscreen engineer

Folks, you're making a lot of to-do about not much at all.

1) Apple didn't invent multi-touch, and sure enough, this isn't a patent for it.

2) Apple didn't invent touchscreen phones, and right again, not a patent for that either.

3) If you read the claims (which are all that matter), it's mostly about using the angle of motion to determine if you're trying to scroll vertically or choose an item.

Few, if any, other touch implementations use actual angles. They instead use the less complicated and more obvious ratio of vertical to horizontal distances.

At least, that's the way I, a 55 year old engineer with decades in the business, read the patent's intentions after a cursory inspection.
 
zombitronic said:
This isn't as much about blocking competition as it is about protecting what Apple has created. If the competition brings something new, different, and better to the table, great. I welcome that, and as Tim Cook has said, "We like competition, as long as they don't rip off our IP."

Now, if this "competition" is merely creating an iPhone clone, I believe that they should be sent back to the drawing board and be forced to innovate for themselves. That's the competition that will drive innovation. Rip-offs will not.
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Totally agree with you!
 
Multi touch

Peace said:
Microsoft did not have it's surface device first and they got the technology ( read: purchased ) from Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel, Inc. a full year after the iPhone was shown.
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I remember seeing those Han videos on You Tube right before the iPhone came out. I thought it was rather curious M$OFT was able to whip together multi touch and embed it in an OS in a year.

Michael CM1 said:
Look at it this way. I think it was IBM that initially created DOS to run computers. Apple said, "I think we can do this better." Then Apple created the Mac OS.
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I think Gates bought DOS off some dude in Seattle and then licensed it to IBM... And somehow convinced them that they should be able to license it to anyone else they wished a well.


Anyone else see a pattern here?
 
kevgav said:
Apple acquired Fingerworks. Companies do this when they identify a technology they need to make a product they want to make. They have to buy another company to own that technology or they licence said technology.
Click to expand...

When one company purchases another company, the purchaser acquires all patent, license and contractual right to the sale company's hardware, software and intellectual property unless the contract of sale specifically declares otherwise. If this were the case with Apple in any of their attempts to purchase companies, they would not acquire the company. Some people may not like Apple and its leadership, but Steve Jobs and company know what they are doing when it comes to running that business.

The main reason for Apple's recent acquisition of PA Semi, the chip company, was so they could acquire the rights to their IP. They could have made the effort to create their own low-power chip designs, but with all that cash, it was cheaper to purchase PA Semi and the right to use what they already had. Soon Apple will be designing their own chips and not have to depend on other chip designers. Unless they acquire a fab company, however, they will still need another company to "manufacture" them.
 
powers74 said:
I remember seeing those Han videos on You Tube right before the iPhone came out. I thought it was rather curious M$OFT was able to whip together multi touch and embed it in an OS in a year.
Click to expand...

That's because the MS Surface was done partly by someone who began on it back in 2001. It had nothing to do with Han. Nor did the iPhone. There has been tons of parallel R&D over the decades.

Almost every post in this thread is full of assumptions, fanboy fake facts, and general lack of knowledge of touch history.

Mass hysteria. Again.
 
kdarling said:
Folks, you're making a lot of to-do about not much at all.

1) Apple didn't invent multi-touch, and sure enough, this isn't a patent for it.

2) Apple didn't invent touchscreen phones, and right again, not a patent for that either.

3) If you read the claims (which are all that matter), it's mostly about using the angle of motion to determine if you're trying to scroll vertically or choose an item.

Few, if any, other touch implementations use actual angles. They instead use the less complicated and more obvious ratio of vertical to horizontal distances.

At least, that's the way I, a 55 year old engineer with decades in the business, read the patent's intentions after a cursory inspection.
Click to expand...

Thank you, i thought i was losing it.
 
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out, one of my free-lance jobs is testing games and apps on mobile devices, including pre-release devices, and I can think of at least one that seems to be infringing on these newly acquired patents.
 
Adokimus said:
Ok, refocusing... here's my main point: Take the original iPod and SanDisk Sansa,

ipod1g.jpg


fuze-sandisk.jpg


They both look pretty similar right?? Why couldn't Apple just patent the scroll wheel for use in mp3 players? How can SanDisk use a scroll wheel? Well, for the same reason that you can't patent a number pad for use with a phone... it's intuitive for that product. What Apple DID patent was a touch surface in the shape of a scroll wheel (a.k.a. no physical wheel that actually spins). SanDisk had to use a traditional physical wheel. Multi-touch, like the scroll wheel user interface, is intuitive and obvious, and shouldn't be patented. On the other hand, particular devices/mechanisms such as capacitive touch screens, and Apple's touch scroll, ARE patentable. I feel like no one is getting this...
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The iPod was the first of it's kind and nobody competed in the market for a while. I guess the question is how long after did SANDisk come out with it's MP3 player? The patent probably expired if any. I think companies learned their lesson and got on board to copying so Apple didn't have such a big lead.
 
hooch said:
The iPod was the first of it's kind and nobody competed in the market for a while. I guess the question is how long after did SANDisk come out with it's MP3 player? The patent probably expired if any. I think companies learned their lesson and got on board to copying so Apple didn't have such a big lead.
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The ipod was not anywhere near the first in the market, but you're right in that it was "the first of its kind". Also, I dont think patents expire that quickly....
 
facts

kdarling said:
That's because the MS Surface was done partly by someone who began on it back in 2001. It had nothing to do with Han. Nor did the iPhone. There has been tons of parallel R&D over the decades.

Almost every post in this thread is full of assumptions, fanboy fake facts, and general lack of knowledge of touch history.
Click to expand...

Sorry, as far as the M$OFT thing is concerned I was just going on what that other guy said, otherwise I know Han didn't have anything to do with the iPhone - the way I understand it the technologies are quite different. Obviously touch has been around a while, it's just a rumors site, I doubt anyone in here has a graduate thesis in the history of touch technology... do you?

At least you could brush us up on the intricacies of touch screen interfaces.
 
wow

how short the memory of some folk.

The mobile phone market was pumping the same crap exactly year after year for nearly a decade.

Apple launched the iPhone with multitouch (which by the way has it's own obstacles and interface devices that have to be worked out completely separate of the way a giant table would) and the "godfathers" of the phone industry laughed and mocked it and said that THEY knew the mobile phone industry and apple was gonna get schooled. (in so many words)

Apple start taking those little punks market share... quickly.

All of a sudden the room is silent... someone raises their hand and out pops tons of iPhone wannabes.

There was never a mention THEN of the device being a flop, or a failure, or a bad idea, or amateurish.

The fact is, that for once, apple had the smarts to get their patents in order before hand, and now everyone is gonna see just how much they owe.

This doesn't stifle innovations, it just means that for once, the technology community will have to give Apple it's due credit.

They will finally have to innovate for themselves, which they failed to do for the previous ten years.

If you want to call it pieces of tech that already existed, then fine, do that, but apple finally gave me a phone that does things the way I like, does it fast and truly syncs with my mac. Sure it has it's features missing, but damn it's essentially a first gen device.. They have to have SOMETHING to add to it.

I find it poetic and funny that Motorola talked so much trash about the iPhone when it debuted and now they can barely keep afloat withstanding releasing 10 more variations on the RAZR FONE.

I sense a bit of bitterness in the mobile phone industry after apple approached them all trying to get them to create a unique device and they never wanted to play ball cause they thought the had it all figured out.

Guess who got schooled and now wants a piece of the pie? Somebody better get to work on eye-tracking user interface before apple builds their optical sensing LCD panel.
 
Keebler said:
It's not like making an operating system and then forcing it on everyone.
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Exactly. You got the point.

How many choices for 'smart phones' or any other phones are there? Monopoly is about using your dominance to limit choice. The last I heard, there was only one (1) phone from Apple. Hardly a monopoly.

Now, if you say that Apple has a monopoly on 'smart ideas' that others want to copy and can't, well, may be so. But you cannot penalize folks and companies for being smart. :)
 
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