As much as I agree, in principle, that getting patents has become *far* too easy, with a virtually meaningless threshold for novelty, you're going to run into trouble if you think that a planned, but not implemented 'pinch-to-zoom' algorithm mentioned only "a couple months" before the iPhone was shown off is going to count as prior art in a discussion of any patent which existed well before *that* date.
Ah, you missed the context. My example was in response to someone claiming that no one else would have thought of using pinch on a phone.
Pinch-to-zoom has been recorded as far back as the
early 1980s. Not that it matters, since Apple doesn't have any such patent.
Such gestures are easy to come up with anyway, once you start working with touch or multi-touch. You can sit around with some buddies and beer and come up with quite a list. (I know. I've been doing touchpads since the 80s and capacitive touchscreens since the early 90s.)
That's one reason why I'm against large companies trying to patent all sorts of gestures, which are just another human vocabulary. For example, Apple's patent on using two fingers to scroll a DIV within a screen. Excuse me? Let's see, you're a developer and you need to differentiate types of fingertip scrolling, and you have a screen that accepts more than one finger. D'oh. Using more than one finger is one obvious choice and should not be patentable. It's like patenting a music chord.
Besides, if you read the details of Apple's collection of 'multi-touch patents', you'll find that they're not patents on multi-touch technology in general.
Yep, I am very familiar with their patents and have explained them many times on this forum, often before major news sites finally figure them out.
They're patents on particular implementations, and on particular methods of recognizing and distinguishing between certain gestures, as well as patents on how to treat those gestures in regard to a user interface.
Umm. I disagree that they're patents on implementations. They don't list detailed algorithms or methods, but more like generic actions hidden behind words like "heuristics".
Apple also likes to pile onto older patents in an attempt to thwart workarounds that others later discover. E.g. their attempts to add more general claims onto the slide-unlock patent (which should never have been granted in the first place) were
rejected over and over by the examiner until Apple just plain wore him down. (Examiners are now reviewed by how many patents they've done, and allowing one is easier than rejecting.)
Apple's multi-touch patent collection is actually rather specific, and should be easy enough to design around, if a competitor actually cared to.
I agree, for the most part. Indeed, the danger Apple faces is that, by not licensing their patents, they force others to come up with ways around them that could be even better (a primary objective of patents in the first place).
For example, the above-mentioned two-finger scrolling patent. The solution that others used was to simply let the person use one finger on the subwindow and when it scrolled to an end, then continue scrolling the rest of the screen. As it turned out, that's infinitely more intuitive for a user than the little-known two-finger method. So now Apple is allowing the one-finger method as well with a special HTML tag.
Again, I'm really against confusing users by forcing each device to have its own gesture vocabulary. All that will do is impede progress.
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Moreover, Apple doesn't care about defending these junk patents. When a judge has pointed out that he'd likely throw one out, Apple simply pulls it and uses a different one. They use these patents as throwaway ammunition to slow down the competition and to get temporary injunctions.
Therefore one thing I agree with as far as patent reform goes, is the idea that the punishment level should match the infringement level. For example, how much of a phone's attraction is because of the unlock screen? Not much. Heck, I always disable it.
Ironically, Apple actually argues the same thing when it's to their advantage in FRAND fights. They claim that they should only pay royalties as a percentage of how much a radio chip costs, not on the whole device. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and they should not seek injunctions against competitors for entire devices, based upon relatively tiny software pieces.
Regards.
