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USPTO Preliminarily Rejects Apple's 'Pinch-to-Zoom' Patent

MonkeySee.... said:
Bored of reading this tripe. The amount of people thinking Apple shouldn't be protecting themselves and let others just leach of their phones innovations is just amazing, it really is.
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There are way too many young kids who think Apple is Goliath and Microsoft is David, and it's always been that way.

There are also way too many young kids who think that if science fiction describes some gadget that this is prior art. *sigh*
 
PentAr said:
Apple once was a very sympathetic company (at least to me), now they're just arrogant and all about money... So, when did Apple become Microsoft?
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As the matter of fact, Microsoft is trying really hard to become like Apple right now ;)

Apple basic tactics didn't change for years.

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mccldwll said:
Except nothing has been invalidated, other than the accuracy of WSJ reporting (which is nothing new). The following may put it in a proper light--especially the likely identity of the "anonymous" objector
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Thank you for the clarifications!
 
The internet is awesome. You can make comments, form opinions, become emotional, etc... over stuff you know nothing about -- at all. No one does anymore independent research. Sad... I guess it's too much work to become informed before speaking...
 
amptech said:
They're totally right.... I mean, I was using pinch-to-zoom on everything before 2006. My flip phone, my XP tablet, my mini-xp tablet, my Rio MP3 player. It was getting so old by the time iPhone came out. I hope they burn. :(
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spare us the melodrama please and wake up to the facts. just because it wasn't widely used doesn't make apple the inventor.
 
Apple will still be in the history books as the company that bought pinch to zoom to the mass market. No one company should have a patent on something like this tho.
 
bbeagle said:
There are way too many young kids who think Apple is Goliath and Microsoft is David, and it's always been that way.

There are also way too many young kids who think that if science fiction describes some gadget that this is prior art. *sigh*
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And there are plenty of old people who recognize the destructiveness of Software patent, no matter which corporation wields them (Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, HP, name it).

And yes, "Science fiction" does count as prior art, because someone had to come up with the actual concept. Copying ideas from Rodenberry, Vernes, Kubrick and then applying for IP protection on the ideas from those guys is inane. You didn't come up with it, you read about it in a book.
 
Shasterball said:
The internet is awesome. You can make comments, form opinions, become emotional, etc... over stuff you know nothing about -- at all. No one does anymore independent research. Sad... I guess it's too much work to become informed before speaking...
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Which statement(s) are you finding lack merit?

As for the patent, I couldn't care less. Apple can't own the world, in spite of their best efforts.
 
KnightWRX said:
And yes, "Science fiction" does count as prior art, because someone had to come up with the actual concept.
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Wrong.

From http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/

A requirement for a document to qualify as prior art is that it is enabling. In other words, the document must enable an average skilled person to practice the invention as claimed. A science-fiction novel might describe an invention without going into details. While this will describe the basic idea behind the invention, it does not enable the skilled person to construct the invention.

For example, the famous Star Trek TV series features the so-called "transporter", by which Starfleet personnel could be "beamed down" to the surface of the planet. However, no details were ever given on how the transporter was supposed to work, or how anyone could build it. If someone today were to invent a working matter transporter that operated in exactly the same way as in Star Trek, he would still be able to obtain a patent on it. The disclosure given in the TV series would not be sufficient to destroy novelty of the features of his transporter.

That does not mean that fiction cannot be used as prior art at all. If the fiction describes the invention in sufficient detail, it counts as prior art just like a technical publication would.

A famous example is the case of a method to recover sunken ships by filling them with buoyant bodies fed through a tube. According to a popular story (well, among patent attorneys anyway), the patent on this method was refused because it had already been described in a prior printed publication. Which document? The 1949 Donald Duck story The Sunken Yacht (by Carl Barks), which shows Donald and the nephews raising a ship by filling it with ping pong balls shoved through a tube. To read what is and is not true about this story, see The "Donald Duck as prior art" case.
 
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