Apple Awarded Major Patent Protection For Smart Phones And Tablets

[WildCat]

Can you point to precisely what technology and industry-wide know-how was available in 2006 (one year prior to the filing date of the Apple patent) that would make the method that Apple claims obvious?

Touch screens have been around since the 1980s...

 

[AvalonXQ]

Touch screens have been around since the 1980s...

So it should be easy to point to a specific set of references that would let an engineer of ordinary skill, without undue experimentation, produce a device that can perform the method listed in the claims, right?

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Well I guess that would hinge on the 'wasn't obvious' part now wouldn't it.

That's why there are patent attorneys.

 

[WildCat]

So it should be easy to point to a specific set of references that would let an engineer of ordinary skill, without undue experimentation, produce a device that can perform the method listed in the claims, right?

Er, it was already done. Apple's sole "innovation" was doing it on a portable device, which is pretty damned obvious IMHO.

Hell, Palm was using touch screens on portable devices a decade ago.

 

[WildCat]

That's why there are patent attorneys.

Smart guys too, they even secured patents for perpetual motion machines!

 

[Darat]

...snip...

The patent involves the application of multitouch to portable devices. It's my understanding that Apple pretty much pioneered this, so I'm not sure how much prior art there really is.

Well so they claim... but then haven't they also claimed that they came up with multi-touch itself? Certainly it is true that Apple was the first company to come up with a successful mass-market consumer portable product utilising a multi touch interface. But that goes back to my point about what form the legal argument is likely to take if a patent infringement case got to court i.e. the breadth versus the specific.

 

[AvalonXQ]

Er, it was already done.

No, it wasn't. I haven't seen a single technical reference cited in this thread at all.

If it's obvious, then point to the actual references that make it obvious. Make sure to include each step in the claimed method, and how they work together.

 

[Ethan Thane Athen]

Touch screen invented in the 60's but first 'proper' one in 1974:

http://inventors.about.com/od/tstartinventions/a/Touch-Screen.htm

and Bob Boie at Bell labs invented the first multi-touch screen in 1984:

http://www.touchuserinterface.com/2010/02/touch-technology-history.html#0_undefined,0_

Nice timeline in that second link (and Sony were all over multitouch in 2002, 5 years before the iphone).

 

[Ferguson]

But Apple's patent isn't about touch screen or multi-touch in general, it's specifically about scrolling a page with 1 finger, and scrolling a frame within that page with 2 fingers:
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...7,966,578.PN.&OS=PN/7,966,578&RS=PN/7,966,578

I don't see the broad interpretation pcmag puts forth, that "Apple's patent essentially gives it ownership of the capacitive multitouch interface."

For something to be in violation of the patent, it has to violate all the claims, not just a few.

I can't speak for others to the obviousness of it, but when I discovered it by accident on my phone a few months ago, I was surprised, and thought it was a pretty brilliant solution to that problem (how to scroll interior frames on a website without a mouse).

 

[AvalonXQ]

For something to be in violation of the patent, it has to violate all the claims, not just a few.

Actually, it only has to be in violation of any one of the claims. But all of the claims are specific to that mechanism of selective scrolling based on finger number.

Again, if that particular solution to the problem would have been readily obvious to one of ordinary skill, WildCat should be able to show us the references that prove it.

 

[not daSkeptic]

Well so they claim... but then haven't they also claimed that they came up with multi-touch itself?

The claim that people point to in this regard is Steve Jobs' iPhone unveiling where he said, "We have invented a new technology called Multi-Touch." Technically, this is true. Jobs did not say they invented the technology of multi-finger touch-screens, but rather that they invented something and that thing is called Multi-Touch (which is a trademark Apple currently holds and is in the process of registering).

 

[BenBurch]

Gestures have already been accepted as patentable - Xerox v Palm

 

[This is The End]

Did Apple doctor evidence in Samsung patent suit?

Apparently so... though apple probably claims it was an accident.

Examining pictures found in a document that Apple recently submitted to a German court, Webwereld.nl found one of the photos of the Tab to be inaccurate. Photos on page 28 of the document show the Tab and iPad 2 as "practically identical" in appearance.

But according to the Dutch publication, the Tab image in the document does not match the real Galaxy Tab, which is "longer and more oblong than the iPad 2." Specifically, the actual Tab has an aspect ratio of 1.46. The image of the Tab created by Apple shows an aspect ratio of 1.36, closer to the iPad's ratio of 1.30.

 

[OCaptain]

If someone had thought to patent such inventions at the point of creation, they might have gotten away with it.

That's the difference. The practical time window for such an invention being something that needs to be protected.

 

[OCaptain]

Er, it was already done. Apple's sole "innovation" was doing it on a portable device, which is pretty damned obvious IMHO.

Hell, Palm was using touch screens on portable devices a decade ago.

Yeah, and we see where that took Palm, don't we? HP owns them now.

And I think you're missing out on what was the biggest innovationon Apple's part - the whole iTunes/idevice ecosystem, with music, tv shows, movies, apps, podcasts, etcetera, that extend functionality far beyond that which the minds at Apple could have done. They wisely expended a tiny amount of effort and forethought that leveraged tremendous revenue rewards, because this ecosystem became a sandbox everyone wanted to play in.

 

[OCaptain]

Sorry, still not buying it. Apple is not doing anything non-obvious with existing technology.

Technically, you're right. They're just doing it better than anyone else right now, and the purpose of the patent is to protect the work they've done.

If someone hit upon the secret sauce and failed to patent it, they deserve a finger-wag.

Apple has earned finger-wags in the past (antennagate, anyone?) but not for this.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Did Apple doctor evidence in Samsung patent suit?

Apparently so... though apple probably claims it was an accident.

I don't know about German judges, but in the US federal judges hate this sort of thing.

The thing is that it is very ease to mess up the aspect ratio of an image if you are copying and pasting into WORD or just copying on a high speed copier. The fact that the distortion makes the Tab look more like the iPad is some evidence that this was more than an accident, though.


BTW: This thread gives me a sad because it reminds me that AvalonXQ left.

 

[OCaptain]

Apple's lawsuit against Samsung is ridiculous. Does anybody really think that this phone (Epic 4G, which I own) looks enough like an iPhone that anyone would confuse the two?

[qimg]http://www.unwiredview.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Samsung-Epic-4G-Sprint-Android-official.jpg[/qimg] [qimg]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EtXIMjio2oM/TaMTGB9TuxI/AAAAAAAAAvg/98c9s5KND5A/s1600/iphone4.png[/qimg]

Please. It has a significantly bigger screen. It is thicker as it has a slide out keyboard. It says "Samsung" at the bottom and "Sprint" at the top. It has four buttons on the bottom. Its UI consists of much more than icon grids. I guess its rounded icons are kinda similar to the iPhone's but that is about it.


Apple is just butt hurt that Samsung makes better phones than them. Actually, Apple doesn't even make phones. They just design them; they buy components from companies like Samsung and outsource the manufacturing to companies in China.

Actually, it's not savvy tech heads Apple is concerned about- it's Grandma and Grandpa and Aunt Gertie who can't tell the difference between the iPod 3rd gen and 4th gen by just looking at the top edge with the power off.

Believe it or not, most consumers don't know that much about the product cycles of smart phones to be able to navigate a store without confusion about what is what.

 

[This is The End]

I don't know about German judges, but in the US federal judges hate this sort of thing.

Apparently they don't either, but I don't think they said it specifically.

German Court Suspends Galaxy Tab Injunction In The Apple-Samsung Case

<snip>
Today, the preliminary injunction banning Samsung from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the EU has been partially lifted. Now before you jump to the same conclusions I did, let me say that this suspension has nothing to do with the false evidence discovered yesterday within Apple’s complaint. At least, that’s not the reason the Dusseldorf regional court gave for the lift.

Instead, a court spokesman said that questions arose over whether or not a German court has the right to ban a company based in South Korea from selling its product throughout the European Union, reports the Wall Street Journal.
<snip>

 

[Horatius]

Obvious uses for existing tech shouldn't be patentable.

The essential problem here is, the common definition of "obvious" is much more lax than that which patent examiners are required to apply. Failure to understand that is at the heart of most of the public reaction to such patents.

If you want to fix this, you need to get the legislature to overrule what the courts have been telling the patent office for many years now.

Let's not forget that we're talking about touching a touch screen here. The word touch is in the very name of the product! So touching the screen would be obvious, but touching it with two fingers at once would be non-obvious?

If you read the claim, it's not just the touching that is patented - it's the differing results of the touching that are patented. And not just "any different result", but a pretty specific result - the different translations of the frame and non-frame elements.

In evaluating the breadth of scope of a claim, you can't ignore any element of the claim - every positive recitation of an element restricts the scope of the claim.

The iPhone and iPad use it as described, to scroll frames within pages. Some sites, like facebook, will have a page (the news feed) that you scroll through, with one finger, then you click something, like '17 friends like this' which pops up a frame with the list of friends that liked it. How do you scroll through that list without scrolling the whole page? With two fingers. I discovered it by accident a few months ago, and its saved my *** a few times on various sites.

I agree that as written I dont believe it covers zooming, just scrolling frames within scrolling pages.

Well, they never define exactly what they mean by "translation", which means it would be given it's common definition as it would be understood by a person skilled in the art:

trans·la·tion (trns-lshn, trnz-)
n.
1.
a. The act or process of translating, especially from one language into another.
b. The state of being translated.
2. A translated version of a text.
3. Physics Motion of a body in which every point of the body moves parallel to and the same distance as every other point of the body.
4. Biology The process by which messenger RNA directs the amino acid sequence of a growing polypeptide during protein synthesis.

Clearly in this case, it would be #3, which would seem to rule out any zooming applications being covered.

Again, if that particular solution to the problem would have been readily obvious to one of ordinary skill, WildCat should be able to show us the references that prove it.

And that's exactly what would be required for the examiner to refuse these claims - they need clear-cut, identifiable references that pre-date the filing date. "Oh come on!" just doesn't cut it as an argument.