The verdict was a monumentally stupid decision and I hope it won't prove to be too harmful in the long run.
One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past technologies to produce newer, better ones.
Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process. None of these parties want touchscreen smartphones to become cheap commodities available to everybody - there's a lot less money to be made this way. Android is Google's attempt to commoditize the smartphone and is probably responsible for erasing tens of billions from the market caps of other companies, the flipside of which is that today tens of millions of people all over the world have access to technology that would otherwise not have.
This is why I think Android is ultimately a force for good and I hope it's simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle and that this verdict won't have a lasting impact.
The patent system is supposed to encourage the commoditization of inventions by using a trade-off: if you invent something novel and useful, you can get a patent that gives you a complete monopoly for a limited amount of time, but in return you have to completely disclose how your invention was made, so that, first, others can see if the intention would be useful for them right now (and thus negotiate a license with you) and, second, once you're patent expires society can easily reach for and utilize your invention.
Unfortunately, that process has been turned on its head, so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized or simply don't work patent protection. The iPhone's design is undeniably visually appealing and user-friendly, but it is by no means an "invention." It is a form of user interface, something that has already been held to not be patentable, and it is a form of branding, something that is protected, but through trademark law, not patent law.
I find this situation disturbing for the same reason I find it disturbing that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research and the belt. Consumer electronics companies should not be investing the bulk of their resources playing legal games with one another over non-disruptive "inventions" like the idea to use asynchronous processing to make sure video and audio lines up. They should be using their resources making phones that are better and more alluring than one another.
"One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity"
Yeah. They do. Patented inventions become a commodity in 14-20 years, depending on the kind of patent.
"Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process."
Call me crazy, but I think we're seeing Apple using the process to defend their inventions, which is exactly what the system was set up to do.
Patents aren't intended to ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest consumer gadgets; they're intended to provide inventors with incentives to produce non-trivial inventions, by granting them temporary monopolies on their ideas. To argue that Apple (and Microsoft, et al.) are wrong because they're artificially inflating prices on their patented products is to miss the entire point of the debate.
I am all for all inventions must eventually become a commodity. However, if you look at the long term instead of just getting innovation to become cheap commodities available to everybody as soon as possible, some protection should be provided to the inventor so while cool new progressive "stand on the shoulders of giants" changes can keep coming, risky groundbreaking innovations can also emerge once in a while. Without effective patent protection, everybody will resort to do safer small-step improvements instead of spending years and billions to build (and market) something vastly different from what people are familiar with. In other words, with zero patent protection, you will still see cars getting better mileage, but you won't see an electrical car.
If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.
> On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display,” the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2
For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.
Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non-novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.
As a minimum test for whether something is non-obvious enough to be patented, I like to think of whether it could have been published in a computer science or UI journal. Similarly, if it has already been published in a journal, then it should be off limits for being patentable.
Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that.
Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal.
In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly.
Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with:
"Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept."
But it had occurred to other people, and lots of them. You can even watch Tom Cruise pinch-to-zoom, and scroll by waiving his hands.
Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:
US5844547 May 9, 1995 Dec 1, 1998 Fujitsu Limited Apparatus for manipulating an object displayed on a display device by using a touch screen
US6567102 Nov 25, 2001 May 20, 2003 Compal Electronics Inc. Touch screen using pressure to control the zoom ratio
US20050168488 Jan 31, 2005 Combination tool that zooms in, zooms out, pans, rotates, draws, or manipulates during a drag
All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding into some arguably-new form, and, viola, they had a patent for something everybody was doing.
I doubt you really contend that, in late 2007, Apple invented scrolling and zooming with your fingers, or that you contend that Apple's implementation was substantially different (and both novel and useful) from those prior forms. If you don't contend either of those, then why, exactly, should Apple have a patent over their implementation, which was at best modestly different from prior implementations?
> you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions
That's how it's supposed to work, which is a large part of why people are up in arms about the broken patent system. A patent on an idea and a patent on any possible implementation of that idea are effectively the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807
> It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.
That supposed specificity is nothing but a way of describing an aspect of the general idea in terms of generic implementation details. Any implementation will have some part that can be construed as similar ("they're just generating the 'area' on demand", etc)
How do you know it wouldn't have occurred to someone else working in the same field? I find the assumption of the patent system that the patented innovations wouldn't have happened without being patentable to be fundamentally flawed. That may be true for fields with huge R&D cost, like medicine, but in fields with near-zero R&D cost like software I find it hard to argue for the necessity of any sort of patent protection.
Can someone explain to me (like I'm 5) exactly what, besides the general concept of list scrolling with bounce-back to indicate end of list reached, it was that Samsung copied from the 7,469,381 patent? The Apple fans here get pissed when someone argues that Apple is trying to patent an obvious "idea" and they claim that the general idea of bounce-back scrolling isn't patented, but instead it's a very specific implementation. And yet I've never heard an explanation of what the technical details are that specifically are patented. I've tried reading the patent, but my head exploded.
So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?
If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?
When reading patents, only the claims matter. In this case, anything that matches claim 19, which is anything that does bounce-back scrolling the way iOS does it, is infringing.
...with a patent application granted after a year-long review by the patent office that apparently didn’t include watching this scene from 2002’s Minority Report, where Tom Cruise does all of those things and more with a spiffy 3D interface.
This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. Star Trek is not prior art.
Practical is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.
How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen?
Answer: not hard at all. In fact, it has been trivial for years. The hard part is implementing it in a cost-effective, reliable manner — something that Apple did with industry-leading industrial design/manufacturing efforts, not through patented technologies. But that's not what this case was about.
If this case involved Samsung bribing Apple employees to reveal the secrets at the Foxconn plants in China, then I would completely agree with you that that is wrong and that Samsung has broken the law by stealing a competitive technology. But that's not what's happening here; ironically, Apple is deriving part of its competitive advantage from using Samsung!
What's happening here is that Apple is suing Samsung over silly, trivial, and peripheral issues that played a modest (if any) role in the iPhone's success, silly, trivial, and peripheral matters that, unfortunately, have been granted the strongest property right in American law, which is a monopoly of their direct or indirect use by anybody.
> Patents protect the implementation, not the idea
That's certainly the supposed goal, but it clearly does not match reality. What actually happens is a company implements a long thought-of idea using modern technology, and then writes a trolling-ready patent which claims the entire idea by way of obvious and extraneous details.
This is a major reason why nobody bothers to read the patent claims when discussing bad patents - they're basically the synopsis of the patent combined over and over with straightforward technical 'chum' to make them seem specific and complex.
The depiction of a holodeck would not stop someone from getting a utility patent for a holodeck.
But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a design patent. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.
If you ever happen to develop this machine, this person who just imagined it can ban you from selling. So tell me, who do you think worked harder on this invention? And why would this paper (the patent) be worth more than the real invention?
They shouldn't be able to patent the idea of a holodeck, which I thought was the main argument in this article. The mechanics of using force fields (or whatever) would still be the subject of the patents if they were novel.
The sad fact is that UI patents are even more bullshit than software patents. Does Apple have the legal high ground here? Yes, they have a patent on rubberbanding scrolling (among others). Arguments about 'prior art' and blah blah are pointless because they have been granted a patent on a UI design -- an idea, not an implementation, and not an invention. Yes, that's not what a patent is supposed to be, but that's what they've been given.
Was it a good idea? Yes. Should it be protected by a patent? No. I'm sorry, but no (and I say this as a UX designer).
Patents exist to incentivize effort. I would really like to hear someone argue that, without UI patent protection, Apple would have never bothered to implement rubberbanding scrolling. Even typing it sounds ridiculous.
I guess you need to google "design patents". I feel like 95% of the people on HN don't know the difference between the two. FWIW, philip morris patented rounded corners on their cigarette boxes. If you think that's crazy, you should see the ones filed by Gucci. Maybe design patents should be renamed since everyone confuses them with utility patents.
This may be slightly off-topic, I'm not sure, but I was just reading Apple's patent on pinch-to-zoom[1], and in claim 8 (which is the one the jury were instructed to rule on) it says:
"determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation"
Now, I don't know how patents works, but on my Galaxy Nexus, you can scroll with two fingers, so this part about determining whether its a scroll or "gesture" by the number of touch points seems to work differently to what is described in the patent.
Does that mean the implementation in the Galaxy Nexus is non-infringing? I mean, if patents are supposed to protect the implementation of an idea, and the implementation is actually different then surely its not infringing?
Now admittedly I only tested a Galaxy Nexus, which is stock Android, so maybe Samsung made their version in TouchWiz different. Or maybe the implementation changed in later versions of Android, I'm not sure...
> smartphones in which the objects on the screen roll around and bounce back like you’re spinning the Wheel of Fortune.
What I don't understand about this 'bounce back' feature is that here in Australia we have software based poker machines (Vegas style slot machines to the yanks out there) and they have had this bounce feature for decades.
Edit: To help people visualise, what I mean is the reels of the poker machine spin in one direction and when they finally stop spinning they do a very short bounce back in the other direction.
Special effects are not prior art. Demonstrating a feature does not give you prior art neither.
Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.
Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.
So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.
[+] [-] martythemaniak|13 years ago|reply
One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past technologies to produce newer, better ones.
Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process. None of these parties want touchscreen smartphones to become cheap commodities available to everybody - there's a lot less money to be made this way. Android is Google's attempt to commoditize the smartphone and is probably responsible for erasing tens of billions from the market caps of other companies, the flipside of which is that today tens of millions of people all over the world have access to technology that would otherwise not have.
This is why I think Android is ultimately a force for good and I hope it's simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle and that this verdict won't have a lasting impact.
[+] [-] MaxwellKennerly|13 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, that process has been turned on its head, so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized or simply don't work patent protection. The iPhone's design is undeniably visually appealing and user-friendly, but it is by no means an "invention." It is a form of user interface, something that has already been held to not be patentable, and it is a form of branding, something that is protected, but through trademark law, not patent law.
I find this situation disturbing for the same reason I find it disturbing that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research and the belt. Consumer electronics companies should not be investing the bulk of their resources playing legal games with one another over non-disruptive "inventions" like the idea to use asynchronous processing to make sure video and audio lines up. They should be using their resources making phones that are better and more alluring than one another.
[+] [-] timr|13 years ago|reply
Yeah. They do. Patented inventions become a commodity in 14-20 years, depending on the kind of patent.
"Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process."
Call me crazy, but I think we're seeing Apple using the process to defend their inventions, which is exactly what the system was set up to do.
Patents aren't intended to ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest consumer gadgets; they're intended to provide inventors with incentives to produce non-trivial inventions, by granting them temporary monopolies on their ideas. To argue that Apple (and Microsoft, et al.) are wrong because they're artificially inflating prices on their patented products is to miss the entire point of the debate.
[+] [-] eddieplan9|13 years ago|reply
If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.
[+] [-] Cushman|13 years ago|reply
> On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display,” the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2
For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.
Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non-novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.
[+] [-] tensor|13 years ago|reply
Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that.
Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal.
In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly.
Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with:
"Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept."
[1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html [2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Cl...
[+] [-] MaxwellKennerly|13 years ago|reply
Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:
US5844547 May 9, 1995 Dec 1, 1998 Fujitsu Limited Apparatus for manipulating an object displayed on a display device by using a touch screen
US6567102 Nov 25, 2001 May 20, 2003 Compal Electronics Inc. Touch screen using pressure to control the zoom ratio
US20050168488 Jan 31, 2005 Combination tool that zooms in, zooms out, pans, rotates, draws, or manipulates during a drag
All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding into some arguably-new form, and, viola, they had a patent for something everybody was doing.
I doubt you really contend that, in late 2007, Apple invented scrolling and zooming with your fingers, or that you contend that Apple's implementation was substantially different (and both novel and useful) from those prior forms. If you don't contend either of those, then why, exactly, should Apple have a patent over their implementation, which was at best modestly different from prior implementations?
[+] [-] mindslight|13 years ago|reply
That's how it's supposed to work, which is a large part of why people are up in arms about the broken patent system. A patent on an idea and a patent on any possible implementation of that idea are effectively the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807
> It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.
That supposed specificity is nothing but a way of describing an aspect of the general idea in terms of generic implementation details. Any implementation will have some part that can be construed as similar ("they're just generating the 'area' on demand", etc)
[+] [-] Joeri|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtetzner|13 years ago|reply
Isn't selling iPhones enough of an incentive?
[+] [-] dougmccune|13 years ago|reply
So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?
If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?
[+] [-] lines|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twoodfin|13 years ago|reply
This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. Star Trek is not prior art.
Practical is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.
[+] [-] MaxwellKennerly|13 years ago|reply
Answer: not hard at all. In fact, it has been trivial for years. The hard part is implementing it in a cost-effective, reliable manner — something that Apple did with industry-leading industrial design/manufacturing efforts, not through patented technologies. But that's not what this case was about.
If this case involved Samsung bribing Apple employees to reveal the secrets at the Foxconn plants in China, then I would completely agree with you that that is wrong and that Samsung has broken the law by stealing a competitive technology. But that's not what's happening here; ironically, Apple is deriving part of its competitive advantage from using Samsung!
What's happening here is that Apple is suing Samsung over silly, trivial, and peripheral issues that played a modest (if any) role in the iPhone's success, silly, trivial, and peripheral matters that, unfortunately, have been granted the strongest property right in American law, which is a monopoly of their direct or indirect use by anybody.
[+] [-] mindslight|13 years ago|reply
That's certainly the supposed goal, but it clearly does not match reality. What actually happens is a company implements a long thought-of idea using modern technology, and then writes a trolling-ready patent which claims the entire idea by way of obvious and extraneous details.
This is a major reason why nobody bothers to read the patent claims when discussing bad patents - they're basically the synopsis of the patent combined over and over with straightforward technical 'chum' to make them seem specific and complex.
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a design patent. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.
[+] [-] felipeko|13 years ago|reply
You can read a time machine patent here: http://www.google.com/patents?id=hNHIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...
If you ever happen to develop this machine, this person who just imagined it can ban you from selling. So tell me, who do you think worked harder on this invention? And why would this paper (the patent) be worth more than the real invention?
[+] [-] SteveArmstrong|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjoff|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ender7|13 years ago|reply
Was it a good idea? Yes. Should it be protected by a patent? No. I'm sorry, but no (and I say this as a UX designer).
Patents exist to incentivize effort. I would really like to hear someone argue that, without UI patent protection, Apple would have never bothered to implement rubberbanding scrolling. Even typing it sounds ridiculous.
[+] [-] veemjeem|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeka|13 years ago|reply
"determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation"
Now, I don't know how patents works, but on my Galaxy Nexus, you can scroll with two fingers, so this part about determining whether its a scroll or "gesture" by the number of touch points seems to work differently to what is described in the patent.
Does that mean the implementation in the Galaxy Nexus is non-infringing? I mean, if patents are supposed to protect the implementation of an idea, and the implementation is actually different then surely its not infringing?
Now admittedly I only tested a Galaxy Nexus, which is stock Android, so maybe Samsung made their version in TouchWiz different. Or maybe the implementation changed in later versions of Android, I'm not sure...
[1]: http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915
[+] [-] jussij|13 years ago|reply
What I don't understand about this 'bounce back' feature is that here in Australia we have software based poker machines (Vegas style slot machines to the yanks out there) and they have had this bounce feature for decades.
Edit: To help people visualise, what I mean is the reels of the poker machine spin in one direction and when they finally stop spinning they do a very short bounce back in the other direction.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thezilch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon
Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.
[+] [-] nirvana|13 years ago|reply
Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.
Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.
So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.
This article is thus nonsense.
[+] [-] learc83|13 years ago|reply
Special effects can be prior art, if they are sufficiently descriptive. Just like drawings, sketches, and textual descriptions can be prior art.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]