1. The author has a valid reason for not reading the patent: there is an enormous disincentive to reading patents built into patent law (treble damages). Even i

1. The author has a valid reason for not reading the patent: there is an enormous disincentive to reading patents built into patent law (treble damages). Even if it was possible to glean useful information from the vague gobbldeygook that is a modern software patent application, reading them would still be a risky proposition. 2. The "prior art" in this article isn't valid, but that doesn't make this patent good. Patents like this are bad for the industry. Imagine if the WIMP interface had been patented out the wazoo like this back when Microsoft and Apple were duking it out for the PC market the first time (or even better, when Apple copied it from Xerox). Would that have resulted in a better outcome for consumers? For the industry? For anyone other than patent lawyers? Absolutely, positively not. Nobody invents in a vacuum; everyone builds on each other in a process of iterative improvement (even Apple; for the most recent example check out the blatant copy of Android's notification tray in iOS 5). If we all had to pay royalties to the entire stack of inventors who came before us, innovation would grind to a halt.