You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away? As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular ex

You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away? As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular technology. To most people, applying pinch to zoom on a capacitive screen verses some other type of screen is pretty obvious, it works in any situation where you have multiple touch points. None of this stopped Apple from patenting it. It didn't stop the patent system from granting the patent. And perhaps worst of all, it doesn't stop Apple from using this patent to claim that they did all sorts of work and pioneered multitouch with gestures like pinch to zoom. The problem many of have with Apple stems from exactly this type of situation. While this is one of the most talked about, I have no doubt that you can find many other examples of Apple enforcing trivial patents granted in a narrow band, or in some caes like the Apple vs Samsung, not so narrow. You don't typically see people complaining about patents on Latent Semantic Indexing, Page Rank, or other complex algorithms that are truly non-obvious. If our society truly believes that minor tweaks on existing ideas are grand innovations worthy of patent protection, that's a very sad statement on the human condition.