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"All this blog post is one person's misunderstanding of patent and copyright law": If you refer to the current patent laws in the USA, then you're probably righ
by danmaz74 14y ago
"All this blog post is one person's misunderstanding of patent and copyright law": If you refer to the current patent laws in the USA, then you're probably right. But I think that laws that grant the possibility to give anybody a 20 years monopoly on something like "double tap to zoom" (or "1-click purchase") are completely against the original spirit of patent laws, very stupid, and, most importantly, pose a severe risk of slowing down innovation almost to a halt.
I just hope that this madness will not come to the EU too (eg the 1-click patent was never granted here).
- nirvana 14y agoPatents cover inventions of methods and processes to accomplish something-- implementations, not the idea or the feature. Thus pinch-to-zoom as Jeff Han demonstrated it, using cameras to take pictures of your hands is not the same thing as apple doing it using software to turn noisy amorphous blobs into finger points on a capacitive touch screen. Other people can implement pinch-to-zoom because pinch-to-zoom cannot be patented. Both Apple and Jeff Han could have patents on their very different implementations of this same feature. Unfortunately people really seem to believe that patents cover features, and I think this is due to the deliberate spin put on the discussions by anti-patent people. If you disagree, try reading the pinch-to-zoom patent itself.