7 ms·

This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn't my intention - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382 http:

• drats 14y ago
  This is silly, touch screen technology, faster ARM cpus and the rest make these things possible and came from elsewhere. My first computer with a GUI was 100mhz. As soon as smartphones got 600mhz+ and as soon as people get touch screens (foreshadowed endlessly in sci-fi) are you seriously suggesting that if you took a room of fresh graduates from a design school (which is a bar lower than "ordinary skill in the art" as most UI designers have years of experience) and brainstormed for an afternoon that you couldn't come up with all this? There is clear prior art on almost every aspect, it was just a new blend. And that which didn't have prior art was logical evolution (as I said in an earlier comment about phones unlocking + physical slide latch locks + touchscreen... slide to unlock, wow I don't think any designer could have thought of that /s). I'm pretty sure there were mouse-gesture plugins for a couple of browsers before the iphone, forgetting the sci-fi prior art. So you are suggesting someone with a degree in UI design with knowledge of mouse gestures and presented with the problem of making a touch interface with a mobile would not find this obvious?
  • Nicole060 14y ago
    If it was so obvious then why did it take a company that had NO history in making cell phones to make a good one with a usable touchscreen and gestures ? Nokia couldn't do it. RIM couldn't do it. Samsung couldn't do it. LG couldn't do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore) And they were on that market way before Apple. Cry me a river if it hurts your feelings that Apple goes to defend their innovation.
    • drats 14y ago
      People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke), a safe padlock/rotary phone (circular motion) and general patterns (nine dots, some pattern dragging across them) rather easily. Spreading the fingers or the hand to zoom was already in minority report (2002). Double taps to do something different is already in the double clicking of the mouse. Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation.
      • chipotle_coyote 14y ago
        "Obvious" and "first" aren't identical, but they're not as separable as you're making them out to be. It's a stretch to say that a sliding door latch counts as prior art against a "slide to unlock" patent; that's essentially asserting that if there's any previous analogy to a claimed invention, the claim should be denied. Apple is defending market share with lawfare, not innovation. That's kind of the point of patents. Apple got market share by doing stuff that nobody else in the phone market was doing. There were a lot of similar (but not identical) things that other companies did in bits and pieces, but there simply wasn't anything else like the iPhone before the iPhone. (I'd argue that the most revolutionary thing the iPhone brought to the market had nothing to do with the patents, ironically; it had a web browser that just blew the doors off anything available in a device that size in 2007. The biggest sign that Apple got that right is how dominant WebKit-based browsers are on mobile devices now.) A lot of the hatred directed against Apple over their "patent wars" seems to me to be misplaced: Apple is not abusing the patent system. They're not an Intellectual Ventures style patent troll. They're actually using the patents that they're fighting over. And it's very hard to make a successful argument that Samsung wasn't intentionally copying a lot of things about the iPhone, if only because they thought Apple got things right that previous Samsung models didn't. (In fact, it's hard to argue that it didn't work: the more Samsung made their phones like iPhones the more successful they got.) There are very good arguments to be made against software patents, maybe even against trade dress patents, and maybe even against patents, period, as John Siracusa has suggested. Maybe patents just don't do what they were intended to do anymore. But it's not realistic to expect any technology company to take a bold stand against the patent system by refusing to sue over perceived patent violations. And it's not even very honest to keep portraying Apple as uniquely litigious in this area; Nokia and Motorola both initiated suits against Apple, and while Microsoft hasn't been going around suing everyone, they've just been collecting license fees on Android from manufacturers. By some estimates they've made more money on Android than Google has. If there's a problem here--and I think there is--it's with the patent system. The Apple-Samsung battle is a symptom of the problem. Let's not mistake it for the disease.
• deerparkwater 14y ago
  In those three months, Samsung was able to copy Apple's 4-year investment in the iPhone, without taking any of the risks—because they were copying the world's most successful product ... No one is trying to stop them from selling smartphones, all we're saying is: make your own. Make your own designs, make your own phones, and compete on your own innovations. If its not obvious, why could they do it in 3 months without access to the great contributions to the art of computer science Apple's patent provide?
• MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  > No one is trying to stop them from selling smartphones, all we're saying is: make your own. Make your own designs, make your own phones, and compete on your own innovations. A world where every product is completely differentiated from its competitors is neither possible nor desirable. You can't stop Samsung from making smartphones, they're significantly entrenched already, but you can stop a startup. This ruling is a validation of the patent system as it currently exists. Just as MPEG LA can prevent startups from competing in video, the range of smartphone patents are thick enough to prevent any newcomers into the industry. If Apple owns bouncy lists and Google owns shadowy lists and RIM owns whatever it is they do, what is a startup to do? Come up with something that is different just to be different, hope that it's not patented by someone, as I'm sure trolls are rushing to patent every variation of end-of-list animations possible, or more probably, not bother getting into the business in the first place.
  • sbuk 14y ago
    That's competition. It's supposed to foster innovation and invention.
• jmilloy 14y ago
  I find it very bizarre that "commercial success" can be sufficient evidence for upholding a patent -- isn't the point of a patent to aid in commercial success by allowing a temporary monopoly?
• deleted 14y ago
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