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Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

93 points by MaxwellKennerly 14y ago

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- thezilch 14y ago
  The process perhaps, but most definitely not the design, were the USPTO to be reformed.
martythemaniak 14y ago
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.
- MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
  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.
  - jeremyarussell 14y ago
    I love how people like to forget about that, software patents never carry the actual code in the patent, so I can't see how they are really divulging how everything works without the code. As it stands when a patent for software finally does expire, no one gets how it worked except for those who had already re-engineered it. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this seem a bit strange?
  - doktrin 14y ago
    I'm glad to see someone highlight the fact that design patents are inherently illogical, and in fact run altogether counter to the purpose of the patent system. Too often this is obscured, and/or all patents are lumped together as being generally awful. I personally do not ascribe to the notion that all patents should be outright abolished. Design patents, however, should simply not exist. Rounded corners, rectangles and UI elements in rows of 4 are simply not inventions.
    - cheald 14y ago
      To be really pedantic about it, it's arguable that they are inventions (someone had to be the first to put four rocks in a row), but it's such a blindly obvious "invention" that it's insanely laughable to afford it any kind of protections at all.
      - bmuon 14y ago
        And that's because design, when done right, is obvious.
        veemjeem 14y ago
        I think it's only obvious in hindsight. The massively popular Ugg boots are not seemingly "obvious design".
        option_greek 14y ago
        Which is the reason design should not enjoy patent protection. No one says transistor when done right is obvious.
- timr 14y ago
  "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.
  - martythemaniak 14y ago
    The system was set up to foster innovation, not grant free monopolies willy nilly. I've yet to read any convincing argument about how this verdict will lead to more innovation, but there's a very clear way to see how it could lead to less. I find it very hard to believe that had Apple not been granted these patents, or if the patents had a much more appropriate 12-18month validity period, they would not have shipped the iPhone and forgone the massive revenue and profit stream. More broadly, I often see people decrying that the poor have access to LCD TVs, ACs or decent smartphones, with the point being that they should stop being so demanding. But this is exactly what technological progress looks like - innovations which are expensive and exclusive are useful demos, but they don't become world-changers until they become widespread. So yes, the patent system should ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest gadgets, and any other technology. Otherwise, it is simply stifling innnovation.
    - timr 14y ago
      "The system was set up to foster innovation, not grant free monopolies willy nilly. I've yet to read any convincing argument about how this verdict will lead to more innovation, but there's a very clear way to see how it could lead to less." The patent system does not grant patents "willy nilly". Whether you agree with the outcome or not, there is a (rather lengthy) review process, and it was followed. And if the verdict is consistent with the patent laws, then your objection to the case is irrelevant -- your proper complaint is with the system, not the actor. "I find it very hard to believe that had Apple not been granted these patents, or if the patents had a much more appropriate 12-18month validity period, they would not have shipped the iPhone and forgone the massive revenue and profit stream." Again, you have complaints about the patent system, and I empathize. I don't like many aspects of the system, either. But I also don't begrudge Apple for acting rationally within the rules established by the system. In this case, in particular, I believe that the patent system is being used in a legitimate way, to protect a company that has made some true marketplace innovations. It's decidedly sub-optimal that Apple has to resort to patents on rubber-band scrolling to protect something as core to their business model as "look and feel", but that's the system that we have. I don't think it's fair to make Apple a villain (and Samsung a hero) just because the laws are flawed. Said another way: don't hate the player, hate the game.
- eddieplan9 14y ago
  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.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    I'm all in for revolutionary changes. Unfortunately, that's not what Apple did in this case. The iPhone is outstanding design. And that is the extent of their work: with enough computing power, they made the first smartphone that didn't suck. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Apple is not a patent troll, but patent trolling is merely one facet of patent abuse. We need to focus on patent abuse, and Apple most certainly is abusing the recent flaws in the patent system, by patenting things which do not deserve patent protection (because patent protection for these things does not benefit society at large, discourages innovation, and is contra to the original intent of the patent system). The problem, fundamentally, is the system, not Apple, but because they are benefiting from its flaws, it's very likely they will defend them. Unfortunately this will be quite hard, because Apple (along with other abusers) is also extremely, extremely, rich, and the rich tend to get their way...
twoodfin 14y ago
...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.
- mindslight 14y ago
  > 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.
- tjoff 14y ago
  But not nearly as silly as the patents themselves...
- MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
  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.
Cushman 14y ago
These articles are getting a bit tiring. > 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.
- MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
  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?
  - otterley 14y ago
    Are you honestly contending that if anything depicted in a sci-fi movie cannot qualify as patentable subject matter when actually implemented? E.g., if someone invents a matter transporter as depicted in Star Trek, the inventor cannot patent it?
nirvana 14y ago
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. This article is thus nonsense.
- learc83 14y ago
  >Special effects are not prior art. Special effects can be prior art, if they are sufficiently descriptive. Just like drawings, sketches, and textual descriptions can be prior art.
dougmccune 14y ago
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?
- lines 14y ago
  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.
  - dougmccune 14y ago
    I get that the claims of patents are supposedly very specific, and what I'm asking is if someone can actually explain why and how this particular patent has anything non-obvious in its claims (without all the ridiculous patent jargon). I've just read claim 19 about 5 times. I also studied Figure 5, which seems to lay out the process in a way that's a little easier to understand. I have absolutely no idea how what is described in claim 19 is not the "idea" of inertial/bounce-back scrolling. As far as I can understand, the layperson's explanation of claim 19 goes something like this: drag some content on a touchscreen at the speed that the dragging finger is moving, once you hit the end of the scrollable range, start slowing down the speed at which the item moves, and show a different background to make it clear you've reached the end of the list, once the finger releases move the list back into place. I'm trying sentence by sentence to translate the words in the patent claim to english that I can understand. And it sounds to me like this is the general idea of this method of scrolling. There are no specifics, no specific easing algorithms, no specific method of tracking the finger's movement, no method of actually implementing this at all.
codeka 14y ago
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... [1]: http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915 http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915
ender7 14y ago
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.
- veemjeem 14y ago
  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.
jussij 14y ago
> 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.
rbanffy 14y ago
Either Gates foresaw the iPhone or... knew about the Simon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.

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thezilch 14y ago
The process perhaps, but most definitely not the design, were the USPTO to be reformed.

martythemaniak 14y ago

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.

MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
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.
- jeremyarussell 14y ago
  I love how people like to forget about that, software patents never carry the actual code in the patent, so I can't see how they are really divulging how everything works without the code. As it stands when a patent for software finally does expire, no one gets how it worked except for those who had already re-engineered it. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this seem a bit strange?
- doktrin 14y ago
  I'm glad to see someone highlight the fact that design patents are inherently illogical, and in fact run altogether counter to the purpose of the patent system. Too often this is obscured, and/or all patents are lumped together as being generally awful. I personally do not ascribe to the notion that all patents should be outright abolished. Design patents, however, should simply not exist. Rounded corners, rectangles and UI elements in rows of 4 are simply not inventions.
  - cheald 14y ago
    To be really pedantic about it, it's arguable that they are inventions (someone had to be the first to put four rocks in a row), but it's such a blindly obvious "invention" that it's insanely laughable to afford it any kind of protections at all.
    - bmuon 14y ago
      And that's because design, when done right, is obvious.
      - veemjeem 14y ago
        I think it's only obvious in hindsight. The massively popular Ugg boots are not seemingly "obvious design".
      - option_greek 14y ago
        Which is the reason design should not enjoy patent protection. No one says transistor when done right is obvious.
timr 14y ago
"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.
- martythemaniak 14y ago
  The system was set up to foster innovation, not grant free monopolies willy nilly. I've yet to read any convincing argument about how this verdict will lead to more innovation, but there's a very clear way to see how it could lead to less. I find it very hard to believe that had Apple not been granted these patents, or if the patents had a much more appropriate 12-18month validity period, they would not have shipped the iPhone and forgone the massive revenue and profit stream. More broadly, I often see people decrying that the poor have access to LCD TVs, ACs or decent smartphones, with the point being that they should stop being so demanding. But this is exactly what technological progress looks like - innovations which are expensive and exclusive are useful demos, but they don't become world-changers until they become widespread. So yes, the patent system should ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest gadgets, and any other technology. Otherwise, it is simply stifling innnovation.
  - timr 14y ago
    "The system was set up to foster innovation, not grant free monopolies willy nilly. I've yet to read any convincing argument about how this verdict will lead to more innovation, but there's a very clear way to see how it could lead to less." The patent system does not grant patents "willy nilly". Whether you agree with the outcome or not, there is a (rather lengthy) review process, and it was followed. And if the verdict is consistent with the patent laws, then your objection to the case is irrelevant -- your proper complaint is with the system, not the actor. "I find it very hard to believe that had Apple not been granted these patents, or if the patents had a much more appropriate 12-18month validity period, they would not have shipped the iPhone and forgone the massive revenue and profit stream." Again, you have complaints about the patent system, and I empathize. I don't like many aspects of the system, either. But I also don't begrudge Apple for acting rationally within the rules established by the system. In this case, in particular, I believe that the patent system is being used in a legitimate way, to protect a company that has made some true marketplace innovations. It's decidedly sub-optimal that Apple has to resort to patents on rubber-band scrolling to protect something as core to their business model as "look and feel", but that's the system that we have. I don't think it's fair to make Apple a villain (and Samsung a hero) just because the laws are flawed. Said another way: don't hate the player, hate the game.
eddieplan9 14y ago
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.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  I'm all in for revolutionary changes. Unfortunately, that's not what Apple did in this case. The iPhone is outstanding design. And that is the extent of their work: with enough computing power, they made the first smartphone that didn't suck. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Apple is not a patent troll, but patent trolling is merely one facet of patent abuse. We need to focus on patent abuse, and Apple most certainly is abusing the recent flaws in the patent system, by patenting things which do not deserve patent protection (because patent protection for these things does not benefit society at large, discourages innovation, and is contra to the original intent of the patent system). The problem, fundamentally, is the system, not Apple, but because they are benefiting from its flaws, it's very likely they will defend them. Unfortunately this will be quite hard, because Apple (along with other abusers) is also extremely, extremely, rich, and the rich tend to get their way...

twoodfin 14y ago

...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.

mindslight 14y ago
> 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.
tjoff 14y ago
But not nearly as silly as the patents themselves...
MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
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.

Cushman 14y ago

These articles are getting a bit tiring. > 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.

MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
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?
- otterley 14y ago
  Are you honestly contending that if anything depicted in a sci-fi movie cannot qualify as patentable subject matter when actually implemented? E.g., if someone invents a matter transporter as depicted in Star Trek, the inventor cannot patent it?

nirvana 14y ago

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. This article is thus nonsense.

learc83 14y ago
>Special effects are not prior art. Special effects can be prior art, if they are sufficiently descriptive. Just like drawings, sketches, and textual descriptions can be prior art.

dougmccune 14y ago

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?

lines 14y ago
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.
- dougmccune 14y ago
  I get that the claims of patents are supposedly very specific, and what I'm asking is if someone can actually explain why and how this particular patent has anything non-obvious in its claims (without all the ridiculous patent jargon). I've just read claim 19 about 5 times. I also studied Figure 5, which seems to lay out the process in a way that's a little easier to understand. I have absolutely no idea how what is described in claim 19 is not the "idea" of inertial/bounce-back scrolling. As far as I can understand, the layperson's explanation of claim 19 goes something like this: drag some content on a touchscreen at the speed that the dragging finger is moving, once you hit the end of the scrollable range, start slowing down the speed at which the item moves, and show a different background to make it clear you've reached the end of the list, once the finger releases move the list back into place. I'm trying sentence by sentence to translate the words in the patent claim to english that I can understand. And it sounds to me like this is the general idea of this method of scrolling. There are no specifics, no specific easing algorithms, no specific method of tracking the finger's movement, no method of actually implementing this at all.

codeka 14y ago

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... [1]: http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915 http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915

ender7 14y ago

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.

veemjeem 14y ago
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.

jussij 14y ago

> 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.

rbanffy 14y ago

Either Gates foresaw the iPhone or... knew about the Simon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.