7 ms·

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,

by 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?
  - mcantelon 14y ago
    Of course the inventor can patent the implementation details of a matter transporter, but patenting the idea of a matter transporter, when the idea's been floating around, seems unduly restrictive.
  - MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
    Of course not, and it bears repeating that this patent doesn't cover any of the underlying technology that makes the iPhone actually work as a phone, it merely covers part of the appearance of the UI, an appearance that any competent programmer can replicate on a whim. I am contending that you can't patent a user interface you see in a sci-fi movie, which is what Apple did here. What they patented is no different from patenting the way the command module looks on the Enterprise. Do you think that Apple should be able to patent, say, the use of oval icons?
    - veemjeem 14y ago
      You can patent icons and fonts, why would a user interface be different here? We could revoke the ability to patent icons & fonts, but then there would be no financial motivation for companies to design fonts to sell.
  - philwelch 14y ago
    It depends on whether it's described in sufficient detail. Robert Heinlein's (written) descriptions of the design of a waterbed were sufficient prior art against Charles Hall's 1968 patent claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Literary_significance_and_criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Lite...
  - jewel 14y ago
- mratzloff 14y ago
  It was apparently novel enough that a number of companies and open source projects have now implemented similar UI feedback where they didn't have it before.
  - ta12121 14y ago
    Many breakthroughs are invented multiple times before they stick. The patent doesn't belong to the one who made it popular, but the one who made it first.
    - mratzloff 14y ago
      If that applies here, please point to a piece of software that did that prior to the iPhone. I would be genuinely curious to find out about it.
      - ta12121 14y ago
        MaxwellKennerly above provided references to prior art. You disputed said references by claiming that other products copied Apple. I pointed out that just because it was Apple who made these features popular, leading to other products copying them, doesn't mean that the features could not have been independently invented prior to Apple. I refer you to the original comment for the prior-art examples.
- nirvana 14y ago
  >Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.: Since the patent itself cites prior art, obviously the patent isn't patenting the same thing as the prior art. >All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding .... was at best modestly different from prior implementations You have provided no evidence or reason to believe this. In fact, I've seen this claim hundreds of times, and never seen anyone even attempt to provide a defense for this assertion. Yet the evidence at hand shows the opposite- the patent was reviewed for a significant period of time by the patent office. Further, this isn't Apple's rodeo. After the Microsoft loss, Apple has a great deal of incentive to make sure that their patents are solid. So despite evidence to the contrary, you just repeatedly assert this position because it helps your ideological position. But we need more than mere assertion. In fact, your assertion isn't really consistent with history. To make this obvious lets change the context. Imagine it is motorola being sued by Bell: Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones". The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface means that apple didn't invent nothing for the iPhone. You're relying on the ubiquity of copies of Apples devices to make an emotional appeal claiming these things were obvious.... yet this is post hoc ergo propter hoc. Before 2007, Android was working on a blackberry ripoff, not a touch UI. And your argument fundamentally misrepresents what patents are.
  - regularfry 14y ago
    > Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones". I've seen you mention this a couple of times now. I know you mean it to be ridiculous, but it's actually a true statement: once you have a telephone, and a radio, then the concept of a cellphone in itself is an obvious step. There are scads of patentable details in the implementation, but nothing to say that the concept of a cellphone itself should be protected. Perhaps you should find an alternative example? > The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface None of the prior art listed above claims anything to do with cameras.
  - 14y ago
- Cushman 14y ago
  Sorry, it's not clear to me which one of those patents you feel is prior art for Apple's specific claim of a method for scrolling on a touch-screen display where a distinct area past the edge of the document is displayed and then removed when the touch ends. Can you clarify?
Joeri 14y ago
How do you know it wouldn't have occurred to someone else working in the same field? I find the assumption of the patent system that the patented innovations wouldn't have happened without being patentable to be fundamentally flawed. That may be true for fields with huge R&D cost, like medicine, but in fields with near-zero R&D cost like software I find it hard to argue for the necessity of any sort of patent protection.
- nirvana 14y ago
  And yet, repeatedly in its history, Apple has come out with major new inventions, while its competitors seem to just ship the same old stuff. The primary improvement for most PCs has always been the work of Microsoft or Intel, not Dell, HP, et al. Yet Apple has worked to actually improve the design and technology of the PC itself. The truth is, genuine innovation is exceedingly rare. Nobody was working to revolutionize the cellphone industry except Apple. Apple was the only one who cared, and that's why they caught everyone flat footed. Anyway, patents don't require that nobody else be working on the same thing you are, quite the opposite: patents are designed to get everyone working on this new invention, by publishing it. Two people who happen to come up with the same method at the same time is so rare I cannot think of a single example... and if they did, there would still likely be differences that result in both getting patents (even if one of them gets the patent on part of the solution because he files first.) If samsung had been doing the fundamental research that would allow them to release an iPhone type device in 2008, Apple being to the patent office first would not have been a problem for them--- because the phone they produce in 2008 would have been so different because they would have had 5-7 years of working in isolation with the priorities of a korean company and sensibility of korean culture. They would have produced very different solutions to these same problems if they had been working on them. Instead Samsung was not working on a touch UI, not even trying to do novel work, and simply decided to copy apple thinking the litigation risk was worth it.
  - Goronmon 14y ago
    Anyway, patents don't require that nobody else be working on the same thing you are, quite the opposite: patents are designed to get everyone working on this new invention, by publishing it. They seem extremely poorly designed for this goal. Edit: Just as an example. Our company had one of the lawyers come in and talk about patents in our office for a couple hours one day. They wanted to encourage us to file them for any work we might be doing. One of the first things he told us was to not ever search through existing patents for any reason whatsoever.
tensor 14y ago
As a minimum test for whether something is non-obvious enough to be patented, I like to think of whether it could have been published in a computer science or UI journal. Similarly, if it has already been published in a journal, then it should be off limits for being patentable. Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that. Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal. In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly. Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with: "Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept." [1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html [2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Claiming.html?id=WvpuGlMVg-QC http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Cl...
- nirvana 14y ago
  Repeat after me: Patents do not cover ideas. Patents do not cover features. Writing about an idea or a feature in a computer science journal is not prior art. Star Trek has the warp drive. So, if someone invents the technology to give us a warp drive, you think that it isn't novel because we've seen it on TV going back to the 1960s!
  - luser001 14y ago
    I think you mischaracterize how CS journals work. What is described there is usually the characteristics of and results from a particular implementation.
  - Kell 14y ago
    If you invent a warp drive you will be awarded a patent over the implementation of it, that was never explained in ST for obvious reasons. So if you invent a real one, built to look exactly like the Star Trek one with an "interface" very similar to the one in the serie, and try to patent it's design and "interface", then Star Trek's warp drive will be prior art (for the design and interface, not the way it works). See, not all patents are of the exact same kind, and there's a lot of things to patent about any thing. That's the problem... nowadays things that shouldn't be patented, like designs and user interfaces (even algorithms), are.
mindslight 14y ago
> you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions That's how it's supposed to work, which is a large part of why people are up in arms about the broken patent system. A patent on an idea and a patent on any possible implementation of that idea are effectively the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807 > 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. That supposed specificity is nothing but a way of describing an aspect of the general idea in terms of generic implementation details. Any implementation will have some part that can be construed as similar ("they're just generating the 'area' on demand", etc)
wtetzner 14y ago
"your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it..." Isn't selling iPhones enough of an incentive?

by Cushman 14y ago

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?
- mcantelon 14y ago
  Of course the inventor can patent the implementation details of a matter transporter, but patenting the idea of a matter transporter, when the idea's been floating around, seems unduly restrictive.
- MaxwellKennerly 14y ago
  Of course not, and it bears repeating that this patent doesn't cover any of the underlying technology that makes the iPhone actually work as a phone, it merely covers part of the appearance of the UI, an appearance that any competent programmer can replicate on a whim. I am contending that you can't patent a user interface you see in a sci-fi movie, which is what Apple did here. What they patented is no different from patenting the way the command module looks on the Enterprise. Do you think that Apple should be able to patent, say, the use of oval icons?
  - veemjeem 14y ago
    You can patent icons and fonts, why would a user interface be different here? We could revoke the ability to patent icons & fonts, but then there would be no financial motivation for companies to design fonts to sell.
- philwelch 14y ago
  It depends on whether it's described in sufficient detail. Robert Heinlein's (written) descriptions of the design of a waterbed were sufficient prior art against Charles Hall's 1968 patent claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Literary_significance_and_criticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Lite...
- jewel 14y ago
mratzloff 14y ago
It was apparently novel enough that a number of companies and open source projects have now implemented similar UI feedback where they didn't have it before.
- ta12121 14y ago
  Many breakthroughs are invented multiple times before they stick. The patent doesn't belong to the one who made it popular, but the one who made it first.
  - mratzloff 14y ago
    If that applies here, please point to a piece of software that did that prior to the iPhone. I would be genuinely curious to find out about it.
    - ta12121 14y ago
      MaxwellKennerly above provided references to prior art. You disputed said references by claiming that other products copied Apple. I pointed out that just because it was Apple who made these features popular, leading to other products copying them, doesn't mean that the features could not have been independently invented prior to Apple. I refer you to the original comment for the prior-art examples.
nirvana 14y ago
>Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.: Since the patent itself cites prior art, obviously the patent isn't patenting the same thing as the prior art. >All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding .... was at best modestly different from prior implementations You have provided no evidence or reason to believe this. In fact, I've seen this claim hundreds of times, and never seen anyone even attempt to provide a defense for this assertion. Yet the evidence at hand shows the opposite- the patent was reviewed for a significant period of time by the patent office. Further, this isn't Apple's rodeo. After the Microsoft loss, Apple has a great deal of incentive to make sure that their patents are solid. So despite evidence to the contrary, you just repeatedly assert this position because it helps your ideological position. But we need more than mere assertion. In fact, your assertion isn't really consistent with history. To make this obvious lets change the context. Imagine it is motorola being sued by Bell: Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones". The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface means that apple didn't invent nothing for the iPhone. You're relying on the ubiquity of copies of Apples devices to make an emotional appeal claiming these things were obvious.... yet this is post hoc ergo propter hoc. Before 2007, Android was working on a blackberry ripoff, not a touch UI. And your argument fundamentally misrepresents what patents are.
- regularfry 14y ago
  > Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones". I've seen you mention this a couple of times now. I know you mean it to be ridiculous, but it's actually a true statement: once you have a telephone, and a radio, then the concept of a cellphone in itself is an obvious step. There are scads of patentable details in the implementation, but nothing to say that the concept of a cellphone itself should be protected. Perhaps you should find an alternative example? > The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface None of the prior art listed above claims anything to do with cameras.
- 14y ago
Cushman 14y ago
Sorry, it's not clear to me which one of those patents you feel is prior art for Apple's specific claim of a method for scrolling on a touch-screen display where a distinct area past the edge of the document is displayed and then removed when the touch ends. Can you clarify?

Joeri 14y ago

How do you know it wouldn't have occurred to someone else working in the same field? I find the assumption of the patent system that the patented innovations wouldn't have happened without being patentable to be fundamentally flawed. That may be true for fields with huge R&D cost, like medicine, but in fields with near-zero R&D cost like software I find it hard to argue for the necessity of any sort of patent protection.

nirvana 14y ago
And yet, repeatedly in its history, Apple has come out with major new inventions, while its competitors seem to just ship the same old stuff. The primary improvement for most PCs has always been the work of Microsoft or Intel, not Dell, HP, et al. Yet Apple has worked to actually improve the design and technology of the PC itself. The truth is, genuine innovation is exceedingly rare. Nobody was working to revolutionize the cellphone industry except Apple. Apple was the only one who cared, and that's why they caught everyone flat footed. Anyway, patents don't require that nobody else be working on the same thing you are, quite the opposite: patents are designed to get everyone working on this new invention, by publishing it. Two people who happen to come up with the same method at the same time is so rare I cannot think of a single example... and if they did, there would still likely be differences that result in both getting patents (even if one of them gets the patent on part of the solution because he files first.) If samsung had been doing the fundamental research that would allow them to release an iPhone type device in 2008, Apple being to the patent office first would not have been a problem for them--- because the phone they produce in 2008 would have been so different because they would have had 5-7 years of working in isolation with the priorities of a korean company and sensibility of korean culture. They would have produced very different solutions to these same problems if they had been working on them. Instead Samsung was not working on a touch UI, not even trying to do novel work, and simply decided to copy apple thinking the litigation risk was worth it.
- Goronmon 14y ago
  Anyway, patents don't require that nobody else be working on the same thing you are, quite the opposite: patents are designed to get everyone working on this new invention, by publishing it. They seem extremely poorly designed for this goal. Edit: Just as an example. Our company had one of the lawyers come in and talk about patents in our office for a couple hours one day. They wanted to encourage us to file them for any work we might be doing. One of the first things he told us was to not ever search through existing patents for any reason whatsoever.

tensor 14y ago

As a minimum test for whether something is non-obvious enough to be patented, I like to think of whether it could have been published in a computer science or UI journal. Similarly, if it has already been published in a journal, then it should be off limits for being patentable. Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that. Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal. In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly. Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with: "Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept." [1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html [2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Claiming.html?id=WvpuGlMVg-QC http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Cl...

nirvana 14y ago
Repeat after me: Patents do not cover ideas. Patents do not cover features. Writing about an idea or a feature in a computer science journal is not prior art. Star Trek has the warp drive. So, if someone invents the technology to give us a warp drive, you think that it isn't novel because we've seen it on TV going back to the 1960s!
- luser001 14y ago
  I think you mischaracterize how CS journals work. What is described there is usually the characteristics of and results from a particular implementation.
- Kell 14y ago
  If you invent a warp drive you will be awarded a patent over the implementation of it, that was never explained in ST for obvious reasons. So if you invent a real one, built to look exactly like the Star Trek one with an "interface" very similar to the one in the serie, and try to patent it's design and "interface", then Star Trek's warp drive will be prior art (for the design and interface, not the way it works). See, not all patents are of the exact same kind, and there's a lot of things to patent about any thing. That's the problem... nowadays things that shouldn't be patented, like designs and user interfaces (even algorithms), are.

mindslight 14y ago

> you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions That's how it's supposed to work, which is a large part of why people are up in arms about the broken patent system. A patent on an idea and a patent on any possible implementation of that idea are effectively the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807 > 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. That supposed specificity is nothing but a way of describing an aspect of the general idea in terms of generic implementation details. Any implementation will have some part that can be construed as similar ("they're just generating the 'area' on demand", etc)

wtetzner 14y ago

"your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it..." Isn't selling iPhones enough of an incentive?