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You know, I was just thinking the same thing about Minority Report. How does that not serve as prior art? I'm sure there are plenty of others before this as wel

by kamjam 14y ago

You know, I was just thinking the same thing about Minority Report. How does that not serve as prior art? I'm sure there are plenty of others before this as well. Someone commented on that blog about the TED talk that did a demo on "the pinch": http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...

twoodfin 14y ago
Uhh, because fictional representations of devices without sufficient information on how to actually construct them isn't prior art? I guarantee you, if you invent a matter/energy transporter you will be able to patent it despite Star Trek having put it on screen almost 50 years ago.
- kamjam 14y ago
  Did you see the video I linked to? This was actually real and that video is dated 1 year before the iPhone was even announced, let alone released. Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different technical implementation of it right...
  - twoodfin 14y ago
    You can't get utility patents for "concepts". They patented a specific way to do pinch-to-zoom on mobile devices with capacitive touch screens (and interacting with an event loop). Which is a similar, but not identical, problem to doing multitouch pinch-to-zoom on a projector-based system as in the demo.
    - kamjam 14y ago
      Which is as silly as those patents which essentially took existing ideas and added "on the web" to the end of them. Not saying you're wrong, just what everyone else has been screaming - the patent system is broken!
- heartbreak 14y ago
  The company that designed the interface in Minority Report is OOOii. They actually did implement the user interfaces portrayed in the movie: http://www.ooo-ii.com/ http://www.ooo-ii.com/
eddieroger 14y ago
Beacuse Minority Report is a movie, and Prior Art tends to require an actual implementation using the same methods claimed in the patent? But if you wanted to pretend that you could claim a movie as real, the implementation is different, in that they used their fingers to frame (the "L" shape), and pinch-to-zoom uses only two fingers in no particular location, other than that they move away from each other.
- kamjam 14y ago
  Ok, but also view th TEDtalk I linked to, it has an actual implementation and Jeff Han zooms in using 2 fingers.

by kamjam 14y ago

twoodfin 14y ago

Uhh, because fictional representations of devices without sufficient information on how to actually construct them isn't prior art? I guarantee you, if you invent a matter/energy transporter you will be able to patent it despite Star Trek having put it on screen almost 50 years ago.

kamjam 14y ago
Did you see the video I linked to? This was actually real and that video is dated 1 year before the iPhone was even announced, let alone released. Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different technical implementation of it right...
- twoodfin 14y ago
  You can't get utility patents for "concepts". They patented a specific way to do pinch-to-zoom on mobile devices with capacitive touch screens (and interacting with an event loop). Which is a similar, but not identical, problem to doing multitouch pinch-to-zoom on a projector-based system as in the demo.
  - kamjam 14y ago
    Which is as silly as those patents which essentially took existing ideas and added "on the web" to the end of them. Not saying you're wrong, just what everyone else has been screaming - the patent system is broken!
heartbreak 14y ago
The company that designed the interface in Minority Report is OOOii. They actually did implement the user interfaces portrayed in the movie: http://www.ooo-ii.com/ http://www.ooo-ii.com/

eddieroger 14y ago

Beacuse Minority Report is a movie, and Prior Art tends to require an actual implementation using the same methods claimed in the patent? But if you wanted to pretend that you could claim a movie as real, the implementation is different, in that they used their fingers to frame (the "L" shape), and pinch-to-zoom uses only two fingers in no particular location, other than that they move away from each other.

kamjam 14y ago
Ok, but also view th TEDtalk I linked to, it has an actual implementation and Jeff Han zooms in using 2 fingers.