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Apple granted Patent for their Page Turn Animation
- adaml_623 14y agoFiled July 2010. I don't understand. I saw this effect on dozens of web pages over the last decade. Do patent examiners just live in a little box?
- nudded 14y agoPatent examiners just provide advice. Even if the advice is negative, you can still be granted the patent. The validity of any patent then has to be established by a judge in court.
- hayksaakian 14y agoI understand 'innocent until proven guilty,' but 'patentable until proven otherwise' makes no damn sense.
- nudded 14y agoI agree with you. But it's important to understand that 'Patent granted' has no meaning at all.
- dpark 14y agoThis is entirely untrue. A patent that has been granted by the USPTO is deemed valid and binding unless decided otherwise in court or by a re-evaluation by the USPTO. By your standard, patents are never meaningful, because a higher court (or the same court) could always invalidate the patent.
- zerostar07 14y ago"Patent pending" doesn't have legal effect ( i think it's a warning to copycat-wannabes). "Patent granted" has lots and lots of meaning.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- nrinaudo 14y agoDid BeOS not have a very similar animation in one of its 3d demonstration widgets? The one you could drop images or videos on, flip pages and have them deformed and rendered in real time? That was, what, in the mid-90s? 15 years before Apple's patent was even filled?
- goodereader 14y agoI think this is a huge win for Apple with all the major companies like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books and others all using page turn animations, much like iBooks uses. I could see easily in the next few months more licensing deals being made.
- calciphus 14y agoA win for Apple, a loss for the rest of us. Do we really honestly think that if Apple hadn't created page turn animations, they wouldn't have existed?
- raganwald 14y agoDo you believe that if the Wright Brothers hadn't flown--and patented their discoveries--that we wouldn't have fixed-wing flight?
- codeka 14y agoHow is a page-turning animation, in wide use before Apple filed for patent, in any way comparable to the Wright brothers?
- esolyt 14y agoI'm not even sure if this analogy is sarcastic or serious. We invented books and page-turning 500 years ago. This is just an animation.
- incision 14y agoSarcasm? I'm having a hard to time understanding how this comparison makes any kind of sense.
- Natsu 14y agoFunny you should use them as an example, because there's a lot of interesting history surrounding that, which you can read about here. I'll give you the highlights for a quick skim, but there's a lot more to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral roll control. The concept of lateral control was basic to all aircraft designs; without it they could not be easily or safely controlled in flight.[7] The broad protection intended by this patent succeeded when the Wrights won patent infringement lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators who devised ailerons to emulate lateral control described in the patent and demonstrated by the Wrights in their 1908 public flights. U.S. courts decided that ailerons were also covered by the patent. [...] The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[10] Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines. In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in favor of the Wrights against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties through legal tactics. [...] The patent pool solution In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.[11][12][13]
- calciphus 14y agoYears and years ago I was a flash developer. I had a client who wanted a catalog that looked like it flipped pages. Even back then (this would have been pre-2000) there were a lot of ways to solve for this, and numerous examples. In fact, here's a post from 2003 describing exactly this. http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-Brandon_-982/index.php http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-Brandon...
- calciphus 14y agohttp://www.flashkit.com/movies/launcher.php?url=/imagesvr_ce/flashkit/movies/3D/Pseudo/Realisti-Triqui-10710/Realisti-Triqui-10710.swf&width=792&height=594&bg=ffffff http://www.flashkit.com/movies/launcher.php?url=/imagesvr_ce... A nice live demo of one of the other tutorials. That one dating from 2006.
- spjwebster 14y agoNot that this needs to turn into an exercise in finding prior art, but here's one from 2002: http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459 http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459 Over a decade ago I was a moderator on the FlashKit forums[1], and this page turning effect was all over the place. [1] I'm surprised this is still here (in all its cringeworth glory) after 12 years: http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?243303-NETbreed http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?243303-NETbre...
- robmcm 14y agoThere are a number of publishing platforms for magazines that use these online (Ceros, Zinio etc). As for touch related, I think they both have iOS / mobile web apps as do others. They have all been around since before iBooks. The first time I saw a finger following page turn on iOS was pre iPad via Pixelmags. I am not sure when it make it to market though, but I'm sure it was before the iPad launched.
- neya 14y agoWell, then it's just a matter of time until some random company 'X' gets sued for having page-turn animation that they had implemented decades ago, I guess.
- JonnieCache 14y agoMicrosoft had it on encarta back in the 90s. I'm sure there are many other glaringly obvious examples.
- Zenst 14y agoYes a small company called that were working on a CPU that would become the ARM cpu was happily demoing there new computer the archimedies and to demonstrate the new CPU they did something that had not been done in realtime. Yes the page turn effect, was also a waving flag surface and few other demonstrations of this great processing power. Now If I watch a film on TV on a digital screen and in that film somebody turns a page of a book, then would I also technicaly be violating this digital patent. Patents like this are fine, as long as there are in a common-sence pool of free use for all, anything else is well, just wrong.
- lutze 14y agoHell, even Master of Magic had this on its spellbook. I fail to see how this is in any way a unique feature warranting a patent, what a fucking joke.
- nudded 14y agoIf they prove they had it implemented before the patent they couldn't.
- zerostar07 14y agoWell, if "software is eating everything", soon traditional books will become extinct. The next generation will probably find page-turning effects a bizarre thing that their computer does (similar to how very few people understand why "radio buttons" are named thusly ).
- danmaz74 14y agoThis is the claim[1]: CLAIM The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described. Reading this, I wonder: How did "design patents" even come to be? I'm tired of saying it, but this is a real aberration. [1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=D670,713.PN.&OS=PN/D670,713&RS=PN/D670,713 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
- czr80 14y agoThink of a "design patent" as being a subclass of "trademark", rather than a subclass of "patent". Do you think companies should be able to get trademarks? If so, then you believe most of the case for design patents.
- zalew 14y ago> Do you think companies should be able to get trademarks? If so, then you believe most of the case for design patents. BS. see fashion - strongly enforced trademarks, no design patents.
- danmaz74 14y agoI believe that trademarks should be granted (and patents too, for REAL non obvious innovations), but watching the black and white sketches it looks like they "trademarked" the very idea of an animation showing a page folding on a digital book. Following the trademarking analogy, this looks to me like trying to trademark the word "Apple" for a company selling apples - which AFAIK isn't allowed.
- bickfordb 14y agoI'm pretty certain trademarks are distinct from design patents, but that the same thing can claimed as both a design patent and a trademark. Many design patents are simply designs and do not reflect a brand or manufacturer of a product. Likewise many trademarks are merely words/phrases or iconography/brandmarks and are not patentable. I disagree with the concept of design patents. I believe that determining the novelty of a design is mostly subjective.
- ljd 14y agoWouldn't there be some significant issues with patenting a skeuomorphic design? Couldn't a physical book be used as a form of prior art? If this is not the case and anything that exists outside of the realm of computing can now be patented by being modeled digitally, wouldn't that have wide sweeping ramifications? For example, what stops someone from taking a pharmaceutical that they do not own the patent to and getting a patent for that same drug but the patent is for a digital model of the molecular structure? Then litigate against the pharmaceutical company if the pharmaceutical company chooses to store the structure digitally. I'm generally curious about this. If anyone can help me understand what I'm missing here, I would appreciate it.
- gilgoomesh 14y agoYou're actually discussing two different points. 1) Is is possible to take a known, existing invention and simply change the context a little and repatent? The answer is yes, if the original existing invention had never been documented to be used in this new context. This is a highly contentious area of patent law and I personally disagree with it. http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/patently-obvious/0 http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/patently-obvious... 2) Design patents are not the same as regular patents. This Apple patent is a design patent, not a normal patent. It protects a very specific visual design in a specific use case. Design patents are very narrow in scope. The same design in a different context is not protected by this patent nor does it affect the patentability (it might affect the obviousness but obviousness is a frustratingly rare objection in patent reviews).
- 1337biz 14y agoI have re-read this argument "design patents have a very limited scope" a few times over the latest Apple patent craze. What I am wondering is what the reasoning behind all these questionable patents is and if they are indeed hardly enforceable. Or is Apple, maybe as a consequence of the Samsung disaster, going into "patent whatever is remotely patentable" mode?
- gilgoomesh 14y ago
- chris_wot 14y agoGOOD - I absolutely loathe that page turning animation... Skeumorphics gone crazy. P.S. I've seen plenty of page turning effects like there's in advertising catalogs built in Flash. But in this case, let Apple have their way.
- zerostar07 14y agoLook at the bright side: there are a number of pretty text-scrolling effects that have been not been appreciated enough. Scrolls unwinding, tablets thrown back and forth etc.
- zeru 14y agoThere's no chance it will hold up in any court if they try to use it to sue because of the vast amount of previous art. Not a chance at all.
- 3amOpsGuy 14y agoThere's too much prior art for this. Back around 97-99 there were plenty of shareware apps shipped on magazine cover CDs for reading ebooks. They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy) page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"
- olgeni 14y agoThis could be easily circumvented by animating a page ripped out of the book, made into a ball, and tossed in the general direction of an Apple-looking product.
- kaolinite 14y agoQuite a few people are mentioning prior art and then going on to give examples where it's just an animation. I'm not saying that there isn't prior art however it does specify that the animation is initiated with a finger: "The animation responds to a simple swiping motion with the finger, which turns the page over just as it happens on a paper book. A different swiping motion will flip the pages quickly, and a vertical finger movement will flip the page just enough to reveal what’s on the next page." Talking of which - does anyone find the iBooks animation to be slow and annoying? On my iPad 3 it lags for a split second and generally feels a bit rough. It sounds picky but it's quite annoying and judging by a quick search on Google, others are annoyed by it too. Has it always been this way or is this a bug that will be fixed?
- stbullard 14y agoI'd like to see Apple's cost-benefit analysis on something like this. Patents aren't cheap; if this is as unlikely to be defensible as some people are claiming, Apple must expect a huge upside. (Decreased risk? Licensing fees?)
- yogeshkhatri 14y agoI don't know much about the patents but is grammer of the claim is considered or not as in the claim it is referring to finger and if i implement the same animation which is done by using two or more fingers, am i infringing the patent.