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I'm a little surprised to see the NY Times perpetuating the hysteria that typically follows patent issues with exaggeration of their scope and claims. This is
by btn 14y ago
I'm a little surprised to see the NY Times perpetuating the hysteria that typically follows patent issues with exaggeration of their scope and claims.
This is a design patent, meaning that Apple has protection for this specific animation and not page-turn animations in general. Note that many of the references cited (a good one is the O'Reilly article from 2004) depict page-turn animations, but differ from this specific one.
- cdooh 14y agoAre you saying the US patent system is not broken and completely f*cked up?
- law 14y agoThe system is not "broken and completely f* cked up." Certain aspects are dysfunctional (as one would reasonably expect given the extent to which technological progress exceeds legislative progress), but you cannot impute those specific flaws onto the system as a whole. It's like saying democracy is "broken and completely f* cked up" because one particular elected official was found to be corrupt. Give it a rest already.
- belorn 14y agoIs the design of this animation novel and not obvious for all items, as the requirement for design patent puts it? To me, this patent fails both. Its not novel, as substantially similar (legal term) has existed before in animated film. Its neither non-obvious for all items, ie, its a obvious way to illustrate a turning of a page for any application that want to illustrate a turning of a page.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mmanfrin 14y agoIt's novel only if the book is fiction. :]
- sanarothe 14y agoplease, take all my upvotes
- zerostar07 14y agoMust be a hell of a page-turning novel. I would like to propose the twitter test for patents: If the patent can't be summarized in 140 characters, it has been done before.
- rymith 14y agoWell, I think for starters, you're missing context for the first example. Prior art must pertain to the context, and animated film is not a touch enabled computing device. For instance, just because Roddenberry thought of the idea of teleportation doesn't mean this concept in the show is prior art. If and when a company does invent a teleporter, then they will be able to patent it. And your second point about obvious is flawed. Everything is obvious when you know the correct answer. For instance, a wheel is so obvious that a very young child could rationalize its creation and use. Because it's obvious once seen. But if it's so obvious, why did it take us 245,000 year or so to invent the wheel? Microsoft has been touting the tablet for ten years. Why didn't they create it, if it's so obvious. I think all patents need to go away, I think they cripple innovation and make it impossible to create something new if you're not a giant corporation. But in so long as we're stuck with these laws, then every company has to try to patent everything it can so it doesn't get sued.
- wlesieutre 14y agoBut dragging something and having it move is a fundamentally obvious interaction. Can you really take "Thing that happens physically, but on a screen" and call it an invention? Could (or did?) someone have gotten a patent on a downward "gravity-like" force on a digital object, so that it falls when you let go of the mouse button? Has anyone patented "grabbing" an "object" with augmented reality glasses, and manipulating it in space? That seems like the most obvious extension of click and drag into the third dimension possible, and yet I have very little doubt that the patent office would grant it.
- justincormack 14y agoThere were a lot of patents in VR, as it was a boom area. Most will however have expired now, without making any money. You could take a look to see how bad they were, although I do not think they were as bad as grabbing objects, a lot of the patents were still physical devices like controllers and glasses.
- belorn 14y agoFeel free to provide link that show the design patent law has an exception for context (domain) of the article. From what can be read in the actually law, it require the same novelty as utility patent, and this requirement is: An invention will not normally be patentable if: The invention was known to the public before it was "invented" by the individual seeking patent protection; The invention was described in a publication more than one year prior to the filing date; or The invention was used publicly, or offered for sale to the public more than one year prior to the filing date. Was the public unaware of how flipping an page on a touch screen looked like before this "invention" was shown, specially when one consider the significant similar design made in prior published animations?
- coolestuk 14y agoprior art can be found in software. I'm fairly sure "page turning" existed in Lotus Organiser in the mid 1990s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Organizer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Organizer
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago>> I'm a little surprised to see the NY Times perpetuating the hysteria that typically follows patent issues with exaggeration of their scope and claims. it's a blog, so there is usually more leeway to call out issues like this, and not have to be a heavily researched, or balanced piece of writing.
- jsnk 14y agoAnd yes, design patents are so abuse-proof that there's absolutely no chance that Apple would sue competitors for using remotely similar animation.
- taligent 14y agoYou know patents really aren't that hard to understand. If prior art exists then the patent will be invalidated in court. Just as has been done in the past and will be done in the future.
- CamperBob2 14y agoYeah, after somebody coughs up a few hundred thousand dollars for legal fees. You in?
- tomrod 14y agoIndeed. The inefficiencies are indecent enough to make an economist blush.
- law 14y agoYou're wrong. The USPTO has an obligation to review any prior art that raises a substantial new question of patentability, even if the patent has already issued. Post-issuance, any person can request ex parte re-examination (even anonymously), and the cost is $2,520. That's a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than you asserted, so in the future, please refrain from commenting on matters about which you know nothing.
- CamperBob2 14y ago"Law"? Meaning 1-L, right? Reality does not work that way. The burden of proof is on the person who's trying to contest an existing patent claim, and that burden is an expensive one to carry against a well-funded opponent. Seriously. What exactly do you think Apple is going to do when you mail in a check for $2520 to the USPTO and they inform the company's patent counsel that a valuable claim is being reexamined? This oughta be good.
- law 14y agoI'm so relieved that this is the top comment. Design patents only protect the ornamental characteristics embodied in an article of manufacture. This NYT blogger seems to conflate design patents and utility patents, but the distinction is that utility patents protect how an article of manufacture works, whereas a design patent protects how an article of manufacture appears. In fact, Apple could have filed an application for a utility patent on "page turning," which the USPTO would summarily reject on the basis of "page turning" being anticipated by technologies like...the book. At any rate, this is the kind of sensationalized blog spam that I'd expect to see on reddit, rather than HN. Flagged.
- hexagonc 14y agoBut this is not just an ornamental artifact. What it attempts to do is simulate the actual way someone would turn a page in a large book, such as a dictionary, with lots of thin pages. I would argue that the technical way of implementing this would warrant a patent (utility) more so than the simple depiction of a thing that people naturally do with books. In no way is this design unique to Apple; there is already prior art from the way people turn pages in books. The choice to depict realistic page turning on an ebook reader is not artistically novel. From a video game perspective, this is like patenting the idea of showing a game world from an isometric point of view. This is a bad patent. Now, I would agree with you that the NY Times article does exaggerate the impact of this patent. Apple has not patented the page turn, instead they have patented a particular realistic way of showing turning pages. In theory, Amazon could implement a page turn style where someone grabs the top corner of the page instead of the bottom and get around this patent.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- danmaz74 14y agoCan you please point out what is specific in this design, as represented in the black and white drawings that describe it in the patent? The angle of the page fold?
- jopt 14y agoRight. As broken as the patent system is, this author doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about. Almost as if he/she knows it's cool to hate on patents, but not why or how.