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And here I am again to provide a friendly reminder that before discussing any patent, you must read the claims! If you did so, in this case, you would see that

And here I am again to provide a friendly reminder that before discussing any patent, you must read the claims! If you did so, in this case, you would see that this is not a "pinch-to-zoom patent", but rather a "pinch-to-zoom-if-the-event-object-created-from-touch-input-has-two-or-more-points-else-scroll-the-view-instead" patent. Yes, it literally covers something as specific as creating "event objects" out of touch inputs and interpreting them as either zooming or scrolling gestures. Minority Report is not sufficient prior art because: 1) It does not include a touch-sensitive display, 2) its user input is not "points applied to the touch-sensitive display" that it does not have, 3) it is wholly non-enabled (at least in the movie) which is why it does not teach, as far as we can tell, create "event objects" in response to user input, 4) and though it may depict scrolling gestures and pinching gestures in various scenes, it does not teach how to determine whether an input is a scroll or a pinch (which this patent proposes doing by differentiating the number of points in the touch input). But why even worry about fictional, non-enabled prior art when people have found specific prior art to (temporarily) invalidate these claims?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- WildUtah 13y ago
  [Edit: deleted parent asked: "May I ask why you include the word \"temporarily\" regarding prior art? ... Am I wrong? Does prior art now somehow not invalidate a claim/patent?"] Usually a patent applicant can claim a narrow distinction between his claim and existing prior art. Consider gp's list of available distinctions from the Minority Report zoom feature; it's a litany of distinctions without any actual difference as far as the actual nature of the 'invention.' It's a standard technique in patent law to apply for a series of patents around the invention of a competitor. The patent office can be persuaded to issue new monopolies over every kind of meaningless distinction. You can make it impossible for that competitor to make his invention by blocking every kind of trivial and obvious change and improvement in design, technique, and build. Then he will have to cross license in order to continue in business and you gain access to his patents. It's one of the ways big businesses continue to operate in the face of a broken patent system. Apple recently overcame a post-grant rejection of their bounce-back patent on appeal. They argued that the prior art showed the technique to re-center the center of a fixed-size document so that it fit on the screen while their technique was completely distinct. Apple instead aligned the edge of a fixed size document to the edge of the screen so that it fit. The logical and geometric and mathematical and programming equivalency of those two did not overcome the PTO's affection for rhetorical distinctions and the patent was re-issued. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130509083407920 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130509083407920 (Note that Samsung is very unlikely to get the re-trial in the story; the PTO's position on distinctions is widely approved in the bar.) So, no. Prior art does not invalidate a claim in most circumstances. In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.' That invention was online backup. The one 1990s patent under litigation could not be invalidated by the five thousand others between it and IBM's first implementations in the 1950s. (They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars.)
  - throwawaykf 13y ago
    > it's a litany of distinctions without any actual difference as far as the actual nature of the 'invention.' So then, what, in your opinion, is "the actual nature of the invention"? Could you provide some legal reasoning behind what you consider "the actual nature of the invention"? > In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.' Oh lord, was that American Life episode a bad piece of reporting about patent-related things! In the entire show, the word "claims" appeared not once! Amongst the worst reporting I've seen, and I say this having read stuff on techdirt! But since you bring up the "5000 patents on the same thing" claim, allow me to talk about that. The guy who made that claim works for a firm called M-CAM, who provide a service to find similar patents based on content similarity. I looked through all of the "similar" patents they mentioned in that episode. Each and everyone one covered specific implementations of various aspects of cloud backup such as load-balancing, availability, de-duping, I/O performance for high-latency connections, etc. They were "on the same thing" inasmuch that they related to the broad area of online backup, but none had any claims that overlapped. If M-CAM had any good examples of patents covering "the same thing", they didn't mention a single one on that show. Furthermore, M-CAM issue reports about the strength of various patent portfolios. I looked through some of the "reports". They were absolutely worthless. They considered two patents to "cover the same invention" if they had some keywords in common. To them, "Alice is taller than Bob" and "Alice is less tall than Bob" would be a claim on the "same thing". Oh, but look! M-CAM also sell a "patent-risk management service" [1]! Strange that their claims on that show would lead some to think the patent system as something that is overly "risky", no? (BTW, I am not the only one who thought M-CAM was full of crap [2].) > They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars. Interestingly, as described in the second episode, that patent was found invalid only because the inventor did not name all his co-inventors on it. He sneakily filed the patent alone, sold it to IV, and raked in millions of dollars as a cut of the royalties. Leaving aside the fact that the inventor was a sleazebag, that throws the whole "patent trolls pay actual inventors very little" narrative -- one that the previous American Life episode played up -- right out the window. Oddly, nobody seems to report that. [1] http://www.m-cam.com/sherwood-patent-risk-management-services http://www.m-cam.com/sherwood-patent-risk-management-service... [2] http://gametimeip.com/2012/04/13/q-why-was-mdb-capital-right-and-m-cam-so-very-very-wrong-on-aol-patent-value/ http://gametimeip.com/2012/04/13/q-why-was-mdb-capital-right...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

WildUtah 13y ago
[Edit: deleted parent asked: "May I ask why you include the word \"temporarily\" regarding prior art? ... Am I wrong? Does prior art now somehow not invalidate a claim/patent?"] Usually a patent applicant can claim a narrow distinction between his claim and existing prior art. Consider gp's list of available distinctions from the Minority Report zoom feature; it's a litany of distinctions without any actual difference as far as the actual nature of the 'invention.' It's a standard technique in patent law to apply for a series of patents around the invention of a competitor. The patent office can be persuaded to issue new monopolies over every kind of meaningless distinction. You can make it impossible for that competitor to make his invention by blocking every kind of trivial and obvious change and improvement in design, technique, and build. Then he will have to cross license in order to continue in business and you gain access to his patents. It's one of the ways big businesses continue to operate in the face of a broken patent system. Apple recently overcame a post-grant rejection of their bounce-back patent on appeal. They argued that the prior art showed the technique to re-center the center of a fixed-size document so that it fit on the screen while their technique was completely distinct. Apple instead aligned the edge of a fixed size document to the edge of the screen so that it fit. The logical and geometric and mathematical and programming equivalency of those two did not overcome the PTO's affection for rhetorical distinctions and the patent was re-issued. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130509083407920 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130509083407920 (Note that Samsung is very unlikely to get the re-trial in the story; the PTO's position on distinctions is widely approved in the bar.) So, no. Prior art does not invalidate a claim in most circumstances. In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.' That invention was online backup. The one 1990s patent under litigation could not be invalidated by the five thousand others between it and IBM's first implementations in the 1950s. (They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars.)
- throwawaykf 13y ago
  > it's a litany of distinctions without any actual difference as far as the actual nature of the 'invention.' So then, what, in your opinion, is "the actual nature of the invention"? Could you provide some legal reasoning behind what you consider "the actual nature of the invention"? > In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.' Oh lord, was that American Life episode a bad piece of reporting about patent-related things! In the entire show, the word "claims" appeared not once! Amongst the worst reporting I've seen, and I say this having read stuff on techdirt! But since you bring up the "5000 patents on the same thing" claim, allow me to talk about that. The guy who made that claim works for a firm called M-CAM, who provide a service to find similar patents based on content similarity. I looked through all of the "similar" patents they mentioned in that episode. Each and everyone one covered specific implementations of various aspects of cloud backup such as load-balancing, availability, de-duping, I/O performance for high-latency connections, etc. They were "on the same thing" inasmuch that they related to the broad area of online backup, but none had any claims that overlapped. If M-CAM had any good examples of patents covering "the same thing", they didn't mention a single one on that show. Furthermore, M-CAM issue reports about the strength of various patent portfolios. I looked through some of the "reports". They were absolutely worthless. They considered two patents to "cover the same invention" if they had some keywords in common. To them, "Alice is taller than Bob" and "Alice is less tall than Bob" would be a claim on the "same thing". Oh, but look! M-CAM also sell a "patent-risk management service" [1]! Strange that their claims on that show would lead some to think the patent system as something that is overly "risky", no? (BTW, I am not the only one who thought M-CAM was full of crap [2].) > They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars. Interestingly, as described in the second episode, that patent was found invalid only because the inventor did not name all his co-inventors on it. He sneakily filed the patent alone, sold it to IV, and raked in millions of dollars as a cut of the royalties. Leaving aside the fact that the inventor was a sleazebag, that throws the whole "patent trolls pay actual inventors very little" narrative -- one that the previous American Life episode played up -- right out the window. Oddly, nobody seems to report that. [1] http://www.m-cam.com/sherwood-patent-risk-management-services http://www.m-cam.com/sherwood-patent-risk-management-service... [2] http://gametimeip.com/2012/04/13/q-why-was-mdb-capital-right-and-m-cam-so-very-very-wrong-on-aol-patent-value/ http://gametimeip.com/2012/04/13/q-why-was-mdb-capital-right...