5 ms·

I swear every time I read one of those articles I die a little bit. I can't begin to apprehend the emptiness inside [insert patent trolling company] lawyers' so

• Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
  Not sure this is much to do with companies patent trolling. Apple developed the tech and use it, that's pretty different. You can disagree with the specific patent (and I think in this case there's a pretty good case for that) or with patents in general, but this isn't, by my understanding of the term, patent trolling.
  • jbogp 13y ago
    Granted that's not patent trolling just yet, but that would definitely be a good first step towards it. I mean given that this patent was granted on the basis that the tech already existed but on capacitor screens and not touch screen is laughable. Of course Apple didn't invent any of these things -- multitouch and heuristics for detected angular swipes were available on older resistive touch screens. However, modern phones don't use resistive touch. The current state of U.S. technology patents allows you to repatent virtually identical firmware on a new kind of hardware.
    • Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
      I agree entirely that it's a suspect patent (even without the capacitive / resistive difference elements of it are hardly innovative) but that's still not trolling as Apple actively use the patent in their own products and registered the patent with that intention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll There are many reasons to dislike Apple but they're not patent trolls.
  • venomsnake 13y ago
    The patents are disclosure in exchange for state granted monopoly. Or they should be - you do something amazing. No one can figure out how to do it - you tell them and they cannot use the tech for X years. But right now people patent the end result. That is wrong.
    • deleted 13y ago
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