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Supreme Court’s new rules on abstract patents hit Apple v. Samsung
- asadotzler 12y agoThe swipe to unlock patent sure does sound like a simple slide door bolt with "do it on a computer" tacked on. Where's the invention here? http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dtools&field-keywords=slide%20surface%20door%20bolt http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...
- CamperBob2 12y agoApparently, if pro-patent advocates are to be believed, this arcane knowledge would be lost to the mists of time if we didn't grant Apple a twenty-year monopoly in return for their deigning to disclose it, Prometheus-like, to us poor mortals.
- gnarbarian 12y agoAs stupid the "slide to unlock" patent is. Copying it is even dumber. There are numerous equally user friendly ways to unlock a phone. What Samsung does to Android cheapens the user interface and generally makes it worse. Regardless, they should NOT be sued for it.
- deong 12y agoI don't care who's "dumber". Samsung copying the idea doesn't change the legal system for everyone else. Apple patenting and suing everyone for ridiculously obvious "ideas" does. Samsung's software designers may be cheap hacks, but they're (inadvertently) serving the same good that Newegg serves. Both are infringing patents that make the world a shittier place and refusing to settle. The only difference is that Newegg does it out of righteous indignation rather than rank incompetence. Either way, the correct party to root for should be obvious.
- gnarbarian 12y agoNot sure why I'm getting downvoted into oblivion that's the sentiment that I have as well.
- ken47 12y agoThe invention: a novel method that enables the enrichment of shareholders at the cost of the progress of mankind.
- sitkack 12y agoIf only Apple had gone full skeuomorphic on this, the fraud would have been exposed sooner.
- aptwebapps 12y agoThe first Castlevania game for the DS [1] had a system where you used the touch screen (with a stylus) to draw "runes" (simple patterns like a triangle or square) to either a) defeat bosses or b) unlock doors. This might seem a bit cute, but it covers the basic idea to me. The game was released in 2005 and I believe Apple's first patent on slide-to-unlock was filed in 2009. 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Dawn_of_Sorrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Dawn_of_Sorrow
- aetherson 12y agoSlide-to-unlock was probably a pretty important, cool idea for whoever first invented it (not Apple -- though maybe they reinvented it from scratch). It's one of those things that's obvious in retrospect but difficult to necessarily think of when you're starting from a white page. But not all important, cool ideas are patentable -- nor should they be. Patents are meant to reward research, not "good ideas."
- sitkack 12y agoYou mean like a 3$ gate latch?
- lostcolony 12y agoExactly. The latches on a briefcase. This is atextbook patent for 'a common real world thing, "But on a computer"'
- upbeat_addict 12y agoit's always reminded me of an apt door chain lock.
- shmerl 12y ago> Slide-to-unlock was probably a pretty important, cool idea for whoever first invented it You mean whoever invented the sliding lock? It is indeed obvious in retrospect, but was probably a breakthrough when it was invented (that is ages ago). Such kind of patents are coming very close to patenting a wheel.
- mratzloff 12y ago> [A] computer process that enables a single machine to distribute a single information identifier and provide that to multiple “rules of thumb” so that each “rule of thumb” can search different locations using different criteria designed for that location is a major innovation in computer science; it improves the speed and efficiency of the computer and generates more useful results. It is not an abstract idea. Thanks to Apple, we now have the technology to pass a parameter to multiple functions implementing the same interface. Incredible!
- radicalbyte 12y agoThat's insane, I implemented something similar 12 years ago, a massive hack-up involving Excel, MS Access and PHP. If a clueless (in hindsight; I thought I was God's gift back then, a super VBA ninja) kid can "invent" something, then it's the textbook definition of "obvious". EDIT: their patent predates this. if someone somewhere is unlucky enough to still be using my fantastic invention, now might be a good time to find an alternative..
- andybak 12y agoThis is the part of the software patent I've never understood. Surely if the standard of "non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art" was applied sensibly then most of the more absurd patents wouldn't be granted. Of course there is the 'obvious in hindsight' problem but this test has been weakened beyond all recognition.
- revelation 12y agoWe don't even need to look to that subjective standard. We grant people exclusive rights or patents for sharing novel techniques with other people skilled in the art, yet I have never seen a professional software programmer look to patents for information or algorithms. It just doesn't happen. So the tradeoff here is exclusive rights for zero public benefits. That is not the way it was intended.
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- jessriedel 12y agoDoes this mean we'll be able to use the "stretch" behavior when finger-scrolling past the end of a list on a Galaxy, or will we be stuck with the inferior "glow" technique.
- gnarbarian 12y agoPersonally I like the "tilt" behavior in the Android 4.x better.
- dctoedt 12y agoWe're going to see lots more of these claims by patent-infringement defendants, whose trial counsel will figure, what the hell, let's give it a shot. Therein lies the practical problem with the Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. [1]: Just about any new technology could be described as a "generic implementation" of an abstract idea --- which the Court said is unpatentable. The Court gave us little or no useful guidance for distinguishing between an unpatentable generic implementation and a patentable "invention." [1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-298_7lh8.pdf http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-298_7lh8.pdf
- harshreality 12y agoEven the court's hint that combining multiple abstract ideas in a way that improves the state of the art of existing tech provides no clear distinction between what is and isn't patentable. Until the Court understands that composing mathematical expressions doesn't turn them into a different kind of thing, and writes clear rules one way or the other about what's patentable, nothing is really resolved.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> Therein lies the practical problem with the Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. [1]: Just about any new technology could be described as a "generic implementation" of an abstract idea This may be true in the domain of software patents (though not of technology generally.) OTOH, I don't think that's a problem with Alice so much as with many, if not all, software patents.
- codeka 12y ago(1) “to detect contact with the touch-sensitive display at a first predefined location corresponding to an unlock image”; (2) “to continuously move the unlock image on the touch-sensitive display in accordance with movement of the detected contact”; (3) “to unlock the hand held electronic device if the unlock image is moved from the first predefined location on the touch screen to a predefined unlock region on the touch-sensitive display”; and (4) “visual cues to communicate a direction of movement of the unlock image required to unlock the device.” It really sounds like Apple's lawyers are struggling to make "drag the image to unlock" sound more complicated than it really is.
- throwawaykf05 12y agoNo, Apple's lawyers are just trying to make it sound more concrete than Samsung's lawyers are trying to make it sound abstract. The key difference is complexity has no bearing on patentability, but abstractness does. To be fair, the claims do require all those elements, so it really is narrower than "moving an image to unlock a device". You could imagine a number of implementations of the latter that would not be covered by the claims.
- Rapzid 12y agoYes, but what aspect of it is novel? Images, touch screens, animation? None of it is new; "the conclusion that when a patent simply arranges old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform and yields no more than one would expect from such an arrangement, the combination is obvious." I would venture to say the patent NEVER should have been granted, even under pre-Alice conditions.
- throwawaykf05 12y agoParent was talking about complexity, I simply corrected them to say that it was about abstraction, and why it mattered. I was not making any point about the novelty or other quality metrics of the patent. However, now that you've brought it up, possibly outside of material science, every invention in the history of engineering falls under the description of "old elements doing old things producing expected results". Taking that quote out of context misses a very important question: was it obvious beforehand that such a result was desirable enough to put those elements together? The answer to your question of "what's novel" is, literally, the combination of elements and the difference it presents over prior art. However, at a higher level, what this quantitative approach misses is this: slide-to-unlock provides a convenient, usable and visually appealing way to unlock a phone. You'll note that these adjectives are some that Apple users regularly attribute to Apple products (since before the iPhone!). These qualities are arguably a primary reason for their success. Sure, when boiled down to their implementation, they don't look so impressive, yet few others are said to match Apple's level of polish. Why is that the case if such features are so easy to implement? Maybe because the feature itself is not obvious. Such qualitative aspects are not always apparent from looking at the claims alone.
- sopooneo 12y agoIs there going to be a big freeing up of lots of obvious patents in the late twenty-teens? I feel like a lot of this started in the late 90's, and I believe they only last twenty years. So will a lot of this just go away soon?
- throwawaykf05 12y agoMisleading headline, but on par for Ars reporting on patents. It makes it sound like Apple has been negatively affected due to the Alice ruling, whereas all that has happened is Samsung has made a new argument that they should be. There has been no response from the Judge yet.
- shmerl 12y agoI hope Samsung will succeed in knocking out these patents. They indeed shouldn't have been granted to begin with. Hopefully more knockouts will follow (not just for Apple, but for anyone who abused the patent system by using the "on the computer" trick).