This always struck me as an "On the computer" patent. The slide to unlock mechanism has been around since forever (think any bathroom stall or old wood screen door, etc). Just because it's on a computer screen shouldn't make it patentable.
I think these are different, though I don't necessarily think it deserves a patent.
In real life, slide to unlock pushes a bar in place to prevent the door from swinging open. You slide to unlock, so the bar is moved away from blocking the door.
"On the computer", it's making sure that you deliberately intended to use the device and it's not an accidental "pocket dialed" motion.
These are similar motions addressing different problems. In the physical world, you slide the bar into place to allow the bar to work for you. On the computer, you slide to express a deliberate intention.
Anyway, deserving of a patent or not, these seem like different mechanisms.
My last laptop had a spring loaded latch you would have to slide to the side to open the lid. You didn't use it to lock the lid, and it's purpose was to ensure you actually intended the lid to open.
He didn't have to. "My last laptop had a latch you had to slide to open," would have sufficed.
It is just like the iPhone. The patent is as absurd as would be 'rotate the door handle to enable the door to open (on a computer)' or 'toggle the light switch from the bottom position to the top position to turn on the lights (on a computer)' or 'slide the slider one way to increase the volume, and the other way to decrease the volume (on a computer)' or 'push the brake pedal to apply the braking mechanism (on a computer)'... etc^3
They could have just said, "My computer had latch that worked just like the iPhone's slider." And then silly people would come along to argue about the missing details. Can't win either way!
I think what's meant by that is, that the purpose is the same as that of the "slide to unlock" mechanism on the iPhone, rather than the implementation; i.e., both exist to make sure that the device isn't activated accidentally or unintentionally.
That argument could be applied to any digital concept that has a real life counterpart. "Window" for example, in the real world it's made of glass and keeps rain out. Does that mean the digital window is different enough to deserve a patent?
But more importantly, "slide to unlock" is essentially "swipe to unlock". The swipe zone is confined to a specific area, but it's still swiping. "Flicking" also works. Apple are trying to patent "swiping", which is ridiculous.
Just like "double click to unlock" would be equally absurd as a patent for unlocking a desktop PC. Changing the name to "double press to unlock" doesn't suddenly make it unique.
Zero? Most glass windows are rectangular; digital windows are generally rectangular. Your view of the outside world is permitted by the glass window; your view of your application is permitted by the digital window.
A computer windowing system does not model real windows, it models pieces of paper, spread across a desk.
On a desk cluttered with papers, you can see bits of some papers and others papers are hidden by other papers that are on top.
There is no way you should be able to patent such an obvious real world, real life experience, just because you were the first to take that real world experience and replicate it on a computer screen.
All you have done is modeled a real work experience.
No! A digital window is not a complex enough system. It would inevitably exist given the hardware allowance and capability to multi-task apps. It merely frames an application or any number of objects within the "parent window" which is your computer monitor.
Frames, boxes, panels, or "windows". A child could come up with the need for a digital version of a container if none existed. The name that catches on to describe that container is irrelevant.
In the digital world we need to be sensible about what would inevitably exist given the hardware allowance for such an obvious software feature. Slide to unlock is child's play.
When I walk up to my grandmothers back screen porch, I have to slide the bar to unlock the door to enter. of course this presupposes that someone before me slid it closed. In the case of the iPhone, the phone itself performs the locking. I don't see it as so different.
This is all mostly irrelevant though, and all of this discussion involves ex post facto analysis. The test for patentability is would a person skilled in the art come to the same solution without an inventive step - is the claimed invention what someone familiar with the art of human computer interaction do without doing something new. I would argue that the answer is no: there are many well known mechanisms for unlocking an electronic device (a pin, a password, a fingerprint, an identifying card or dongle, and so on) - using an analog of something that exists in the physical world such as a latch is not what someone skilled in the art WOULD do, there is some invention in taking the physical and bring it into the digital.
> a pin, a password, a fingerprint, an identifying card or dongle
Those are all examples of authentication. Not at all the purpose of the slide-to-open.
The earlier dumb-phones used to have a key-lock functionality where you would have to press a certain combination of keys in quick succession. Or just open a physical lid.
My primary point still stands - the test isn't whether physical analogs exist, it is whether someone WOULD be lead to reach the same solution to the problem. I'm not sure I agree that someone, at the time, would have been lead to the same solution when the existing art revolved around physical mechanisms such as buttons and switches, and did not involve interaction with the screen which the mechanisms has previously been in place to prevent.
Designers/developers other than and including those at Apple have used skeuomorphism for this very reason. You want people to know where to drop files, you show them an image of a floppy or a folder. Want to print, click the printer icon. Want to unlock your phone, slide it unlocked.
Using physical analogs has LONG been common.
The other day I used ProComm (yeah, I know, right!?). To close the connection, I clicked the phone icon and it animated showing the phone being placed back on the hook.
Also, let's not forget that Apple were not the first phone company to have a touch screen device that used the swipe to unlock process. They were just the first to patent, and the other company went bust...
If this were true, then the patent is obviously invalid. But since this has never been the argument in court, I'm guessing your assertion mostly false. If you have proof that there was another company who had a product with this idea before the priority date of the patent, then I'd love to see it.
You make a valid point, it is for a different purpose. I think many people aren't arguing the actual law, on Hacker News, I feel as if the commenters are expressing their expert opinions on what it should be. I'm not an expert, but I sure do have opinions. That purpose basically reduces to "on a computer, for computer reasons." If you put a bathroom slide lock on a chicken coop to keep the chickens from getting out, that's a different purpose, but it shouldn't be a new patent.
That being said, if you had to use a newly invented screw or slide to get that chicken coop mod to work, then that probably should be patentable. Similarly, on a phone, if you invented a new means of translating that motion into a slide, or other actual invention, than that probably should be valid. Using existing touch drivers to recognize an obvious real world motion, probably not.
You're looking at the process backwards. Just because latches exist does not mean that, at the time the patent was filed, it was obvious to use a latch analog to unlock a digital device. A person skilled in the art would NOT be lead directly to that solution, but one which is already know: a pin, password, fingerprint, keycard, heck even facial or voice recognition. The test is not "did latches already exist" but "is it obvious to use them in the method claimed, as the time of application", and I would strongly argue that it is not, without some evidence to support the contrary.
I say this as someone who has worked as a patent examiner and understand the law (not the US law exactly, but they're quite similar world wide).
Does it matter, when there is so much prior art that is more relevant?
The first time I saw it was on the Neonode phone, several years prior to Apple's patent. They were Windows CE based if I remembers correctly, and very proud of their UI. You can probably still find movies on Youtube.
That seems like a difference without a distinction to me.
You slide to unlock to open a door. You slide to unlock to open your phone (or rather the "door" blocking you from accessing the content in the phone). Seems quite similar to me.
In hindsight, yes, but the fact a solution is simple does not mean that it isn't inventive. There is the possibility of invention in the use of technology from one field in another unrelated field.
If intention mattered, then couldn't you patent anythinga again, but with a new intention? I'd guess that many "on the computer" or "with the Internet" will have arguably different intentions.
Minor nitpick: The ruling court was not "the German Supreme Court" (which there is no single direct equivalent - often the term is used for the Bundesverfassungsgericht but that's problematic on many levels). The court was the Bundesgerichtshof which is the highest court for civil cases. Best is the avoid the term "Supreme Court" at all when talking about the German court system.
The Bundesgerichtshof is also Supreme Court for criminal cases.
The phrase "Supreme Court" is indeed problematic, since we have quite a few of them (administrative law, labor law, finance law, social law, plus BGH and BVerfG), but I think it's okay to call the Bundesgerichtshof so.
More okay than calling our Federal Constitutional Court "Supreme Court", at least, since generally speaking the Constitutional Court is not "above" the other courts.
I would be happy with calling it "a German supreme court" (which is maybe misleading but technically correct). The phrasing "the German Supreme Court" implies that there is only one and it's somewhat comparable to the US Supreme Court which are both wrong assumptions.
> The phrase "Supreme Court" is indeed problematic, since we have quite a few of them
The same thing is true in the United States. It's a term that can mean a few different things on the state level, depending on which state you're talking about.
As a casual reader, then I am happy that they used Supreme Court. I don't want to know more about the German legal system to know that this could possibly be the highest court for such cases.
I always smile seeing long German words. I just imagine some fellow American being in a public setting and having to attempt to pronounce the word. I am a horrible speller and I feel I would be so much worst if I had to spell German words.
Well, long German words are just contractions, so a misspelling of 'Bundesverfassungsgericht' would be 'Bundes verfassungs gericht' which roughly would be 'federal constitutional court'. So if you'd like to know how it feels spelling in this style, just try spelling federalconstitutionalcourt. In English contractions like that are rare and sound weird when pronounced, but in German there is a sort of rhythm to it that makes it fit and not sound much different (if at all) from if they were not contracted.
> In English contractions like that are rare and sound weird when pronounced,
English does exactly the same: "3-year mandatory contract" is pronounced as a single word. It is just a matter of writing convention.
«English word chains such as _child labour law_ may count as well, because it is merely an orthographic convention to write them as isolated words. Grammatically and phonetically they behave like one word (stress on the first syllable, plural morpheme at the end).»
Cool thanks, always nice to have some theory behind it. When I pronounced 'federalconstitutionalcourt' I did it like I imagined a CNN news reader would pronounce it, with big emphasis on each word. When I try as you say with stress on the first syllable it does sound more like one word, not so awkward at all.
Not to get too far off-topic, but the mitigating factor is that German has quite regular pronunciation. As soon as you hear a new word you likely know exactly how it's spelled.
German used to be more like that buta spelling reform in 1996 fixed many of these issues. All my spelling grades got significantly better (less terrible) once that happened.
In Germany, if a Youtube video isn't available - it shows that the video isn't available due to an organization named GEMA. I wondered what GEMA was and promptly searched to find out this. Sigh!
> Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte
Even the so called "good" software patents have a lot of the same elements as this bad patent. The problem is, most people aren't going to bother to read the claims of those patents and try to understand what the concepts claimed really are.
I have been involved with several patent suits (on both litigant side and defendant side) and as an engineer, I have to admit that there has never been a time when I haven't read the statement of the problem the patent says its going to solve, and not thought of the solution myself, way before the patent presents the same solution. In other words, every single litigated software patent I've been asked to review has been BLATANTLY obvious. And I'm no genius. I've talked to other engineers and they've all said the same thing. I just explain a problem domain, and they usually give a solution that comes under the claims of the litigated patent.
This is not to say that there aren't non-obvious software patents. Its just that those never seem to get litigated, because they aren't some obvious concept sitting at the nexus of a well-trodden path the industry is following.
I can't describe or link the specific patents I've been involved with, for obvious reasons, but the stuff I'm talking about sounds like things as follows:
"Receiving at a server a data packet, the data packet comprising a user identification number and a merchant identification number
retrieving a record in a database referenced by the user identification number
determining if the record in the database contains an authorization entry corresponding to the merchant identification number
responsive to the record in the database containing an authorization entry corresponding to the merchant identification number, transmitting a second data packet, containing an authorization token, to a server operated by a merchant."
I am not lying to you. This is how stupid each of these patents have been. Sometimes even worse.
Nobody not involved in these litigations understands how bad it is. And this is coming from someone who has made at least enough money to buy several luxury cars, providing consulting services to this particular legal industry. In other words, I have a financial interest in things remaining this fucked up. And I'm still telling you, its really fucked up.
Yup. Every single software patent basically boils down to "make the computer do X." Software simply shouldn't be patentable just like any other artwork. I can't patent my short story (because I'd be patenting "using words on paper to tell a story"), why should I be able to patent my program ("using words in a text file, make the computer do something")? The absurdity of American (and other countries') law is just fucking sickening.
Yes, I think this is the essence of the problem: the PTO and the courts have a very hard time distinguishing a nonobvious invention from an easy problem that merely happens to have been solved for the first time (as far as the PTO can tell).
I have occasionally seen a software patent with an idea that was not obvious at least to me, but I haven't seen many of them. Most have been as you describe: once the requirements are understood, there is no difficulty designing a system to satisfy them. It's just that (again, as far as the PTO can tell) nobody has come across that particular set of requirements before.
I think that in order to litigate a patent, the patentee should be required to provide evidence that their invention was nonobvious. The PTO is poorly equipped and structured to do a good job filtering out obvious "inventions" (for example, examiners have no incentives to do so); and yet, as things stand, the courts defer to the PTO on this question. I think the rules should be changed so the court has to be persuaded of the nonobviousness of the patent before the suit can proceed. That would be a potentially adversarial proceeding itself, in that the defendant would be allowed to argue that the invention is obvious, but the primary burden of proof would be on the patentee.
One could argue that this would put on the court a job that should belong to the PTO, and that argument has some merit, but here's a counterargument. It's often hard to tell, when a patent application is filed, how much the potential patent will be worth. Delaying part of the effort involved in evaluating the patent until such a time that the patentee has actually decided to litigate makes some economic sense. More to the point, it is often easier to show nonobviousness once some time has passed. One of the Graham factors [0] that can be used as evidence of nonobviousness is commercial success of a product based on the invention. Such success can't have occurred yet at the time the patent application is filed.
The change I am proposing would constitute a massive shift in the balance of power between patentees and alleged infringers, and a lot of oxen would be gored; I'm well aware of that. A lot of companies would see the putative value of their patent portfolios drop precipitously. Against that, they would have to worry a lot less about being sued.
I'd be interested in your take on this, as you've been inside the system a lot more than I have.
How would one present evidence of non-obviousness? It seems very difficult once a solution is presented. Its a bit easier to prove that something was obvious at the time of invention. One sure sign is if there are many cases of independent invention.
I think therefore that one simple way to ameliorate some of the abuse in patents is to give defendants an independent invention defense. What I mean is, if you can prove that you had no access to the patent holders patent or idea, and that you came up with it independently, then, that should be taken as a factor showing that the solution may have been obvious. If additional companies similarly show that they also independently came up with the same solution, then that is additional strong evidence of obviousness that should make the finding of obviousness more likely.
Right now, independent invention is not a defense. And multiple independent invention isn't even considered evidence of obviousness.
As embarrassing as slide to unlock is for the US patent system, its actually not the more egregious case of obvious things being patented. If you look at what is being filed in social networking patents, database patents, and cloud computing, any person here on Hacker News would be shocked.
The problem is, the USPTO examiners are NOT shocked. Have you ever talked to one of them? The quality of their technical knowledge is EXTREMELY poor. EXTREMELY. The USPTO seems to have recruited third-rate PHDs and other "technical" folk from developing nations, and put them into examiner positions based on their degrees alone. I have seen many many office actions from USPTO examiners where it was obvious that the examiner understood absolutely nothing of the patent he was reading, so he just did a Google search on the key words in the abstract and pasted the paragraphs he found into a response. The office actions are not even coherent, much less effective.
Don't take my word for it. Do a search for a patent that has some technical phrase you are familiar with ... say Markov Chains. Then take the patent you find and go to the USPTO Public PAIR database. Pull up that patent application. Go into the record of documents for that patent and read the first office action that was sent by the USPTO for that patent ... I will bet you 10 to 1, the office action will be utter gibberish that makes no sense. I'm willing to give you those odds, because out of the hundreds of office actions I have seen, perhaps less than ten have made any sense ... where the examiner had any clue at all.
Programmers don't realize this basic problem.
Every patent lawyer understands it. And they are embarrassed by it. They are embarrassed because they are making tens of thousands of dollars writing oppositions to documents written by what are essentially technically retarded individuals. This is not a disputed fact. Go put some beers into a patent prosecution attorney, and let him start talking to you about office actions he has received from the USPTO.
These office actions usually don't get seen by the public. They only get surfaced in big litigations ... and when they are surfaced, all involved are deeply embarrassed. Why? Because both plaintiff's and defendant's attorneys don't want to come out and say that they are making a living in a system that is fundamentally broken at its very core.
What does it mean if the USPTO patent examiners don't actually do any examination worth a damn at all? Has the American public been made aware of this blatantly obvious and true fact? No. They continue to think that the USPTO is actually serving a useful examination function. That is a complete and utter lie. And its a lie out in the open. Just open up the prosecution history for any technical patent as I asked earlier. ANY TECHNICAL PATENT.
The problem with the independent invention defense is, how can you ever prove you had not seen the patent? One could read a patent, then change terms, rearrange parts, etc. until it was not at all clear that one's own expression of the idea actually came from the patent. I realize an independent invention defense seems natural to us as engineers, since we independently (re-)invent things all the time, but I don't see how it would work as a matter of law.
And people wouldn't necessarily have to have read the actual patent in order to abuse such a defense -- they might just have seen the product that incorporates the invention.
As for how one would present evidence of non-obviousness, if you follow the link I gave, you'll see three kinds of evidence which can support such a claim, according to the Supreme Court: commercial success; long-felt but unsolved needs; and failure of others. I think what these all have in common is clear: you need to show that others have had an incentive to try to solve the same problem, but haven't done so. That would constitute evidence that the solution wasn't obvious.
> It[']s a bit easier to prove that something was obvious at the time of invention. One sure sign is if there are many cases of independent invention.
How would this work? If the independent inventions occurred before the patent application, they're already prior art; if they occur after, then once again, we can't know they were truly independent.
I already knew the examiners were pretty bad, though maybe I didn't realize quite how bad.
How did you get started in this kind of consulting?
There is an independent invention defense of sort in Copyright Law. A Copyright plaintiff actually has to prove that the defendant had access to the material and was inspired by it (or copied it).
BTW, substantial similarity acts as defacto evidence of copying in Copyright. So, you might claim you didn't copy Michael Jackson's Thriller because you were on a desert island and never heard it, but if your rendition is really similar to the original, then that similarity is itself proof sufficient that you are lying. Additional evidence isn't necessary.
In software things could work differently. I think one way the defense would be most aptly used is in cases like the notorious podcasting patent. There you could see literally hundreds of independently written podcasting style applications, where literally every one of the engineers writing podcast software were willing to testify that they'd never seen the podcast patent or heard of the company that wrote the patent. I think courts can take that as strong evidence of obviousness, as all of those engineers perjuring themselves is unlikely, and the simultaneous widespread invention of the same thing means its probably an inevitable and obvious advance.
I don't want to go into too much detail about how I started my current patent work, because this account is anonymous. I'll just say, though, in this business credentials mean everything and actual practical expertise means nothing. I have a law degree from a top ten law school in the US, in addition to an engineering degree from an Ivy league school, and over a decade of engineering experience at brand name US tech companies. My resume looks good. That's why I get work. It has nothing to do with my skills as an engineer. I know how to communicate technical ideas, read legal documents, and look confident in my advice to people for whom appearances matter.
Any bright engineer can learn to do what I do in less time than it would take to master something technical (like machine learning), but you'll need paper credentials to get in this business. That's why I don't recommend this line of work to people that prize capabilities over paper.
But that's exactly the difference between copyright and patent: copyright covers the expression of an idea, but patent covers the idea itself. J.K. Rowling can't sue me if I write a book that's just like Harry Potter except that the places, characters, and storyline are all different, and all that remains is that it's a book about kids growing up learning about magic at a weird school. On the other hand, if it were possible to patent such an idea, and Rowling had done so, then it wouldn't matter that I had changed all those things: the idea would still be there.
So for copyright, the absence of substantial similarity is a straightforward defense, but it couldn't work that way for patents.
I agree about the podcasting patent. There are a few cases where so many people have independently invented the thing that its obviousness is overwhelmingly clear. I don't know how often that happens, though.
Well, from your perspective it may happen frequently, because those are the cases you get called in on. That doesn't necessarily mean that these cases represent a large fraction of the obvious patents that have been issued and that we would like to see invalidated. There are an awful lot of those, as you yourself have pointed out.
Thank you for your comments, though. It has been interesting hearing about your experiences, and I think we agree on many points.
I think this should apply generally to touch screen gestures. Once someone invented a good enough touch screen display(capacitive) , the gestures are not that big of a step.
All Apple did was to acquire the inventors of the capacitive touch - and worked a bit on the UI. And while it's valuable to be the first company who recognize the importance of a capacitive touch screen - that isn't a basis for a patent - and Apple did get enough benefits anyway.
Making UI elements big enough to be minimally tappable wasn't really that big of a step. Yet Windows Mobile was horrible in that regard.
While I don't agree with awarding strong protection via IP to UI patterns such as the "slide to unlock", I think we should acknowledge the merits which exist in these "leaps" forward. If everything was that obvious, why all of the other mobile UI alternatives started to look "pre-historic" in a span of a few months?
One reason why we award patents is so that inventors won't have an incentive to keep trade secrets locked away forever. Touchscreen gestures are trivial to implement, with no conceivable trade secrets that wouldn't become obvious to anyone skilled in the art after a few minutes' thought. So that's not a good reason in this case.
Another reason is to incentivize innovation by awarding a temporary monopoly. Apple will continue to make more money from the iPhone and iPad than many entire countries' GDP, patents or no patents. They don't need any additional artificial "incentives."
Another reason is to reward those who finance expensive long-term R&D efforts. No lengthy R&D efforts are involved in touchscreen gesture processing. Again, the market is doing just fine at rewarding Apple on its own.
So what exactly do we gain, as a society, by awarding patents on things like slide-to-unlock? Exactly how is the "progress of science and the useful arts" being promoted?
I strongly disagree with the statement that there is no lengthy R&D involved with gesture processing. If it was so trivial, why did Apple have to acquire a company working in that field? Getting UX right is fucking hard and takes a lot of effort -- just look at the touchscreens of an average camera... If it was so easy, why do most companies get it so wrong?
Of course, that doesn't mean that Apple should be able to patent it. Good UX is composed of many small things, each too small too patent.
> If it was so trivial, why did Apple have to acquire a company working in that field?
Why do big companies get outfoxed regularly by 10 man startups? The reality is that most large corporate entities are inefficient and acquisitions aren't usually for talent, but for other purposes: buying before a competitor does, buying the patents and firing the talent, burning through a cash reserve that, if left alone, will be given up as dividends,etc.
You have never worked at the raw level of getting a touch screen controller (especially the older ones, todays once are much nicer) working.
The work Apple did to get first generation capacitive touch screens working is impressive, I say this with no more experience than having had to get later generation cap touch solutions working.
The amount of clean up you have to do on the signal, the sheer garbage you get through, and then to figure out what gestures actually work reliably?
I won't comment of if it is patentable or not, but it sure as hell is not trivial. Getting cap touch working involves close collaboration between the EE, ME, Firmware, Software, and UX teams.
The nice little world of touch points software developers get access to at the highest layer is supported by a massive effort beneath.
I ask you kindly that, if you want to answer, please do so to myself and my words, and not to a straw man. You'll gain nothing from discussions if you assume other people's participation instead of actually reading it.
I said, as explicitly as I could, that I don't agree with strong protection through IP to slide to unlock.
I think most patents are silly, but isn't the system working exactly as it should here? The patent was awarded, then it was challenged in court and overturned for many of the reasons you cite.
If we were a lot more thorough about awarding patents wouldn't that increase the overall cost to society to exhaustively audit patents from the outset, instead of auditing only the small subset that's troublesome enough to be challenged in court?
Isn't that sorta like saying we should just prosecute everyone regardless of evidence, and let courts sift out the real problems? I doubt that's "exactly as it should" be.
The patent office is made out of experts which should have a much higher expertise in judging if an patent is valid than a judge. It make no sense to give the patent office the vast majority of "easy" patents, and then give the non-experts judges the issue of all the troublesome "hard" patents which has been challenged.
Like the bounce-back effect patent, which is even sillier than the slide-to-unlock one. The main problem by far is still having these patents granted in the first place, and then either having multiple companies getting harassed by others to pay them money for the bogus patents (like what Microsoft does) or spend millions and years in Courts to resolve just a handful of them.
Sounds like a terribly inefficient system to me. Not to mention that because the US Patent Office has such low standards for accepting patents, that also means lawyers will file just about any crazy idea they can come up with, backing up the USPTO for 4 years.
If the USPTO took a stance to reject 80% of the filed patents while still charging them a few thousand dollars per application, I think the quality of the patents would significantly improve in a few years. so if there are some good patents in there, perhaps from a startup, that startup will have to wait 4 years to get it. That sounds like ages for a small company and it could be long dead by then, especially if it doesn't get funding because of the lack of an approved patent.
I remember watching the original iPhone presentation thinking "this looks OK but touch screens suck" then having the UI-design-oriented part of my brain completely blown by the bounce-back effect. No other touch screen software worked that way and it is hard to think of something physical that bounces like that (unlike the swipe-to-open metaphor).
I am not a lawyer and I have no opinion on the validity of the bounce-back patent (although the German court rejected it based of publication date rather than merit), but from a business point of view I can see why Apple was so keen to hog bounce-back for itself. I didn't buy a iPhone for a few years but they won a customer that day.
It wasn't novel though. I had personally implemented a drag-to-scroll interface with momentum and bounce-back for a Web 1.0 startup in 1999. Just substitute mouse pointer for finger and it's exactly the interface that mobile devices use today.
I can't think it even remotely conceivable that I invented that. It's just one of the first things you think of.
Good examples, but I would be willing to bet that at some point all those things have been covered by different patents. The company who patented a chair rocking mechanism would not be affected by the inventor who made a door with soft springs (although I have never seen a door that works exactly that way).
The difference is that those patents would cover the specific mechanisms by which the bounce-back effect was achieved. In this case, the Apple patent covered the bounce-back effect itself, without regard to the code or other specific mechanisms used to achieve the effect.
"I would be willing to bet that at some point all those things have been covered by different patents"
I agree, but whether they have been covered and whether they should have been are very different things.
"The company who patented a chair rocking mechanism would not be affected by the inventor who made a door with soft springs"
Probably not, given how messed up the patent system is, but if you read Thomas Jefferson's writings on patents, it isn't too hard to imagine him spinning furiously in his grave at where the patent system is now because of this sort of thing.
What the founding fathers considered "non-obvious" was a vastly higher standard than what is passed off as non-obvious these days (these days it seems like most people who talk about patents consider "non-obvious" to be about the equivalent of "could someone have come up with in in a minute off the top of his or her head?", but for Jefferson, et al, these "X but on Y" patents would have been considered laughably weak and extremely damaging to the public good.
This is long overdue. As is invalidation of the bounceback patent. Like so many of "designy" patents, there's quite a bit of prior art.
The whole "but on a computer" patent needs to go away. "Sliding a latch from one position to another to open but on a computer" should not be patentable.
Well in EU some algorithm is surely patentable if it has a "technical effect", for instance if you can move a robot arms consuming less energy or producing less waste materials, it must have a physical impact on something. Quote: "the method didn’t reach a level of sophistication needed to award patent protection", just this, lol at patenting it in the first place.
I feel it would be easy for Apple to argue that is does have a physical effect - it makes it easier to access a locked phone than having to enter a pin, or one of the many other methods of unlocking electronic devices.
It is not saving battery, it is not producing less waste.. so no, it has no physical effect. As an algorithm it cannot be patented in the EU, and code-wise in EU it's the only thing you can try to patent.
It's making life easier for the user... this is one of the primary things that patents are here for, inventions which make life easier. And it's certainly not what would be considered "an algorithm" by any patent office - it has user interaction, in involves hardware, it is clearly not just a mere algorithm.
Judges on Tuesday said that the iPhone maker’s method didn’t reach a level of sophistication needed to award patent protection
Just so I understand what happened, can someone summarize German patent law? Is it the same 3 tests as in the U.S., i.e. statutory, novel, non-obvious?
I'm waiting for a future where we can ask a "blank" AI to come up with trivial solutions to new problems, so that we can just invalidate such stupid patents. If the AI can invent it, it is not worthy of a patent.
Simple != trivial. The art is in designing a high quality experience, not in solving a programming problem.
Look and feel is a very real and valuable thing in the marketplace. The big differentiator between Apple and everyone else is that Apple pays attention to - or used to pay attention to, anyway - the user experience,
The code behind the experience was always secondary to that. Users don't care about it, and they're completely fine with not caring.
I agree that there are limits, especially when there are patents on rounded corners or specific English words.
But generally if there's innovation in the user experience on a screen it's potentially patentable, even if the code behind it is trivially simple.
AIs have no concept of user experience, so it's unlikely you'd get much of marketable value out of one.
It's more that AI can't be taught aesthetics since for most people it's a "I know it when I see it" sort of thing. Very few people can turn that into a talent like Scott Forestall. We're probably at least a century away before we can get an AI to work at that level of abstraction.
I could bang out an AI that files patent applications right now. All I have to do is use neural networks on existing computer patents and it would probably sound impressive to the patent office.
I don't get how this was a patent to begin with. The door in my room has a "slide-to-unlock" lock that dates back 50 years. Surely Apple did not invent this.
I think it is a mistake to suggest that slide to unlock on a touchscreen and a sliding bolt are the same concepts. The important thing as I see it is a way to change a touchscreen from a state of "unresponsive to input" to a state of "responsive to input" by requiring a very restricted set of inputs to be entered. "Swipe to unlock" is just one (pretty good) definition of this restricted set of inputs. I think this is quite conceptually different from a physical lock unlocking a physical door.
Don't know the technical terms but how is "unresponsive to input" when you can interact with the lock screen. For example swiping/expanding notifications, change songs, etc. For me "unresponsive to input" to a state of "responsive to input" would be the power/home button let's you interact with the screen.
Pretty obvious this was going to happen. Pretty much the only software that is patentable in Germany is stuff that controls physical machinery of sorts (embedded break controls or something). Control of forces of nature to cause an expected effect is what qualifies. "Technizität" (technical character) is what it's called. It's one of the four criteria. The other being it has to be "new" (no prior publications including your own), marketable (no clear cut criteria) and an invention (an "imaginary expert in the field" can't come up with it, also pretty debatable).
I don't think "obvious in retrospect" is a fair criterion for invalidating a patent. Those are actually the most valuable patents. The safety pin and the catseye (road reflector) were both patented and made fortunes for their inventors (or in the case of the safety pin the company that bought the patent).
Now arguing the whole patent system is fucked up is perfectly fair but we shouldn't celebrate a legitimate, non-abstract patent being incorrectly invalidated.
I should have been clearer. Their definition of "sophistication" is arbitrary and effectively amounts to "obvious in retrospect". Safety pins and catseyes aren't more "sophisticated". The inventor of the safety pin made a working version in a few minutes. Differentiating an intentional slide gesture is actually much more sophisticated than bending a wire or mounting a reflector on a piece of rubber.
does the patent say it actually has to work? XD just saying...
i'm always in two minds about this but i lean very heavily towards culling people who think this sort of thing should be patentable. i think it would benefit everyone for the entire future mostly...
Ha! I just used a cheapo off the shelf website that featured slide to unlock on web forms for spam prevention. Not posting the link because I don't want Apple breathing down their neck.
I'd say "good riddance to bad rubbish" but this is just one of a million nonsense patents that are uselessly being applied to transfer wealth upwards. Why, humanity, why? Why do we continue to hang ourselves with these thin fictions?
Our property concepts are fundamentally broken. Copyrights, patents and especially real estate are all flawed concepts that privilege their owners far more than they should. But we allow them to persist for centuries; then we wonder why society is fucked and some people have all the wealth.
Arbitrary titles granted to someone that allows them to control a piece of the Earth in perpetuity? That doesn't strike you as a recipe for disaster and inequality?
For a full answer, try: "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George.
I feel we're mixing too things now. There's control of land, and there's ownership of land. Control of land is mainly obtained by conquest and occupation, that's to say physical dominance. Titles are usually obtained by persons that attained this dominance, so that's hardly arbitrary (nor very perpetual though that may often seem so). This is nature.
Ownership is the fun stuff where you pay money/goods to the previous owner (who might very well be (a descendant of) an oppressor). In exchange for rights of exploitation (i.e. living on it).
It's not the titles that make real estate unfair, it's nature itself. That's why an egalitarian society can not be like nature but must instead be governed by rules and regulations. This is why democratic socialism is superior to libertarian capitalism (at least when we're talking equality and 'fairness').
Patents lower the playing field. Without them even if you develop an amazing product a big manufacturer can rip off your design and sell it cheaper than you can.
The biggest problem with the patent system is trolling. Which is actually a wealth transfer downwards. Smalltime inventors and lawyers extort F500 companies.
The vast majority of patent defendants are small companies. Startups are much more likely to be slammed by a bogus patent suit than to get a patent that proves lucrative.
Patents effectively never level the playing field. Trolls and big companies eliminating competition are the key clients and trolls are mostly multi-million or billion dollar companies like IV and rich scammers like Spangenberg, Hyatt, and Lemelson.
Trolling itself is one of the few parts of the system that sometimes targets big companies and therefore an essential font of reform ideas. Without trolling, big companies would slam startups even harder with patents. The needed reform is to limit patents and keep them away from software, business, finance, 3d-printing, CNC, robotics, and other new tech the patent lawyers are trying to destroy.
No, this is not one of a million nonsense patents, it one of a handful of patents which were close enough to be on the line between valid and invalid, and the decision fell on one side of the line. The vast majority of patents, even from Apple, are completely valid, and never see any time in court because they are valid. I hate this meme that patents are all awful because sometimes they are found invalid. Do some research, learn about the system, then talk about it because you clearly have no idea how successful the patent system is, and the benefits it provides to you.
Patents are awful because even when they are valid, they are terrible at providing social benefits and are much more effective at securing wealth for the upper classes. This is why they have been around so long, and why those upper classes are fighting so hard to strengthen their reach (TPP, etc). Patents are not the most effective way to encourage technology development, and they should certainly not be allowed to devolve into corporate property that is used to flog money from the rest of us.
