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.
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.