“All the cited apple patents on multitouch gestures appear to be filed since Jeff Han's TED talk”
FingerWorks, a pioneer in multitouch gestures, filed for (and received) boatloads of patents. Apple bought FingerWorks in 2005, inheriting its intellectual property. The scientists came to work for Apple and continued to file patents for the research that they had done since the nineties.
“In June 2005, FingerWorks officially announced they were no longer in business. The founders continued to file and process patents for their work through late 2007. And as of August 2008 they still filed patents for Apple, Inc.” [1]
Beyond that, we need to consider priority dates when determining when something was 'invented' when it comes to prior art.
Note the application referenced downthread (20060238520) is a continuation of a 2004 filing, itself a continuation of a 2001 filing, itself a divisional of a 1999 filing which claimed priority based on a provisional 1998 filing. [1]
So to challenge that application, you'd need to find art circa at least 1998. And even then you have to consider the USPTO's (now legacy) practice of recognizing date of invention, rather than filing. Which means you may have to find art even older than 1998, to get that bit invalidated.
[1] Patent applications are rarely straightforward affairs. The process of mapping what we colloquially think of as "an invention" (awesome new widget) to patent applications often entails the creation of a family of patent applications. It gets very messy, very quickly.
No, it expires based on when it was granted not the priority date. However, different parts of the same patent can have different priority dates if they where not in the initial filing. So, some prior art after 1998 may still be relevant.
This is why a lot of patent trolls would drag their feet as long as possible in the hopes that someone would actually research, prototype and bring to market what they've "invented". These so-called submarine patents then surface to sink the company who's done all the work.
It's my understanding that the USPTO is trying to limit the ability of companies to do this though.
Wayne Westerman is one of the identified Inventors. Published papers/articles by the inventors can count against their being able to get a patent, dependent upon the character of the disclosure (did they tell a couple friends or write a widely circulated article? etc) and how long before the filing that disclosure was made.
Since this appears to be dated after the priority date, I don't think it would pose any problem, even if it were published in a professional journal.
Software patents like this should never be granted. Any kind of gesture we naturally do in the real world quite obviously can be rendered in software. There's nothing "invented" here. Microsoft was similarly granted a patent for grasping an object in 3d. If every possible human action can be granted a software patent, then computing in the future is going to become awfully ridiculous.
I was curious about the difference between Han's technology, and the iPhone's. In Han's words, his device is pressure based: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZv1nBM8zsI (he also believes that the scale of the devices puts them into completely different categories.) I read up a little on the differences between pressure and capacitive devices, and one that stands out is that capacitive surfaces can emit more light, because less layers are required beneath the glass.
(Edit: I meant to post this as a reply to the grandparent comment, not the parent post about FingerWorks. Whoops.)
Hans device is light based and makes use of frustrated total internal reflection of infra-red light being shone into the edge of the touch surface that is then picked up by an infra-red camera that is sitting next to a projector underneath the table.
There is a big difference between dreaming about something and actually doing it. For example, everyone knew what a flying machine was, centuries before it was invented. Clearly this doesn't mean that creating that machine was actually obvious. With computing it is similar, there are lots of "inventions" dreamed about by science fiction writers that are simply not possible today. When such innovations become possible, they will need to be protected.
And yet the wright brothers were not granted a patent on "things that fly". They were granted patents on some specific machines they invented that could fly. But the patents were about the mechanical machines themselves. If someone else had come along and invented a totally different means of flying (like a helicopter) they would not have been infringing on their patents. This is a patent on "things that fly".
Apples patents are clearly not patents on "smartphones with a rectangular touchscreen and no external UI buttons", but they cover many inventions that make such a phone usable.
Likewise, apart from a totally different kind of flying machine like a helicopter, there probably isn't any better method of controlling an airplane than the method covered by Wrights patents (since it specifically does not exclude non-wing warping control designs), which is why the basic mode of control is still in use today. So Wrights patents at the time might as well be called a patents on "things that fly". It was very difficult to make a controllable plane without violating the patent.
Likewise, unless you equip a phone with dedicated zoom controls, there probably isn't a better or more intuitive way of zooming than using pinch-to-zoom or double tapping.
> Apples patents are clearly not patents on "smartphones with a rectangular touchscreen and no external UI buttons", but they cover many inventions that make such a phone usable.
Actually, per my understanding, Apple's design patents are exactly that (if you throw in beveled corners). It's true, though, that those aren't the patents at issue in this thread.
Yes, but design patents are a different animal, and AFAIK much easier to work around. So if they changed just one aspect of the design (making it less likely to be confused), Apple would have a harder time enforcing it.
>When such innovations become possible, they will need to be protected.
The underlying implementation details should be protected, sure, but not the idea itself. Just because you're the first to successfully make a flying machine doesn't mean someone competing with you, implementing it in a different underlying way, shouldn't be able to make a flying machine.
Under that argument shouldn't the patents apply to the capacitive touch surfaces and not the gestures?
"Method for transportation by flying vehicle" is very different from "Construction method of flux capacitor that provides enough energy to power flying vehicles". The first is obvious and there is prior art even if people could not build it. The concepts of pinch-to-zoom or slide-to-unlock are obvious to even people without Phds in touch surface technologies.
Anything intuitive by definition should not be patentable.
A multi-touch screen, like a design for an airplane should be patentable. It actually takes serious R&D and discovers things that were not understood before. Obvious things you can do with multi-touch screen or airplane should not be patenable. Any programmer that had a multi-touch screen to play with would come up with pinch to zoom. Allowing pinch to zoom to be patented is like patenting aerial photography, an obvious use of an airplane.
I think the important point is that "obvious" has a very precise meaning for patents, and it's not what you think it means. . There was a great IAmA on reddit with a patent examiner that's worth reading: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ww982/iama_patent_e...
This needs many upvotes. That IAmA is rather worth reading, with the in-depth responses of the two patent examiners to questions. For example, I think most people here wouldn't know that the "obviousness" of a idea is determined by whether previous patents or prior art can be combined to produce that idea (and not by whether a professional in the field would judge it to be obvious, or any other standard). Furthermore, prior art can include products/art from anywhere in the world, patented or not.
Some great questions and comments there too. I like the one by futurespacetraveler, apparently also of HN, who said this:
---
The price we pay to incentivize an inventor to disclose their invention is with decades of protection from competition. For a utility patent, that's 20 years from the date of the patent grant. And we always pay the same price, regardless of the underlying value of the invention to our society. So whether you invent a new method of swinging in a swing or a new drug to fight cancer, we pay the same price to know how it works.
And I think that's one of the key perspectives that often gets overlooked. We are paying for knowledge. The inventor is supposed to have figured something out that even skilled practitioners in the art hadn't thought of. We are paying for the secret sauce, so to speak. I think sofware "inventions", for many of us skilled in the art, seem so obviously non-insightful that we can't believe society has paid for such "knowledge" with a patent. Many of us realize that we don't even need to read most software patents to learn how to do what it explains. We're paying for "I was here first", rather than "I finally solved the problem no one else could". Yet we pay the same price regardless. That's why the Defend Innovation site wants to limit software patent terms to 5 years. Patent protection should be proportional to the value of the invention. But I believe that should be true for any invention.
Patent protection should be proportional to the value of the invention
He was making sense up until that point. The value of patent protection to society is determined by the potential harm done to the progress of science and the useful arts that would result if the IP had been kept as a trade secret. In the case of pinch-and-zoom gestures the net benefit to society gained by allowing Apple to own the idea is demonstrably nonexistent.
Apple sold a hundred million iPhones before they ever set foot in a courtroom. Clearly patent protection was not necessary to allow them to recoup their investment a thousand times over. Meanwhile, the harm done to competition by granting them a 20-year monopoly on the basic UI paradigm is easily estimable in the trillions of dollars, if they succeed in enjoining Samsung and other manufacturers.
I believe the patent is for a specific implementation of identifying those intuitive gestures and generating corresponding user interface commands. That's what follows in the description of the algorithm and circuitry.
[0046] It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the invention as claimed.
The claims as-filed, sure.
But the USPTO doesn't generally update the published application to match the current document (including changed and struck claims) during the process.
So it's entirely possible that wording didn't survive.
In any event, it's hardly fair to judge a system based on the snapshot of a submission from before it had even gone through that system yet.
You can easily read all of that in the public PAIR database, it's not hard to find.
Btw the wording did indeed survive, the patent as it stands is sufficiently broad to cover all pinch-to-zoom implementations on any kind of touchscreen.
You're kidding right? Sure, I'll dig through the patent lists for a few hours digging up the hundreds of examples of patents that were creative new ideas for their time. Very little of them will be software patents.
But this isn't a discussion about patents like that. This is a discussion about patents being granted for ideas that are simply innovations and/or copies of pre-existing ideas. That's completely different.
Not every patent is of equal creativity, importance, and value.
I'm saying the patent was obvious before the fact because of prior art. Just because someone was the first to patent something doesn't mean that they can claim it was not obvious before their patent was issued.
If you had prior art that invalidates a patent it doesn't necessarily mean the owner of the patent owes you money.
FingerWorks, a pioneer in multitouch gestures, filed for (and received) boatloads of patents. Apple bought FingerWorks in 2005, inheriting its intellectual property. The scientists came to work for Apple and continued to file patents for the research that they had done since the nineties.
“In June 2005, FingerWorks officially announced they were no longer in business. The founders continued to file and process patents for their work through late 2007. And as of August 2008 they still filed patents for Apple, Inc.” [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks