Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 22:19 UTC (Mon) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
Parent article: Apple's touch-screen patent

Wait a sec Apple invents a really cool and useful new user interface technique. Even if the parts were all there, no one thought of putting them together like this before and there's no real evidence that anyone would have if Apple hadn't thought of it. Sure, touchpads have been able to detect multiple fingers before, but before Apple came along, the concern was using that information to suppress accidental input, not to do anything useful.

So Apple spens significant money in developing and marketing devices which use this invention. It turns out to be a hit. Now, everyone wants to copy them and make money without having to take the development costs and risks of being first in the market.

Isn't this exactly the sort of innovation the patent system is supposed to protect?

Now, okay, the current 20-year term is ridiculous when it comes to computing devices. But that's an implementation detail which could be reformed without throwing out the whole system.

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Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 22:50 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

actually, there are a LOT of people working on multitouch interfaces right now. Apple didn't invent a new technique, they just were the first ones to ship a high-volume product that uses it.

there may be specific details that they are the first ones to do, but things like 'a huristic to determine if the angle of the motion is steep enough to not be a horizontal scroll command' is hardly in that category.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 10, 2009 16:53 UTC (Tue) by bfeeney (guest, #6855) [Link] (2 responses)

Arguably they were the second. The LG Prada, a touch-screen phone, was
released three months before the iPhone was announced.

True, the iPhone uses some interesting touchscreen-based UI tricks (e.g.
pinch), but these two were invented by others, there was a video on youtube
showing an academic research demoing these techniques over two years before
the iPhone debuted.

Apple were the first to successfully create a product based on existing
techniques, not the first to invent those techniques. It's to Apple's credit
that they can exploit known techniques and the talent of their developers to
create great products; Microsoft and Google, despite employing similarly
skilled developers, have failed to create next-gen products (MS never got
beyond Windows+Office, Google has yet to get beyond Search+Ads).

The thing is though, ability to execute is not enough for a patent. It must
be new, innovative, and not at all obvious. None of these are true of that
scrolling
patent.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 12, 2009 14:59 UTC (Thu) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link] (1 responses)

"Arguably they were the second. The LG Prada, a touch-screen phone, was
released three months before the iPhone was announced."

Um, LG Prada was a touchscreen phone, but it was not MULTITOUCH. There has been several phones with touchscreens over the years, but none of them were multitouch.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Apr 20, 2010 14:41 UTC (Tue) by Desty (guest, #65496) [Link]

"Um, LG Prada was a touchscreen phone, but it was not MULTITOUCH. There has been several phones with touchscreens over the years, but none of them were multitouch."

So? The patent threat in question has no relevance to whether the phones are multitouch or not; you only need one finger to scroll in two-dimensions (or one, which is the issue at hand).

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 22:50 UTC (Mon) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] (2 responses)

And in the meanwhile, they build upon inventions and code of *many* other people. Both within and outside the FLOSS community. What mess this world would be in if every significant contributor originally involved in the software they build on (from 4.4BSD to KHTML) sought to patent their inventions? Really, they are standing on the shoulders of giants.

And the practical advantage of inventing things is being the first to the market, and this already paid off well for them, judging the popularity of the iPhone in some countries (or the near omnipresence of the iPod).

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 4, 2009 2:03 UTC (Wed) by bbb (guest, #49804) [Link] (1 responses)

You are confusing copyright and patents. Copyright is about the code, patents are about ideas.

KHTML was clearly not the first HTML rendering engine. Sir Tim was the first to do that, but then
HTML is just another markup language, so the prior art goes back way into the 60ies. KHTML is no
doubt a great piece of software (and very much non-trivial to write), but there is nothing overly
novel in it.

Similarly, 4.4 BSD in particular and Unix in general consisted mostly of ideas that were present in
one form or other in earlier (research) OSs.

What you are realizing is that producing open source software, even (L)GPL software, may help
parties that you do not agree with. But that is the price of free software.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 5, 2009 12:33 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I think the original poster meant patents for the innovations made by those teams, not for the specific products. I don't know much about KHTML, but BSD teams did invent a lot of things: examples [pdf]. "Method and apparatus for paging main memory to disk..."

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 23:04 UTC (Mon) by kune (guest, #172) [Link] (2 responses)

Patents give an exclusive right to an invention -- not the combination of things. Copyright and design patents are probably the better tools to cover such combinations.

Apple has surely patent exchange agreements with Microsoft and IBM. But even with those the iPhone will violate at least a dozen patents of third parties.

Assume that you own a company that has actual products and a patent violated by Apple. You will probably not risk to claim your rights with Apple, because your products will certainly violate some Apple patents. At least it will cost you millions to clarify the situation.

This leaves only two other types of companies: Companies with patents and no products and Companies with a product and no patents. The first type are nowadays called patent trolls. I'm not sure how we want to call the second type: patent losers maybe.

Free Software Developers will have to do without a patent if they are notified about it. A good example are specific bytecodes used for hinting of Truetype fonts, which is covered by Apple patents. Look here:

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Interestingly Freetype helped Apple to find new licensees for their Patents from embedded vendors. Meanwhile on distributions that care about patents your desktop experience will be hampered, because they use autohinting instead of the carefully designed bytecode.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 3, 2009 0:00 UTC (Tue) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (1 responses)

Interestingly, according to FreeType's patent info, two of Apple's TrueType patents were filed on May 8, 1989 (and granted in Oct 1992). Per the term of patent rules, they should expire on May 8, 2009 (this year) - only a few months away. Wonder how much that helps FreeType.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 3, 2009 6:17 UTC (Tue) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

Not until October, actually since they still get the 17 years from grant.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 2, 2009 23:33 UTC (Mon) by ajross (guest, #4563) [Link]

and there's no real evidence that anyone would have if Apple hadn't thought of it
Oh, come on. Lieutenant Commander Data was using multitouch interfaces every week on my television two decades ago. Argue that Apple did it "better" if you want. But asserting that no one would ever thought of holding two fingers down at once (!) is just ridiculous.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 3, 2009 13:45 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

That's just silly. The wikipedia article on multitouch mentions the first gesture based multitouch product in 1982. Even the movie Minority Report that popularized multitouch and specifically the pinch gesture is from 2002, and at that time these interfaces were mainstream enough that there were several to draw inspiration from.

The patent in question is filed in 2008. Even Microsoft Surface is from 2007, the same year as the iPhone, and both products probably was severals years in the making.

All this is irrelevant, of course, as if we are to believe our editor this so-called "multitouch" patent doesn't even touch multitouch (pun intended).

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 3, 2009 16:38 UTC (Tue) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

I think Steve Jobs has also seen Minority Report. Of course it matters what the patent application is actually for.

What it seems to apply to (IANAL) is a device that is able to translate imprecise gestures into precise commands, through a touch screen of comparatively small size. Multi-touch functionality is indeed not at all one of the claims, but it is (of course) mentioned as a related application.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 3, 2009 19:20 UTC (Tue) by gregwilkins (guest, #515) [Link]

Maybe the producers of the movie Minority Report should be given a patent for interfaces that use multi pointers???

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 4, 2009 2:28 UTC (Wed) by DonDiego (guest, #24141) [Link] (1 responses)

1) Has anybody seen FingerWorks keyboards in action? They did all of this and more many years ago. They have used multitouch gestures many years before Apple. Apple bought the company, now they use the same technology. So Apple invented this? I don't think so...

2) The 20 year term is not an implementation detail. If you look at things like the TRIPS agreement, patents can never last less than 20 years, unless major changes are undertaken in the judicial system and international treaties. What you call an implementation detail is more like a rewrite from scratch.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 12, 2009 20:28 UTC (Thu) by ecloud (guest, #56624) [Link]

Did you not know that Apple bought FingerWorks? Hmm wonder why they did that...

For some reason the touch controller chip is made by Broadcom. But as far as I know, Apple is the only one who buys the chip. It would seem there must have been some exclusive agreement. But I would think it should expire eventually since that's in Broadcom's best interest... they would like to sell such a hot chip to every cell phone mfgr.

Let me play devil's advocate for a minute...

Posted Feb 7, 2009 1:23 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

If Apple spent significant money inventing multitouch, I agree completely that anyone else who profits from the invention should pay Apple. Otherwise, we risk not having such inventions.

But I have a hard time believing the invention was costly. I'm sure Apple spent a fortune implementing it in a product, but that's the same money any copycat would have to spend. Actually determining that pinch gestures are a good way to do a UI was probably close to free.

Incidentally, this philosophy of significant investment is not present in current patent law, because patent law was not originally intended to protect investment. It was intended to encourage disclosure of the invention. So since there is no possible way for Apple to use multitouch while keeping it a secret, the original goals of patent law don't support any protection at all here.