Apple's patent attack

Posted Mar 3, 2010 9:44 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: Apple's patent attack by rahvin
Parent article: Apple's patent attack

Or, as per Andrew Tridgell (see http://lwn.net/Articles/371044/ ), the community could get
together to try and create workarounds for those patents and leave Apple with no case.

Apple's patent attack

Posted Mar 8, 2010 12:25 UTC (Mon) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link] (1 responses)

Why though? I mean, take "#7,657,849: Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image." There are several physical devices where you have to move or slide a (physical) knob in order to unlock the device. This patent just describes the same thing, done in images on a computer screen. This is just physical affordances translated to the computer screen, in the same way that patenting "online" auctions is not novel because they have existed for centuries "offline".

Why should we have to deny ourselves obvious techniques like that? We should keep using them and get rid of obvious software patents instead.

Apple's patent attack

Posted Mar 8, 2010 13:32 UTC (Mon) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

The reasoning behind what he had to say was that proving a patent invalid is very hard and
expensive, even if it is trivial to see it.