Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

The verdict was a monumentally stupid decision and I hope it won't prove to be too harmful in the long run.<p>One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past technologies to produce newer, better ones.<p>Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process. None of these parties want touchscreen smartphones to become cheap commodities available to everybody - there's a lot less money to be made this way. Android is Google's attempt to commoditize the smartphone and is probably responsible for erasing tens of billions from the market caps of other companies, the flipside of which is that today tens of millions of people all over the world have access to technology that would otherwise not have.<p>This is why I think Android is ultimately a force for good and I hope it's simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle and that this verdict won't have a lasting impact.

These articles are getting a bit tiring.<p>&#62; On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display,” the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2<p>For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for <i>ideas</i>, you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.<p>Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non-novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.

Can someone explain to me (like I'm 5) exactly what, besides the general concept of list scrolling with bounce-back to indicate end of list reached, it was that Samsung copied from the 7,469,381 patent? The Apple fans here get pissed when someone argues that Apple is trying to patent an obvious "idea" and they claim that the general idea of bounce-back scrolling isn't patented, but instead it's a very specific implementation. And yet I've never heard an explanation of what the technical details are that specifically are patented. I've tried reading the patent, but my head exploded.<p>So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?<p>If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?

<i>...with a patent application granted after a year-long review by the patent office that apparently didn’t include watching this scene from 2002’s Minority Report, where Tom Cruise does all of those things and more with a spiffy 3D interface.</i><p>This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. <i>Star Trek</i> is not prior art.<p><i>Practical</i> is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.

The sad fact is that UI patents are even more bullshit than software patents. Does Apple have the legal high ground here? Yes, they have a patent on rubberbanding scrolling (among others). Arguments about 'prior art' and blah blah are pointless because they have been granted a patent on a UI design -- an <i>idea</i>, not an implementation, and not an invention. Yes, that's not what a patent is supposed to be, but that's what they've been given.<p>Was it a good idea? Yes. Should it be protected by a patent? No. I'm sorry, but <i>no</i> (and I say this as a UX designer).<p>Patents exist to incentivize effort. I would really like to hear someone argue that, without UI patent protection, Apple would have never bothered to implement rubberbanding scrolling. Even typing it sounds ridiculous.

This may be slightly off-topic, I'm not sure, but I was just reading Apple's patent on pinch-to-zoom[1], and in claim 8 (which is the one the jury were instructed to rule on) it says:<p><i>"determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation"</i><p>Now, I don't know how patents works, but on my Galaxy Nexus, you can scroll with two fingers, so this part about determining whether its a scroll or "gesture" by the number of touch points seems to work differently to what is described in the patent.<p>Does that mean the implementation in the Galaxy Nexus is non-infringing? I mean, if patents are supposed to protect the <i>implementation</i> of an idea, and the implementation is actually different then surely its not infringing?<p>Now admittedly I only tested a Galaxy Nexus, which is stock Android, so maybe Samsung made their version in TouchWiz different. Or maybe the implementation changed in later versions of Android, I'm not sure...<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915</a>

&#62; smartphones in which the objects on the screen roll around and bounce back like you’re spinning the Wheel of Fortune.<p>What I don't understand about this 'bounce back' feature is that here in Australia we have software based poker machines (Vegas style slot machines to the yanks out there) and they have had this bounce feature for decades.<p>Edit: To help people visualise, what I mean is the reels of the poker machine spin in one direction and when they finally stop spinning they do a very short bounce back in the other direction.

Either Gates foresaw the iPhone or... knew about the Simon:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon</a><p>Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.

Special effects are not prior art. Demonstrating a feature does not give you prior art neither.<p>Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.<p>Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.<p>So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.<p>This article is thus nonsense.