Apple granted Patent for their Page Turn Animation

Wouldn't there be some significant issues with patenting a skeuomorphic design? Couldn't a physical book be used as a form of prior art? If this is not the case and anything that exists outside of the realm of computing can now be patented by being modeled digitally, wouldn't that have wide sweeping ramifications?<p>For example, what stops someone from taking a pharmaceutical that they do not own the patent to and getting a patent for that same drug but the patent is for a digital model of the molecular structure? Then litigate against the pharmaceutical company if the pharmaceutical company chooses to store the structure digitally.<p>I'm generally curious about this. If anyone can help me understand what I'm missing here, I would appreciate it.

Years and years ago I was a flash developer. I had a client who wanted a catalog that looked like it flipped pages. Even back then (this would have been pre-2000) there were a lot of ways to solve for this, and numerous examples.<p>In fact, here's a post from 2003 describing exactly this. <a href="http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-Brandon_-982/index.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-Brandon...</a>

This is the claim[1]:<p>CLAIM The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described.<p>Reading this, I wonder: How did "design patents" even come to be? I'm tired of saying it, but this is a real aberration.<p>[1] <a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&#38;Sect2=HITOFF&#38;p=1&#38;u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&#38;r=1&#38;f=G&#38;l=50&#38;co1=AND&#38;d=PTXT&#38;s1=D670,713.PN.&#38;OS=PN/D670,713&#38;RS=PN/D670,713" rel="nofollow">http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&#38;Sec...</a>

Did BeOS not have a <i>very</i> similar animation in one of its 3d demonstration widgets? The one you could drop images or videos on, flip pages and have them deformed and rendered in real time? That was, what, in the mid-90s? 15 years before Apple's patent was even filled?

Well, then it's just a matter of time until some random company 'X' gets sued for having page-turn animation that they had implemented decades ago, I guess.

Quite a few people are mentioning prior art and then going on to give examples where it's just an animation. I'm not saying that there isn't prior art however it does specify that the animation is initiated with a finger:<p><i>"The animation responds to a simple swiping motion with the finger, which turns the page over just as it happens on a paper book. A different swiping motion will flip the pages quickly, and a vertical finger movement will flip the page just enough to reveal what’s on the next page."</i><p>Talking of which - does anyone find the iBooks animation to be slow and annoying? On my iPad 3 it lags for a split second and generally feels a bit rough. It sounds picky but it's quite annoying and judging by a quick search on Google, others are annoyed by it too. Has it always been this way or is this a bug that will be fixed?

Filed July 2010.<p>I don't understand. I saw this effect on dozens of web pages over the last decade. Do patent examiners just live in a little box?

GOOD - I absolutely <i>loathe</i> that page turning animation... Skeumorphics gone crazy.<p>P.S. I've seen plenty of page turning effects like there's in advertising catalogs built in Flash. But in this case, let Apple have their way.

This could be easily circumvented by animating a page ripped out of the book, made into a ball, and tossed in the general direction of an Apple-looking product.

There's no chance it will hold up in any court if they try to use it to sue because of the vast amount of previous art. Not a chance at all.

There's too much prior art for this. Back around 97-99 there were plenty of shareware apps shipped on magazine cover CDs for reading ebooks.<p>They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy) page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"

I don't know much about the patents but is grammer of the claim is considered or not as in the claim it is referring to finger and if i implement the same animation which is done by using two or more fingers, am i infringing the patent.

I'd like to see Apple's cost-benefit analysis on something like this. Patents aren't cheap; if this is as unlikely to be defensible as some people are claiming, Apple must expect a huge upside. (Decreased risk? Licensing fees?)

Look at the bright side: there are a number of pretty text-scrolling effects that have been not been appreciated enough. Scrolls unwinding, tablets thrown back and forth etc.

I think this is a huge win for Apple with all the major companies like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books and others all using page turn animations, much like iBooks uses. I could see easily in the next few months more licensing deals being made.