Answer: not hard at all. In fact, it has been trivial for years. The hard part is implementing it in a cost-effective, reliable manner — something that Apple did with industry-leading industrial design/manufacturing efforts, not through patented technologies. But that's not what this case was about.

If this case involved Samsung bribing Apple employees to reveal the secrets at the Foxconn plants in China, then I would completely agree with you that that is wrong and that Samsung has broken the law by stealing a competitive technology. But that's not what's happening here; ironically, Apple is deriving part of its competitive advantage from using Samsung!

What's happening here is that Apple is suing Samsung over silly, trivial, and peripheral issues that played a modest (if any) role in the iPhone's success, silly, trivial, and peripheral matters that, unfortunately, have been granted the strongest property right in American law, which is a monopoly of their direct or indirect use by anybody.

So surely there were dozens of devices with these features (I assume you mean inertial scrolling) prior to the patents being granted?

This stuff is not trivial: Only a handful of multitouch devices even existed prior to the iPhone, and exploiting that technology, along with improvements in mobile hardware generally, was hard, or smartphones prior to 2007 wouldn't have sucked so very badly.

Read the file wrapper and the notice of allowability. Here is Apple's great triumph in claiming an invention as compared to prior art:

"The following is an examiner's statement of reasons for allowance: In regards to the independent claims 1, 19 and 20, the prior art found does not teach in response to an edge of the electronic document being reached while translating the electronic document in the first direction while the object is still detected on or near the touch screen display: displaying an area beyond the edge of the document, and displaying a third portion of the electronic document, wherein the third portion is smaller than the first portion; and in response to detecting that the object is no longer detected on or near the touch screen display, translating the electronic document in a second direction until the area beyond the edge of the electronic document is no longer displayed to display a fourth portion of the electronic document, wherein the fourth portion is different from the first portion; in combination with all of the other claim limitations."

Do you consider that extremely narrow tweak to a user interface a novel and useful invention worthy of patent protection?

That's certainly the supposed goal, but it clearly does not match reality. What actually happens is a company implements a long thought-of idea using modern technology, and then writes a trolling-ready patent which claims the entire idea by way of obvious and extraneous details.

This is a major reason why nobody bothers to read the patent claims when discussing bad patents - they're basically the synopsis of the patent combined over and over with straightforward technical 'chum' to make them seem specific and complex.

But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a design patent. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.

You can read a time machine patent here: http://www.google.com/patents?id=hNHIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...

If you ever happen to develop this machine, this person who just imagined it can ban you from selling. So tell me, who do you think worked harder on this invention? And why would this paper (the patent) be worth more than the real invention?