FingerWorks, a pioneer in multitouch gestures, filed for (and received) boatloads of patents. Apple bought FingerWorks in 2005, inheriting its intellectual property. The scientists came to work for Apple and continued to file patents for the research that they had done since the nineties.
“In June 2005, FingerWorks officially announced they were no longer in business. The founders continued to file and process patents for their work through late 2007. And as of August 2008 they still filed patents for Apple, Inc.” [1]
Note the application referenced downthread (20060238520) is a continuation of a 2004 filing, itself a continuation of a 2001 filing, itself a divisional of a 1999 filing which claimed priority based on a provisional 1998 filing. [1]
So to challenge that application, you'd need to find art circa at least 1998. And even then you have to consider the USPTO's (now legacy) practice of recognizing date of invention, rather than filing. Which means you may have to find art even older than 1998, to get that bit invalidated.
[1] Patent applications are rarely straightforward affairs. The process of mapping what we colloquially think of as "an invention" (awesome new widget) to patent applications often entails the creation of a family of patent applications. It gets very messy, very quickly.
It's my understanding that the USPTO is trying to limit the ability of companies to do this though.
http://www.ece.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf
Edit:
Ref, note [1]
Since this appears to be dated after the priority date, I don't think it would pose any problem, even if it were published in a professional journal.
(Edit: I meant to post this as a reply to the grandparent comment, not the parent post about FingerWorks. Whoops.)
Identification and classification of intuitive hand configurations and motions - http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...
How is the use of intuitive gestures not obvious, entirely by definition?
Likewise, apart from a totally different kind of flying machine like a helicopter, there probably isn't any better method of controlling an airplane than the method covered by Wrights patents (since it specifically does not exclude non-wing warping control designs), which is why the basic mode of control is still in use today. So Wrights patents at the time might as well be called a patents on "things that fly". It was very difficult to make a controllable plane without violating the patent.
Likewise, unless you equip a phone with dedicated zoom controls, there probably isn't a better or more intuitive way of zooming than using pinch-to-zoom or double tapping.
Actually, per my understanding, Apple's design patents are exactly that (if you throw in beveled corners). It's true, though, that those aren't the patents at issue in this thread.
The underlying implementation details should be protected, sure, but not the idea itself. Just because you're the first to successfully make a flying machine doesn't mean someone competing with you, implementing it in a different underlying way, shouldn't be able to make a flying machine.
"Method for transportation by flying vehicle" is very different from "Construction method of flux capacitor that provides enough energy to power flying vehicles". The first is obvious and there is prior art even if people could not build it. The concepts of pinch-to-zoom or slide-to-unlock are obvious to even people without Phds in touch surface technologies.
Anything intuitive by definition should not be patentable.
Some great questions and comments there too. I like the one by futurespacetraveler, apparently also of HN, who said this:
---
The price we pay to incentivize an inventor to disclose their invention is with decades of protection from competition. For a utility patent, that's 20 years from the date of the patent grant. And we always pay the same price, regardless of the underlying value of the invention to our society. So whether you invent a new method of swinging in a swing or a new drug to fight cancer, we pay the same price to know how it works.
And I think that's one of the key perspectives that often gets overlooked. We are paying for knowledge. The inventor is supposed to have figured something out that even skilled practitioners in the art hadn't thought of. We are paying for the secret sauce, so to speak. I think sofware "inventions", for many of us skilled in the art, seem so obviously non-insightful that we can't believe society has paid for such "knowledge" with a patent. Many of us realize that we don't even need to read most software patents to learn how to do what it explains. We're paying for "I was here first", rather than "I finally solved the problem no one else could". Yet we pay the same price regardless. That's why the Defend Innovation site wants to limit software patent terms to 5 years. Patent protection should be proportional to the value of the invention. But I believe that should be true for any invention.
He was making sense up until that point. The value of patent protection to society is determined by the potential harm done to the progress of science and the useful arts that would result if the IP had been kept as a trade secret. In the case of pinch-and-zoom gestures the net benefit to society gained by allowing Apple to own the idea is demonstrably nonexistent.
Apple sold a hundred million iPhones before they ever set foot in a courtroom. Clearly patent protection was not necessary to allow them to recoup their investment a thousand times over. Meanwhile, the harm done to competition by granting them a 20-year monopoly on the basic UI paradigm is easily estimable in the trillions of dollars, if they succeed in enjoining Samsung and other manufacturers.
I can think of at least 4 different ways to implement zooming without using pinch to zoom. So this idea that it is worth trillions is bizarre.
You seriously don't think that Samsung's line of smartphones would bring in a trillion dollars' revenue over 20 years, if left unmolested by Apple?
[0046] It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the invention as claimed.
That line, and the general and detailed descriptions can be ignored entirely.
So it's entirely possible that wording didn't survive.
In any event, it's hardly fair to judge a system based on the snapshot of a submission from before it had even gone through that system yet.
Btw the wording did indeed survive, the patent as it stands is sufficiently broad to cover all pinch-to-zoom implementations on any kind of touchscreen.
But this isn't a discussion about patents like that. This is a discussion about patents being granted for ideas that are simply innovations and/or copies of pre-existing ideas. That's completely different.
Not every patent is of equal creativity, importance, and value.
If you had prior art that invalidates a patent it doesn't necessarily mean the owner of the patent owes you money.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I should stop looking for signs of any kind of sanity in the decision making processes of faceless bureaucracies, as it is entirely pointless and only causes me stress.
thanks for posting this. quoted text from the link.
After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art." "In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."
Unsurprisingly, the ambiguity leads to people reading what they want from it.
"We weren't impatient," Ilagan said. "We wanted to do the right thing, and not skip any evidence. I think we were thorough... we took our time. We didn't rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated."
Even without context, what you quoted is not really that ambiguous. He says they debated it, so much debate that it was "bogging them down". That's not skipping it in the sense most people think skipping it means.
So "skipped it" in his words seems to just mean they moved on. Then since the question was answered on the verdict, they did clearly did come back to it to form a group consensus later.
Which other quote?
Sorry but I'm an asshole. You are using it wrong.
Using "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" is a perfectly cromulant application. Latin may be a dead language, but English is alive and ever-changing.
In either case the me-too idiots didn't realise how to implement control interfaces for touch screens until Apple showed them how to, at which point they tried to copy what the bright kid had done.
The point is whether Apple's ideas are worth granting a monopoly over.
I recall playing with a Microsoft Surface the year before the iPhone got released, and lots of the mechanics were very similar. Pinch-and-zoom is the 'one-click-shopping', or the 'press tab to move to next selectable UI element' (also patented) of the touch interface; if you're being paid to develop it, you'd think about that concept in about five minutes.
Furthermore, do you really want to live in a world where Apple gets a monopoly on touch gestures? Describe a different zoom-in mechanic using only two fingers.
The story here seems to be that Apple did the right thing buying a company that developed an innovate technology. In other words, the small company the created the technology was compensated by its development. Now, you think that a company like Samsung can just say "no, this is obvious" and start using that same innovation without any compensation or agreement? This is what seems crazy to me.
I'm saying the system is broken - not an uncommon argument here on HN - because I don't think these are ideas worth protecting.
Did you spend $10 million dollars investigating the right kind of chemical coating to get glass to respond to finger tips? Maybe you can get a monopoly on that.
Did you have an engineer dick around in a lab for a week? Why are we protecting this? We're basically rewarding incumbents.
Being a software engineer I obviously can't comment on other fields. But it strikes me that a huge proportion of these patents were awarded on incredibly specious grounds. I know innovation is obvious in hindsight but… I think these kinds of wide-swath patents destroy competition which harms all of us.
Patents as they stand today destroy more social value than they produce.
What you're saying that is that if it is innovation in materials research then it is valuable (probably because you and me don't know anything about it). But software engineering is not, probably because you could (in theory) do something similar. Let me tell you: if you were the one doing the design of a motion sensing system, I can bet it wouldn't be "easy". And you would want some kind of protection for your efforts. It is too simple to disregard somebody else's effort when making a hypothetical point.
WELL… I never took any visual recognition courses in university. But there is a large amount of literature on the subject. I think there may have been more innovation producing cheap infrared 3d sensors that work reliably than converting that vector field into a bit of math you can pattern match - but what do I know?
We're disagreeing on the "obviousness" of these patents.
>The aspect of a patentable invention most difficult to judge is obviousness. An invention is patentable only if it is not obvious to a person who is typically educated or trained in the field of the invention.
http://www.uspatlaw.com/contant.php?id=3
I'm trained in the art and I think pinch to zoom is obvious. It would be the first thing you try right after scrolling.
At the end of the day, I think the USPTO has been far too lax in what they consider obvious or not obvious. And yeah, frankly, I think a stunningly large percentage of all software patents are 'too obvious'.
None of the examples of patent trolling we've seen are really 'misuses' of the system.
This sentence makes no sense. The patent in question is not on a single technical implementation of pinch-to-zoom; it is on pinch-to-zoom in general. It does not merely protect the (easy) engineering needed to detect two fingers pinching, it protects the idea of "two fingers pinching = zoom". This is an obvious idea, and should not be protected by patents.
It was created to encourage R&D by granting those who come up with complex implementations a window in which they can recoup the expenses. It wasn't created so the first person to implement an idea in general can have a competitive advantage.
If companies had used the patent system to create artificial monopolies in this fashion throughout the development of personal computing, we'd be living in much less functional world.
Hardly. Of course the patent system isn't new, Apple just isn't behaving like personal computing companies have historically behaved. Licensing complex things like algorithmic implementations hasn't been uncommon, but licensing obvious UI ideas has been.
Personally I think it's better too.
[edit] Some of the quotes from his 2006 presentation are quite relevant to this...
... "Now, multi-touch sensing isn't anything- isn't completely new, I mean, people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s." ...
... "Now this is a photographer's light box application. Again, I can use both of my hands to kind of interact and move photos around. But, what's even cooler-
(uses fingers to 'grab' two corners of one of the photos and 'pulls' it to full screen size)
is that, if I have two fingers, I can actually grab a photo and then stretch it out like that really easily. I can pan, zoom, and rotate it effortlessly.
(slides piles of photos around)
I can do that grossly with both of my hands,
(pulls photo out of stack & enlarges it)
or if I can do it just with two fingers on each of my hands together.
(grabs empty space around photos & zooms in and out of canvas)
If I grab the canvas I can kind of do the same thing- stretch it out- I can do it simultaneously, where I'm holding this down-
(holds pile of photos down while pulling out another)
-and gripping on another one, stretching this out like this.
Again, the interface just disappears here. There's no manual. This is exactly what you kind of expect, especially if you haven't interacted with a computer before." ...
Which sort of begs the question that if an expert in the field thinks the gesture is exactly what you would expect, even if you had no expertise whatsoever, then how does that not qualify as obvious?