Just to keep things fact based, the recent court case against samsung did not cite the "Pinch-to-zoo-after-finger-contact-has-been-broken-and-restarted patent of 7,812,826.

You can read that patent here: http://www.google.com/patents/US7812826

And, even thought that patent was _not_ referenced in the case, you will see it's a particular multi-touch behavior _associated with pinch-to-zoom_ that apple is claiming a process invention against, not pinch to zoom. It's actually quite clever.

See: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo... for good details on this myth.

Note - others have patented Pinch-to-Zoom far before Apple came to the stage.

You don't have to contest the patent for it to be suppressing others' design. I once worked for a company that made a humidifying air pump. We had to have the water tank held in with a removable flap rather than a door because our main competitor had patented 'holding the tank in with a hinged flap/door'. Sure, you could fight it in court, down the track, after hardware design (which is much more expensive than people realise). Or you could move onto the next problem and have a slightly inferior product. Patents on trivial things stifle innovation.

The points I was trying to make (and clearly failed) is that Apple does not have a patent on pinch to zoom, so they couldn't contest the patent on it, because it doesn't belong to them.

Something funny is going on - I don't recall doing my reply against this particular comment, I think it was meant to be against a different comment about patents being trivial to work around or somesuch. Probably human error on my part, my apologies.

Thank you for linking those articles, that was very helpful.

That said, Google was lucky that there was a loophole in the patent definition. Imagine a world where Apple had actually obtained an airtight patent on a system that listens for single- or multi-touch gestures and switches between scrolling and pinch-to-zoom appropriately (which is essentially what the patent in question does). So, you'd be free to implement pinch-to-zoom as long as it doesn't infringe on that. Good luck.

(the point here being that, de facto, Apple would essentially have a patent on pinch-to-scroll. In real life [not in the proposed alternate universe] this is almost true -- there are loopholes, but you have to hire a patent lawyer to find and/or confirm them).

Imagine something completely different happened, based on that, something bad could then have come out of it?

I'd rather not, lets just stick to the facts and not build strawmen. It's bad enough to even discuss pinch-to-zoom or rounded rectangles when that's not what the trial was even about.

If we're discussing the Apple trial, lets figure out what really happened, not just repeat what we read from the press.

Apple's original claim didn't have that "loophole", but added it after the patent office rejected the original version as being anticipated by prior art (specifically, a patent [1] and a patent application [2]).

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US7576732

[2] http://www.google.com/patents?id=gKyRAAAAEBAJ

And even then sometimes you have to hire a team of lawyers to defend your loopholes in a trial.

It's not a 20 year monopoly. Many Android manufacturers are paying Microsoft for their patents. What prevents them from licensing Apple's patents?

I don't care which phone I use, because they're (mostly) all pretty good now. But wow, I remember the Microsoft WM5 heap that I had just before my iPhone. It was a testament to terrible UI. It had more widgets than my old Palm5 but was somehow far less usable. Not some rubbish knock-off, the premier phone from HTC running the software from the world's software monopoly, and it was terrible. I made vows never to use another Windows phone again after that. Version 5 and it was still crap. With the iPhone, Apple's first version knocked it out of the park. First try. And changed the industry, yet everyone thinks it was all obvious or people should be able to use their ideas freely.

There is obviously a balance between Apple-owns-all and everything-goes. Apple should benefit from their patents like every other company does, but others should be able to license them under reasonable terms. Until we finally dump all software patents, this seems like a reasonable compromise.

PS. - pharmaceuticals usually get a full-on monopoly for the full period. Software makers usually cross-license, so there is a difference.

PPS. - Apple's 100bn in the bank just show how far behind everyone else was at the time. Took ages to catch up.

Apple hasn't offered to license their patents, they want to kill Android.

BTW, I liked my WM5 phone.

> BTW, I liked my WM5 phone.

Eep. Scrolling was through the tiny scrollbar on the right, and I'm left-handed to make it even more irritating to use. Closing a window with your finger required a fingernail in the corner (or stylus, add 2 seconds). It insisted on stuffing a Start Menu in there, with careful clickery required to not make mistakes. And a Windows Explorer, with tiny expand-contract [+] thingies. I forget most of the horror.

For others who forget, these were examples of the best apps at the time. Behold the menu bar for some apps, the scroll bar, tree menus (and tree folders, requiring stylii or fingernails), [x]-to-close, the button on the bottom that says "Up". You can see the iPhone was out, and some apps were already influenced by it.

http://www.honeytechblog.com/30-best-windows-mobile-applicat...

My hardware had a slide-out keyboard. Sometimes the flip didn't flip, though, so you'd open and close it multiple times until it woke up. The phone was capable of connecting to the web, but that just generally brought misery. It could do video calls, which was theoretically pretty cool. We tried that once.

Version 5, that was. I think I'm going to put it in a fire, right now.

so i didn't like my phone?

My goal was to add some value to the conversation, not convince you or others that you didn't like the phone. It's not about your opinion, it's about Apple and the state of the art at the time, and what they did to change it. If you have some relevant info about why it was great, paint that picture for other HN'ers who might not have used it.

Sometimes, love defies reason ;-)

Sigh. So much misinformation, so little time...

http://allthingsd.com/20120810/breaking-apple-offered-to-lic...

They offered to license them to Samsung.

For an unreasonable amount ($30-$40 per device). Looks good when they can say, "But we offered to license to them!" before they file the lawsuit.

You offer 30, they say no, 10, you settle on 15. That's called negotiation.

And you know that Apple didn't say "No, the price is 30." how exactly?

And you know the price Apple asked is unreasonable. How exactly?

I cannot find logic that $30 is reasonable, but I cannot find logic that shows $30 is unreasonable, either.

Here is some food for thought: iSuppli claims the iPhone 4S contains $188 of materials (http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/iPhone-4S-Carrie...). That "$188 BOM" 16GB phone sells for $649 on the Apple Store.

Part of the price difference will be the cost of shipping and handling, customer service, warranties, etc, but I think it is reasonable to claim that at least $200 will remain after factoring in those. People do buy these phones, so there must be some $200 of value in an iPhone that is not attributable to its hardware. People will have different views on where that value is, but IMO, it is not unreasonable to assume half of it is in the iPhone UI.

Based on that logic, $30 seems not unreasonable.

My point was that the parent had no idea whether Apple's purported price was negotiable or not.

Whether $30 is a reasonable price for use of the UI elements that Apple claimed ownership of is a completely different question.

You're absolutely right. I should've posted it as a possibility.

Einstein didn't invent relativity - it was already there. That's why people in the scientific community rarely get miffed at people. They're not innovating or inventing - they are discovering.

There need be no software patents on the basis that software takes time to reproduce and that is your guarantee. The implementation is where the cost is. If the idea is obvious and trivial (like pinch gestures), then you probably don't deserve a head start.

People in the scientific community often "get miffed at people." They rarely sue anyone for it, however.

> One interesting point is he brought up Einstein's invention of relativity.

He didn't invent, he discovered. I'm not just being pedantic, I think the approaches signified by these two words goes to the root of the differences your describing.

Do you invent, or do you merely discover an optimum in solution space? This is really just semantics that changes nothing, regardless of what you want to call it, there is a history of people spending decades of effort to describe new math, new models, new mechanisms, all prior to patent protection.

That reforming copyright and patent laws will reduce innovation is unproven scaremongering. There are other industries that don't litigate like this, but none the less experience a wide diversity of innovation. With the exception of Nathan Myhrvold, most innovations in field of cooking have not been patented. You don't go to a restaurant and get a patented entree, the chef cooks up new and original recipes by copying and tweaking recipes of those that came before.

My point is the differential in mental approach.

In a classical sense, science is an act of discovery, of learning and understanding that which already exists, that which is the fundamental nature of the universe. These are things done out of a quest for knowledge and understanding. The entire concept of a patent is foreign to such an approach.

Invention on the other hand is a concept rooted in taking a knowledge base and using it to create something new. Something that isn't just the fundamental nature of things but rather using such fundamental rules to create a novelty. The concept of a patent is founded on this ideal.

Ultimately what I'm saying is that science marching along just fine without patents is a poor comparison to use, it has a completely different basis than what patents were created to protect (theoretically, I think they are just a mess at this point).

Science and scholarship as a whole are creative processes, just like invention is.

>Invention on the other hand is a concept rooted in taking a knowledge base and using it to create something new.

Replace "invention" with "science" and this sentence remains true.

You're drawing a distinction that doesn't exist.

I believe patents apply to discoveries in the same way as inventions.

"You can patent pretty much anything under the sun that is made by man except laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas. These categories are excluded subject matter from the scope of patents."

You believe incorrectly.

http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/what-cant-be-p...

Tell that to the companies that have patented genetic sequences.

No. One can discover mathematics, but mathematics cannot be patented. One can discover an ancient civilization ... and so forth. There are many more examples, and they're not patentable.

One could discover a gene sequence that ... oh, wait.

RSA encryption is pure number theory math and it was patented.

Apple could say they "discovered" how to do pinch to zoom well or something.

The sure can, but that means they would be forced to share their "discovery". Discovery and Invention are two different domains when it comes to patent law.

> But 20? It's absurd.

If pinch and zoom is such a trivial thing then invent some other thing to use instead.

The patent system by-and-large doesn't pick and choose patent durations based on the kind of patent.

Theoretical physics and patentable technology are quite different things and the comparison is not helpful. Before patents we had a guild system where people who made almost anything -- pottery, telescopes, pots and pans -- would obfuscate their techniques and if possible their products. Knowledge of key manufacturing processes was a trade secret. This is the world that we'd be in without patent protections.

Trivial doesn't mean valueless. A "1 click buy" patent is trivial, but forcing everyone to "invent something else instead" (e.g. 2 clicks) is stupid. And what if 2-click is patented? Then the next guy to come along has to have a 3-click system, or some obfuscation that convinces a jury.

Pretty soon, consumers are confused, because every website they go to has a radically different user interface brought on by patents on ideas that should be basic commodities.

When we had the guild system, we also didn't have universal public education, and instantaneous near zero cost publication of ideas.

Plus, you analogy makes pinch-zoom patents look even worse. You can keep how it is implemented a complete trade secret, and from looking at it for a few seconds, I can produce an equivalent implementation.

Apple has already obfuscated their techniques anyway. Why not release iOS as open source then, if it's protected by patents? The reality is, these patents are read by no one except lawyers, and in many cases, they under specify the implementation by being very abstract.

I really don't see how anyone who writes software for a living can defend these things and defend the status quo of not even supporting reform. You are asserting that something like an XOR-cursor (another dumb patent) is equivalent to a manufacturing process deserving 20 year protection?

> I really don't see how anyone who writes software for a living can defend these things and defend the status quo of not even supporting reform.

I agree that it seems like things are a bit screwy right now, but I don't claim to know what the solution is, and I'm not sure that things haven't always been a bit screwy (Alexander Graham Bell got the telephone patent because he was ahead of some other guy in line, Farnsworth died poor having invented TV).

Abolishing software patents is -- in my opinion -- not the solution since -- given the direction technology is headed -- this is going to be disturbingly similar to abolishing patents altogether. Most suggested "reforms" of the patent system seem to satisfy Mencken's criteria ("neat, simple, and wrong")

Note that genetic and chemical-engineering patents are pretty close to software too.

1-click is one of my least favorite patents, but it really comes down to an argument about obviousness -- an argument it appears to have lost in Europe (where the patent was never granted). The patent has been challenged, most of its claims thrown out, and its remaining claims narrowed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click

I'd suggest that in the end its a question of application not theory. In this case the Europeans have arguably done a better job of applying patent law than the US.

The solution already exists, in parallel with patents. If the whole goal is to "incentive innovation", then there are many ways of doing this. And we've been doing it already. If all you wanna do is incentive innovation then just give innovators what they need to innovate. That's what angel investors, angel groups, startup incubators, accelerators and even kickstarter backers do.

There's absolutely nothing about the concept of "incentive innovation" that says you must punish other innovators by giving monopolies to each individual. Of all ideas for promoting innovation you can think of, granting monopolies are among the worst ones. If before the invention of Intellectual Property, if you asked people to come up with new ideas to incentive innovation, no one would come up with "let's promote innovation by punishing innovators to pay fees to a select few". And in fact, no one did, that's not how IP was invented, it was the other way around. It started with UK monarchy monopolies with the explicit goal to make money for the monarchy. The excuse that IP protects innovation was made up later by those who were profiting from it when the monarchy fell.

Solutions to replace patents always existed, still exist and are working great. YCombinator is a great example of that. If you think it's the government who should grant some kind of incentives. I don't know about the US, but in my country we have many government programs for innovative startups. Many high tech and bio tech startups only exist because of government granted funding, incubation and mentorship.

Humans will always innovate. Solutions already exist and are working. Patents just need to stay out of our way and the rest will keep working fine.

What about "0 click buy"? Sounds better :)

> Knowledge of key manufacturing processes was a trade secret.

So, without patent protection, pinch-to-zoom would have been a secret and the rest of us would never have been able to figure it out? Or, without patent protection, no one would have put in the R&D effort to come up with pinch-to-zoom?

Obviously not.

The benefits that patents are supposed to provide to society just aren't benefits at all in this case. So, as a society, we ought to figure out a way to change the law so that it provides benefits where needed without doing more harm than good. It's clearly doing more harm than good in software right now.

I think you're arguing against a straw man. The idea of pinch to zoom isn't patented, it's specific tricks to the implementation, which the patent explains, that are patented.

The world that you were describing, without patent protection, would be perfectly fine for software.

Do you think samsung needed to refer to apple's patent to figure out those tricks? Or that those tricks needed significant R&D to come up with, which requires patent protection? I do not.

I'm a computer graphics student with a little linear algebra background.

How you would implement pinch to zoom was immediately obvious to me after seeing it.

Funny then that rival implementations turn out to miss nuances Apple dealt with in its 1.0 implementation.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...

I've implemented pinch-to-zoom in a bunch of different contexts, and I agree that it's easy to do a half-assed version. AFAIK that's not what Apple patented, and you're free to implement half-assed pinch-to-zoom to your heart's content (although you may be infringing an earlier patent).

> If pinch and zoom is such a trivial thing then invent some other thing to use instead.

But isn't that the exact problem.

p&z is so trivial that any other thing would be less trivial which would be counter intuitive for human-computer interaction.

pinch-and-zoom is a good idea. But it is just that: An idea.

Its invention cost no money and society as a whole is not served by granted exclusive monopoly over it to any entity.

The entire discussion is turning to be absurd. Is pinch-and-zoom (and friends) all that separates Apple from the competition?

In other industry manufacturers learn from each other (seatbelts, suspensions systems, transmissions, etc), but somehow when it comes to software and electronic devices we want to stop progress and grant monopolies to every oh-so-little idea.

It's a very refined implementation of an idea. Try pinch and zoom on an iPad and then try it on an Android device.

In so far as this is true -- that Android devices' pinch-and-zoom doesn't behave at all the same as iPads', and that this makes them much worse to use -- those Android devices have not copied what Apple did.

(I have no opinion about how much Samsung actually copied from Apple or whether what they did was legal; I haven't looked carefully enough at the case. I'm not passing comment on that. Just saying that you can't reasonably say both (1) that what Apple have rights over is a very refined implementation of pinch-and-zoom that differs from anything you'll see on an Android device, and (2) that a maker of Android devices copied it. At least, not without a further explanation of how they screwed it up so badly.)

Pinch to zoom wasn't actually something Apple was pursuing Samsung over, apparently.

Regarding the expense of clinical trials, it's important to note that the scientific results of a clinical trial are not protected by either patent or copyright. Pure research data cannot be restricted under any form of IP. Factual data without a creative element is explicitly exempted from both the patent and copyright system.

A published paper on the results of a trial may fall under copyright, but the factual observations and conclusions cannot be.

The "clinical trials are expensive" argument is incredibly disingenuous.

You'll need to remove fashion from that list, patent litigation is becoming much more common:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/12/design-patents-and-t...

http://www.elle.com/news/fashion-style/lululemon-sues-calvin...

It's possible that innovation, specifically scientific progress that leads to innovation, actually relies on scientists sharing stuff with collaborators that patent lawyers would not want them to share. The patent lawyers might often be "the last to know". It's possible that many scientists often put their own scientific goals, which stand to enrich the scientific community as a whole, before the business goals of the employers they work for. Something tells me that Apple's patent lawyers do not have this problem with Apple engineers.

Not that I consider software developers to be scientists but I wonder if there are any Apple engineers contributing to open source projects or even just publishing the occasional research paper.

Doesn't Apple have rules that keep all their employees from talking to anyone outside of Apple under threat of immediate termination?

No FDA for software. You can say that again. There's also no Medicaid, Medicare or health insurance that pays for it.

I don't even think medicines should be patented. I think government should fund the R&D and then let all companies manufacture and sell it at a low price. Then it is even better than medicare.

The government can sell the production method to other countries for a profit though.

That's not government's role unless you're in Soviet Russia. The free market drives more innovation that government ever has. The Lada and the Yugo are great examples of what happens when central planners try to run things. Besides, if people aren't going to profit from their hard work, what's the incentive for hard work? I don't write code everyday for the good of humanity, I do it to try and build something someone wants to buy so I can improve my lot in life. Besides, if companies don't profit, they won't do and then you have a downward economic spiral of decreasing tax revenues and ever increasing tax rates to fund the government's work which then drives even less economic activity because the incentive is reduced.

The role of government is to protect life, freedom and property. As soon as the government gets involved in microeconomic transactions, the efficiency declines. Comparing the US Postal Servie and Amtrack to Southwest Airlines and FedEx illustrates this perfectly. The government should regulate markets only as much as necessary to ensure that the markets function. They shouldn't be running the markets themselves.

The lack of tort reform is one of the key drivers to the insane cost of drugs and medical care. When a drug company has multi-million dollar exposure for every drug they produce, it's going to raise the cost. OB-GYN docs pay several hundred thousand dollars per year in malpractice insurance because one mistake has them on the hook for multi-million dollar punitive judgements.

Government should be a referee, not a player. It should provide a safety net from complete destitution, but not serve as an insurance policy against failure. The GM bailout is a great example of what government should not be doing.

When the government starts meddling in private business (i.e. pouring money into it,) it distorts the market and makes it much harder for innovative new players to enter the market. The Tucker car from the 1950s is a perfect illustration. The big three in Detroit threw around political muscle to effectively shut down a car company that built safer cars. If government had stayed out, we would have had seat belts and pop-out windshields years earlier.

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help" are still the scariest words one can hear in America.

The US government spends an enormous amount of money on medical research, and many medical treatments would simply not exist if it weren't for such Evil Communist behavior.

The market is a tool useful for some problems. It is not the alpha and the omega of society.

About $26.4 billion, that is 28% of the total biomedical research funding in US are money from the government. Its the single largest player in medical research. In areas of core principles, cancer research, and motility effecting illness, they are 80-95% in total funding.

Government is not and has never been an referee in medical research. The drug companies would never allow it. Try removing a $26.4 billion of free R&D and see lobbyist doing everything they can to stop you. Additionally, anyone caring about sick people would join in in stopping that bill. One do not simply remove $26.4 billion of medical research in the name of free market.

That's not government meddling in private business. That is private business meddling in government.

Yeah I am sure government is the right place to fund innovation! (See how the NASA has been productive vs SpaceX for example) - and why don't you let the government run the production of cars, as well ? Oh wait, we tried that before. That gave Skoda and the Trabant in Eastern Europe. Clear examples how professional government sponsored innovation was.

No, thanks.

Actually exist statements from Apple that say "We invent this" when in fact not?

Because my perception is that people accused apple of that, but I don't remenber them saying that...

I don't think you're aware of the sheer magnitude of revenue that pharmaceutical companies make. They often mark-up their drugs by 1000%.

I've sold software with a crazy markup too. Something like 100,000,000%! Because it's very cheap (far less than a penny) to duplicate the software, but I sold it online for $99.

Pharmaceutical companies do the same thing. It's not the pill that's expensive, it's designing it. Same with software.

The difference being that your software probably isn't going to save anyone's life. While a specific chemical compound designed for that purpose probably can. There is a clear moral difference.