Apple using patents to undermine open standards again

The author's framing of Apple's patent applications isn't congruent with the way Apple views touch. The W3C, and standards advocates, view touch events in the same way they do mouse clicks. They're interactions that should be standardized and incorporated in to an event model for use in web applications. Apple views toch events as a proprietary interaction that they pioneered. Their already granted pinch to zoom patents reflect this view.

So, to a standards body, Apple's actions are perceived as undermining standards. To Apple, they're perceived as an act to protect a R&D investment.

And yet Apple extended the web platform with these APIs, shipped them in a production browser, documented them (without labeling them as experimental or proprietary), published web content that used them, and encouraged other web developers to do the same [1]. Other WebKit vendors followed suit and implemented Apple's APIs, including Android, BlackBerry, and Nokia. Then other browser vendors like Opera followed. Mozilla had our own independently-developed multitouch API [2] but earlier this year we implemented WebKit-style touch events in Gecko and helped lead the standardization process at the W3C. They were already a de-facto standard; we had to implement them if we wanted mobile Firefox to work with popular sites like Google Maps.

If Apple had no intention of ever allowing other browsers to implement touch events, then they could at least have shipped them with a vendor prefix, as Mozilla did with our "MozTouchMove" events (and other experimental or pre-standard APIs). Instead they polluted the global namespace, created a de-facto standard, and never gave a word of feedback to the standards effort that emerged around their work. Only at the very end of the process, after supporting the API in their production browser for four years, did they suddenly act to block the acceptance of a de-jure standard based on the de-facto standard they created.

Touch events are not just for novel multi-touch scenarios; in browsers like Safari they are necessary even for single-touch drag and drop handling that has been possible in desktop browsers for over a decade. If the W3C and Apple can't work out a royalty-free licensing arrangement for Apple's essential claims, then this seems very likely to fragment the mobile web even further by creating yet more "works only in Safari" pages. While we don't know the outcome yet, the path Apple has taken so far does not reflect the responsibility or stewardship toward the web that I'd like to see from a major browser vendor.

The mobile web is already in terrible shape when it comes to pages working across browsers. Do you think Google would ever push an update to Gmail that makes it not work in Firefox? Well they did exactly that to mobile Gmail this year, and didn't fix it until a month later [3]. It's like the 1990s browser war all over again. Keeping the web platform based on open standards is essential to keep it open to new browsers and technologies.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/IOs/#documentation/Apple...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Touch_events_%28Mozilla...

[3]: http://bugzil.la/678150

(I work for Mozilla and I am co-editor of the W3C Touch Events spec, but these opinions are my own.)

EDIT: I think your comment is an accurate reflection of Apple's priorities -- I'm arguing against Apple's actions, not against your comment.

Alternate title:"Apple disclosing patents ahead of deadline in accordance with W3C patent policy, again."

The sense of malice seems to be inferred from Apple not disclosing these sooner, but I question what the point is of having a deadline if disclosures a month prior to it are going to be considered disruptive. If this was going undermine the process, shouldn't the deadline have been sooner?

The case where a W3C member has essential claims that aren't available under W3C royalty-free licensing requirements is treated as an "exception" to W3C policy [1], not an expected part of the normal process. It requires formation of a special committee and is truly disruptive. Apple seems to be one of the only members willing to do it regularly.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/#sec-Exc...

What would have been less disruptive is if Apple had any other communication at all with the W3C Web Events working since it was formed more than a year ago.

Actually participating in a working group that is working an APIs they are shipping is the normal way for a W3C member to help shape a standard. If they had participated in the group, then the patents would have come up during the disclosure period for the First Public Working Draft back in May 2011. Instead, they recently even asked for other, unrelated standards (like the Game Pad API) to be moved to a different working group so they can continue to avoid participation in the Web Events WG [2].

[2]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webevents/2011Oct...

Or, better, Apple could have brought touch events to the W3C themselves after they first shipped them in Safari back in 2007. (Even better is to propose new standards before shipping them in a production browser, so that other parties can provide feedback before the standard is locked in by content compatibility - but I understand that proprietary browser vendors won't always do this because of secrecy around product launches.)

And of course, not patenting their extensions to the web platform would also be great. :(

It's possible that some of the patents came from Fingerworks which Apple bought in 2005. Fingerworks had been doing touch based work since about 1998.