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A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

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Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#291

Post by Steko »

Maybe all the people with slam-dunk morning after arguments should have sent them to Samsung's large, professional, highly paid and presumably competent legal staff.

Or maybe these arguments are all bullshit. Would the jury really have found these to infringe the iphone design (assume they were released later)? I'm going to say, clearly, no. Right off the bat none of them have black faces with equally rounded corners. That sort of gives away the game right there. But let's imagine any one of those devices in this exhibit:

http://www-bgr-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/087-e...

http://www-bgr-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/677-e...

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#292

Post by taligent »

jasonlotito wrote: post #263
flatline3 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your extrapolation from off the cuff out of context quotes is mind boggling daft in its scope. Instead of providing supporting evidence, you're merely building a larger and larger narrative on top of the same incomplete data. This is the same sort of reality twisting that we see out of the likes of the birther movement -- facts and supporting data take a back seat to whatever supports an appealing narrative.

What lacks evidence? I can support all claims. You, on the other hand, make unsubstantiated claims. You equate me with birthers, you contradict yourself... and even when faced with concrete evidence, you dismiss it out of hand. You even go so far as to lie by claiming I offered no supporting evidence. No, I've provided evidence. You've merely attempted to insult and claim that the quotes are out of context, and when…

Then you should support them when you make them.

But extrapolating all of this from one single statement is irrational, ridiculous and frankly delusional.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#293

Post by learc83 »

rayiner wrote: post #176
drats wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't own ideas, they are granted temporary monopoly on real innovations to encourage their disclosure so that they, in the short term, and society, in the long term, can profit. The question isn't "first" the question is "obvious". I would argue with gestures already established and real touch screens a group of designers would quickly come up with a latch (horizontal stroke), a door handle (curving stroke),…

So one thing to understand about patent law. A combination of existing features can be novel if the combination together is novel. However, in that case, the protection is extended to the combination only, not the individual features. Samsung isn't getting sued because Apple owns "pinch to zoom." That's not how you'd read the patent. What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combinati…

>What Apple owns is "pinch to zoom" in the context of a device containing a combination of all the other features.

That's completely incorrect--read the patent. Apple owns pinch to zoom on a touchscreen, so long as that pinch to zoom allows you to pinch multiple times to continue to zoom.

Again apple owns an individual utility patent on what we consider pinch to zoom on touchscreens. If you use just that one feature you are infringing on their patent, and every android phone is infringing on that patent.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#294

Post by nirvana »

vidarh wrote: post #187
nirvana wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those have a touch based UI. Touch means finger touches. Very different from a stylus which is only touching one or two pixels at a time. This is very easy to sense because the stylus pushes two layers together physically and effectively is closing swithces. A touch is much difeferent, a finger is an amorphous blob over many pixels of a varying shape, and Apple had to figure out how to resolve that into a sin…

I wrote on my Palm Pilot Pro in '98 using my fingers. I preferred it to using the stylus, because it was faster and more comfortable for me. (Incidentally, when I left the job where I used the Palm at the end of '98, it was to work on developing a touch based tablet which had no stylus at all - see one of my other posts in this thread). The stylus on the Palm was optional for better precision. It was by no means nece…

The idea that the palm was a touch based UI is simply false. You needed a stylus and the UI was designed for a stylus. You could do some things with fingers and some apps were designed for finger use, where it was appropriate.

The reason you needed a stylus is because the technology was not advanced enough to detect finger touches with the accuracy that the iPhone does.

Even if Palm had all of the algorithms that apple developed for iOS, the ARM processors in those palms was not fast enough.

To claim that Apple invented nothing new because you could get a Palm to react to your finger is frankly a lie. It is a shameful lie, because when you let your ideology drive you to dishonesty, you've lost all integrity.

I have given the specifics of how and why my claims are true, but you ignore them, and you post dishonest stuff like this.

I genuinely don't know if you are simply ignorant and repeating what you've heard from others how are lying, or you're lying yourself, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter.

For the record, I have owned Palms and Newtons and Compaq's stylus driven device (iPaq I think it was) etc.

None of them could be used completely by fingers and all of them were designed to be used reliably by styluses.

I never said they would not react to finger presses at all, and I never said they couldn't be used in a limited fasion with finger presses.... so pretending that I did is yet another dishonesty.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#295

Post by veemjeem »

mattmcknight wrote: post #45
Nicole060 wrote: post #5

As someone who has owned a pre-iPhone phone with a touchscreen, and seen another one in the hand of a friend, no, what made the iPhone the iPhone is NOT obvious. For the love of god, my LG Prada was so shitty I had to hit a 2px scrollbar with my thumb to scroll in the contact list. I can't contain the nervous laugh whenever some ignorant who never touched the device link to wikipedia proud of their attempt at mocking…

You are basically saying the iPhone was of higher quality- things worked better. This is true, but you can't patent quality.

You should google "design patent". If the quality can be distinguished by an ordinary person, then the design patent is upheld. I think everyone on HN thinks patents are "utility patents".

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#296

Post by codeka »

mbreese wrote: post #239
esolyt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can read the same quote from CNET if Groklaw is the issue. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57500358-37/exclusive-appl... I hope you don't consider CNET biased. If anything, they are usually criticized for being Apple-biased.

The cnet article was the original source for the Groklaw quote. The juror in the quote didn't mention anything about possibly going back to the issue. We don't know if cnet didn't run that part of the quote (why would they, they get more clicks with more controversy), or if the juror just didn't mention it. We do know that he isn't quoted as saying, "oh yeah, we never got back around to it". And since they explicitly…

My understanding is that there were two jurers who were unconvinced about the prior art thing. It seems to me like what actually happened is that, rather than trying to convince those two jurers (i.e. coming to a unanimous decision), they just went with "majority rules".

Of course, there's no evidence to suggest that's what they did, but equally there's no evidence to suggest that they eventually went back to that question and debated it further.

Given that they admitted to ignoring the instructions on punitive vs. compensatory damages, it's not a stretch to imagine they also ignored the instructions on coming to a unanimous decision.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#297

Post by gnaffle »

tjoff wrote: post #234
gnaffle wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point exactly. :)

Your point seem to imply that innovation was required, mine that it was trivial .

If it was that trivial, I would at least expect Google or Nokias Maemo to have come up with such an interface before 2007.

I don't think the work put in by FingerWorks, and then the work put in by Apple to create the iOS user interface was trivial at all. It may not have been groundbreaking compared to what came before (ie most had been demonstrated by researchers), but I think it's obvious that a lot of work and design decisions went into creating it.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#298

Post by corin_ »

eropple wrote: post #251
tomjakubowski wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since I don't know, I thought I'd ask -- were Apple the first to create a multi-touch UI for a phone? That would seem to me to be the major innovation in touch UI if that's the case.

Apple was neither the first to create a multi-touch user interface (the first consumer multitouch device I know of was the Lemur, but I'm sure that was predated) nor the first to put it in a handheld PDA-ish device or a phone (LG beat the iPhone to market with the Prada--which, incidentally, also used very few physical buttons in favor of software buttons). The entire argument in favor of Apple's patents is bullshit,…

I could be wrong (?) but I think the first Prada was capacitive but not multi-touch.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#299

Post by veemjeem »

confluence wrote: post #261
wklauss wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if you are wrong? How long do we have to wait to see if you gave your father an inaccurate reading of the situation? I mean, I remember a lot of the "Apple is at 90$ a share now, it will go down soon" crowd in the '06 in the Yahoo Finance forum posts and I'd love to see them now and sincerely ask them what were they thinking or why did they reach that conclusion back then. I'm completely serious. This kind of…

Seeing as I bought Apple in 08 I understand your reasoning :D A few factors lead to my understanding of this situation changing. 1: Mobile saturation - only thing left is more of the same and virtual/augmented reality. 2: Absolute domination of Android and the continual manufacturing dominance of Samsung 3: The move towards commoditizing most consumer electronics thanks to work done by Google and other hardware manuf…

Companies often sue each other, but I doubt the lawsuits are what caused previous companies to fold. Kohler sued Moen on several popular faucet designs that were patented, but I don't see either companies going away any time soon. I can agree with your other factors for argument, but not the lawsuit.

Re: A device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious

#300

Post by varelse »

jonhendry wrote: post #270
varelse wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect but don't take my word for it: let's go look at the Tom and Jerry instruction manual at http://www.hillsoftware.com/files/atari/jaguar/jag_v8.pdf On page 50 describing the GPU instruction set, you should note right at the top the instruction LOADP which I quote is a: "64-bit memory read. The source register contains a 32-bit byte address, which must be phrase aligned. The destination register will have the…

"64-bit memory read. The source register contains a 32-bit byte address, which must be phrase aligned. The destination register will have the low long-word loaded into it, the high long-word is available in the high-half register. This applies to external memory only." Which is 32-bit addressing, not 64-bit. Exactly what was claimed in the comment you're responding to.

Sure, 32-bit addressing with 64-bit memory operations, but that said, I wasn't aware of any existing videogame console even today with 4GB or more of memory so it seems a bit pedantic to disqualify on that basis or are you saying there has yet to actually be such a console?

Or are you saying if the chip squanders transistors so that it's capable of 64-bit addressing, but they're useless because there's less than a GB of memory on-board, the addressing alone constitutes magic blue crystals of 64-bit legitimacy?

The horrendous handling of the Jaguar by Atari aside, and despite its unfortunate resemblance to a bedpan, it was a surprisingly powerful machine for the time, no harder to program than the ragingly successful PS2 (IMO of course), and the best way to show it off was to make full use of its 66 MHz worth of instruction issue (2 x 26.6 MHz RISC process plus a 13.3 MHz 68000 and its 64-bit memory operations. For example, the Jaguar version of Doom was the best of all ports at the time: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Atari_Jaguar

All that said, I find reminiscing on video game consoles of the past to be a more positive experience than what this lawsuit has demonstrated about the state of patent law. Sure, Samsung copied Apple's look and feel. Why is this and why should this be illegal unless they literally slapped the word IPhone or IPad on their gadgets? Might as well have banned the Chevy Camaro for copying the Ford Mustang IMO.

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