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US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

pcworld.com

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Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#71

Post by shmerl »

rayiner wrote: post #58
shmerl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should a "normal tech company" behave exactly? Rather simple. It should have a base principle to be opposed to software patents. It should not patent trivial things, it should be opposed to functional claiming and etc. If patents are used, they should be used for defensive pools against aggressors, not to engage in aggression themselves. That's what I call normal. Twitter recently adopted such methodology. Others…

The mechanism by which patents work, though, is by (temporarily) banning competition.

> The mechanism by which patents work, though, is by (temporarily) banning competition.

Yes, for valid cases, since patent is a limited monopoly. Thing is, software is an invalid case to begin with for a number of reasons, including patent thickets issue.

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#72

Post by [deleted] »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #35
btilly wrote: post #8

Pinch to zoom absolutely should have been rejected. Watch the 2002 movie Minority Report for what I consider prior art on the 2007 patent filing at http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915 .

I don’t understand that reasoning. If that’s valid prior art, then patents for functioning time machines won’t hold up either. I think you’d have a point if it pertained to a design patent. If some movie used a tablet that looked exactly like an iPad, 10 years before Apple produced it, then surely Apple’s design patent for it would be worth zilch. However, the pinch-to-zoom patent describes an implementation in minut…

[deleted]

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#73

Post by shmerl »

mitchty wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mechanism by which patents work, though, is by (temporarily) banning competition.

This is basically why I'm confused with the "defensive" patent phrase. It seems to completely ignore the whole purpose of patents in the first place. Either we get rid of software patents wholesale, or we accept the consequences of software patents are this. Lets say a company develops a 5% increase in efficiency for an engine. They patent it, a competitor reverse engineers it and releases a product. Fundamentally th…

You are confused because you assume that software patents are normal patents. They aren't. Software should not be patentable. In practice software patents cause more harm than any possible benefits they supposedly bring to innovation. Therefore companies should avoid using them for aggression.

Compare it to weapons. Weapons are used for warfare, aren't they? But do you think using nuclear weapons is a sane thing to do? No. But they are still weapons, right? Same thing with software patents. They are patents, but they are not sane to use. Today patents are used as weapons, therefore aggression / defense analogy is very appropriate. And aggressors are the bad guys.

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#74

Post by snom380 »

baddox wrote: post #65
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken, but won’t that mean that if someone figures out how to make a time machine, they will simply not apply for a patent and try to keep the design to themselves? (They could for instance sell time travel as a service, but not sell the machines or license the tech to other companies) In theory, patents grant the inventor exclusivity for a limited time so that they can recoup their investment, in exchange for…

I have no problem with a time machine inventor choosing to keep the design to themselves. I also have no problem with him/her releasing the design for free, or even licensing the technology contractually. I have a problem with the government, funded partially by money I earned but have no control over, protecting any sort of intellectual property.

Wouldn't that just give even more power to big corporations? Or do you think things would work themselves out without government interference?

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#75

Post by dragonwriter »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #35
btilly wrote: post #8

Pinch to zoom absolutely should have been rejected. Watch the 2002 movie Minority Report for what I consider prior art on the 2007 patent filing at http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915 .

I don’t understand that reasoning. If that’s valid prior art, then patents for functioning time machines won’t hold up either. I think you’d have a point if it pertained to a design patent. If some movie used a tablet that looked exactly like an iPad, 10 years before Apple produced it, then surely Apple’s design patent for it would be worth zilch. However, the pinch-to-zoom patent describes an implementation in minut…

> I don’t understand that reasoning. If that’s valid prior art, then patents for functioning time machines won’t hold up either.

Patents on functioning time machines are likely to be problematic, anyway, since the natural response to such a patent [1] is to copy the machine, go back in time to before the patent was filed, and file a patent on it. It doesn't take many repetitions of this loop before the original patent on the device is expiring just about the time the device was actually invented.

[1] Ignoring all the other problems with causality and paradox inherent in time travel.

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#76

Post by dragonwriter »

mrpdaemon wrote: post #61
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand that reasoning. If that’s valid prior art, then patents for functioning time machines won’t hold up either. I think you’d have a point if it pertained to a design patent. If some movie used a tablet that looked exactly like an iPad, 10 years before Apple produced it, then surely Apple’s design patent for it would be worth zilch. However, the pinch-to-zoom patent describes an implementation in minut…

If you had a functioning time machine you could travel back in time and file the patent before any prior art was created.

Yeah, but so would any infringer, thus making the infringement prior art for the invention.

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#77

Post by btilly »

mrpdaemon wrote: post #61
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand that reasoning. If that’s valid prior art, then patents for functioning time machines won’t hold up either. I think you’d have a point if it pertained to a design patent. If some movie used a tablet that looked exactly like an iPad, 10 years before Apple produced it, then surely Apple’s design patent for it would be worth zilch. However, the pinch-to-zoom patent describes an implementation in minut…

If you had a functioning time machine you could travel back in time and file the patent before any prior art was created.

Not necessarily.

I have, in fact, seen a potential design for a time machine which violates no known laws of physics and could take you back in time only as far as the point where the machine itself was built. This would prevent the "patent filing leapfrog" that you are talking about.

Before anyone wonders why this machine has not been built, it requires a rapidly rotating rod, several light years long, about the diameter of the Sun. To travel in time you need to orbit the rod at extremely high speed, and your direction relative to the spin of the rod determines which direction you travel through time.

In theory it should work. But reducing theory to practice is somewhat beyond our current means. :-)

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#78

Post by WildUtah »

[deleted] wrote: post #70
throwawaykf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here I am again to provide a friendly reminder that before discussing any patent, you must read the claims! If you did so, in this case, you would see that this is not a "pinch-to-zoom patent", but rather a "pinch-to-zoom-if-the-event-object-created-from-touch-input-has-two-or-more-points-else-scroll-the-view-instead" patent. Yes, it literally covers something as specific as creating "event objects" out of touch…

[deleted]

[Edit: deleted parent asked: "May I ask why you include the word \"temporarily\" regarding prior art? ... Am I wrong? Does prior art now somehow not invalidate a claim/patent?"]

Usually a patent applicant can claim a narrow distinction between his claim and existing prior art. Consider gp's list of available distinctions from the Minority Report zoom feature; it's a litany of distinctions without any actual difference as far as the actual nature of the 'invention.'

It's a standard technique in patent law to apply for a series of patents around the invention of a competitor. The patent office can be persuaded to issue new monopolies over every kind of meaningless distinction. You can make it impossible for that competitor to make his invention by blocking every kind of trivial and obvious change and improvement in design, technique, and build. Then he will have to cross license in order to continue in business and you gain access to his patents. It's one of the ways big businesses continue to operate in the face of a broken patent system.

Apple recently overcame a post-grant rejection of their bounce-back patent on appeal. They argued that the prior art showed the technique to re-center the center of a fixed-size document so that it fit on the screen while their technique was completely distinct. Apple instead aligned the edge of a fixed size document to the edge of the screen so that it fit. The logical and geometric and mathematical and programming equivalency of those two did not overcome the PTO's affection for rhetorical distinctions and the patent was re-issued.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130509083407920

(Note that Samsung is very unlikely to get the re-trial in the story; the PTO's position on distinctions is widely approved in the bar.)

So, no. Prior art does not invalidate a claim in most circumstances.

In the most recent "When Patents Attack" episode, This American Life found 5,000 patents that covered the exact same 'invention.' That invention was online backup. The one 1990s patent under litigation could not be invalidated by the five thousand others between it and IBM's first implementations in the 1950s. (They eventually invalidated it another way, after trolls collected hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#79

Post by baddox »

snom380 wrote: post #74
baddox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with a time machine inventor choosing to keep the design to themselves. I also have no problem with him/her releasing the design for free, or even licensing the technology contractually. I have a problem with the government, funded partially by money I earned but have no control over, protecting any sort of intellectual property.

Wouldn't that just give even more power to big corporations? Or do you think things would work themselves out without government interference?

I think the patent system, and indeed all intellectual property laws, give more power to big corporations.

Re: US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent

#80

Post by lh7777 »

baddox wrote: post #66
lh7777 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried this one handed suggestion - first time ever in my 6 years using an iPhone - and I can see why I never thought of it. Extremely awkward and imprecise. I don't get why anyone would do that. Do you have giant hands? For zooming, I've always used the double-tap method. This generally works fine for zooming in and out on Safari, and it works for zooming in on Maps. I can do a two-finger double tap on Maps to…

> I can do a two-finger double tap on Maps to zoom out And now I know about that! It's still awkward, but slightly less awkward than one-handed pinching.

Oops - it's actually a single tap with two fingers...
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