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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

#171

Post by jmilloy »

timmyd wrote: post #11

This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn't my intention - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382 ). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness. Refer here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... - "One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a…

I find it very bizarre that "commercial success" can be sufficient evidence for upholding a patent -- isn't the point of a patent to aid in commercial success by allowing a temporary monopoly?

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

#172

Post by hazov »

nirvana wrote: post #31
equalarrow wrote: post #2

"Just to drive the point home: a device with a touchscreen and few buttons was obvious.." I still don't buy it. This still misses the mark - it wasn't about a 'few' buttons, the iPhone was about none. All those pda's in the picture don't really mean anything to me. Sure, some of them had cell networking and a lot (most? all?) had wifi. But I would never consider the old pda's a mobile device. 'Mobile' to me comes fro…

> if it's not Linux or open source, it bad/wrong/etc. It's ideological. There is a trend in these objections in articles like this and across hacker news. They simply ignore what was unique about the iPhone and trivialize it completely and then pretend like it was obvious all along. Notice the repeated comparisons to stylus based devices as prior art for multi-touch. They don't care about the differences, as long as…

> If the iPhone wasn't revolutionary, how did Apple go from selling no phones to the selling the most popular phone in just a few years?

People were just enamored with the iPod, it was a good device and people paid to see if Apple would make a good phone as well, which it did.

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

#173

Post by rustynails »

ricardobeat wrote: post #112
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),…

The latch is only obvious in retrospect; it involves the emulation of physical constraints that most non-engineers couldn't even describe succesfully (springy handle, locking at the end) and great resilience to unintended input. If another manufacturer had made the iPhone, you would probably unlock it by pressing a sequence of keys. That's the most obvious design.

I respectfully disagree. My thought process was 1. Passcode (alpha or numeric) 2. If I don't want a passcode, I need something else, and a single button won't do. Ok, drag something.

The conclusion is obvious. You could argue that I am biased, and it would be impossible for me to counter. However, IMHO, sliding something was the obvious answer.

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

#174

Post by rayiner »

drats wrote: post #28
timmyd wrote: post #11

This has been spoken about over and over (refer to the heated discussion yesterday which wasn't my intention - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431382 ). The core of the article again - looks at the concept of obviousness. Refer here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... - "One of the main requirements of patentability is that the invention being patented is not obvious, meaning that a…

This is silly, touch screen technology, faster ARM cpus and the rest make these things possible and came from elsewhere. My first computer with a GUI was 100mhz. As soon as smartphones got 600mhz+ and as soon as people get touch screens (foreshadowed endlessly in sci-fi) are you seriously suggesting that if you took a room of fresh graduates from a design school (which is a bar lower than "ordinary skill in the art"…

Just because you can see the logical evolutionary history of a design in hindsight does not mean it's obvious.

One of the considerations for "obviousness" is "failure of others." Companies failed for a decade to have usable touch-screen devices before Apple came out with the iPhone. Within just a couple of years, smartphones all went from looking like Treos to looking like iPhones. Multi-touch was a game-changer and it wasn't obvious.

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

#175

Post by tobylane »

w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

Trade dress is about what the average consumer sees and perceives? First to market matters here because even with a lot of patents covering the outside of the product there's so much more involved in trade dress. Therefore it doesn't matter that Apple copies, they were first to market and were copied in the market in a way that would be considered similar by laymen. Lawyers would have a much higher/harder standard of similar.

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

#176

Post by rayiner »

drats wrote: post #52
Nicole060 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was so obvious then why did it take a company that had NO history in making cell phones to make a good one with a usable touchscreen and gestures ? Nokia couldn't do it. RIM couldn't do it. Samsung couldn't do it. LG couldn't do it. (LG did make a touchscreen, and I owned one before I bought an iPhone, and it sucked hardcore) And they were on that market way before Apple. Cry me a river if it hurts your feeling…

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 combination of all the other features. Samsung copied that device with that combination of features. With a device, I might add, that was changed from the default Android UI to look more like an iPhone.

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

#177

Post by jarjoura »

Yeah, it's obvious now, because it's so beautiful and simple. That's the magic of the iPhone, how obvious it all seems now that it's staring you in the face.

I have no doubt that Samsung, Microsoft, Palm, Google, et. al, were all headed down a similar path, but no one was willing to break from the past.

People wanted/begged for a physical keyboard, people wanted/begged for the fastest 3G connection, etc.

Apple wasn't bound to that past and yes they had hindsight to make something compelling. Plus they had to come up with something that would immediately separate themselves from the other devices. In fact, this desire to be unique amongst all other smartphones led to these defendable iPhone traits.

What Apple was defending wasn't minimalist capacitive touch devices, no, they are protecting the unique attributes that define what an iPhone experience should be.

Take away the physical hardware for a minute and compare only the software of the phones. You still should tell which one is an iPhone versus something else. It's those features that Apple needs to protect. Bouncing scroll that stays glued to your fingers, etc.

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

#178

Post by rayiner »

arrrg wrote: post #29
w1ntermute wrote: post #16

This entire trial was a farce. The jury foreman admitted that they "skipped" prior art because "It was bogging us down."[0] > "Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the produc…

I think the trial had a normal result given the legal framework. Sometimes trials like this might go a bit this or that way, but in general they will have results like this. My own position on this is very simple: All (yes, all) patents should be abolished. The current law is the problem, not Apple or Samsung or the Jury or the judge. I also think what Samsung did was – in part – morally reprehensible, but should hav…

For people who believe that patents should be abolished: how do you see an ARM-like company existing without patent protection? Or do you think there is no value in being able to transact in designs?

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

#179

Post by vidarh »

nirvana wrote: post #86
corin_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the ability to put them together, it's about deciding what to put together, when to do it, how to market it and of course a big part: what software to put on it. I'd never say " all Apple do is" about this, just that it is what they do, and they do it better than anyone else.

Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them. And having seen them, other companies can't replicate them well at all because they don't do the research. Calling them a lego assembler ignores all the real innovation they do.

> Except that the major parts- like a touch oriented UI- don't exist until Apple develops them.

I worked on a tablet in '99. I wrote the widget library (we used Nano-X plus a custom widget library and font loader to keep memory usage down - this was a unit with 32MB RAM...) and managed the developers who wrote the apps that are featured:

http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Article...

(the names on the people in the phone book are names of actual employees of Screen Media at the time, actually - I'm there too)

Notice how it is described: Not as something new, but as another entrant up against another product. Even in '99/'00 our touch based tablet was not a new idea.

In fact, one of the companies that Screen Media was co-located with was a touch screen importer and distributorship that served as our major go-to guys for ideas and information about what the touch screens of the time were capable of - we didn't invent any of the ideas of this type of touch screen UI because we could go to our local touch screen distributor and ask what was common practice in the market already. The only remotely new thing (and at least Ericsson, and probably others, beat us there too) was to apply it to a tablet type device rather than a kiosk.

We did use resistive touch screens, not capacitive, but the UI was most definitively "touch oriented" - there were no hard keys on the standard unit at all. Web browsing, phone functions, address books, e-mail, was all done via touch.

The tablet used a port of Opera, and Opera subsequently introduced gestures in 2001, but while gestures was then new to browsers, that was not considered anything revolutionary either - just applying existing, known technology in a novel way.

The idea that a "touch oriented UI" didn't exist before Apple developed it is fiction.

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

#180

Post by alexwolfe »

Considering how much money was spent on both sides, I'm certain any aspect that would have helped Samsung was researched and considered. After many months of deliberation and arguments from both sides, the verdict is very clear, they are guilty. We would all like to think that this case was simple and the jury was out to lunch. The facts however don't seem to support that. It was a long case, with mountains of evidence, covering a variety of copyright issues. It's also clear from the decision and statements made by Samsung Executives that they don't feel that their appeal to this case will be successful.
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