Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995? • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#71

Post by cnu » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:03 AM UTC

martythemaniak wrote: post #39

timr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity" Yeah. They do. Patented inventions become a commodity in 14-20 years, depending on the kind of patent. "Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process." Call me crazy, but I think we're seeing Apple using the process to defend their inventions , which is exactly…

The system was set up to foster innovation, not grant free monopolies willy nilly. I've yet to read any convincing argument about how this verdict will lead to more innovation, but there's a very clear way to see how it could lead to less. I find it very hard to believe that had Apple not been granted these patents, or if the patents had a much more appropriate 12-18month validity period, they would not have shipped…

"I've yet to read any convincing argument about how this verdict will lead to more innovation"

The verdict will lead to more innovation and R&D from Samsung, instead of just copying from Apple.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#72

Post by cromwellian » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:23 AM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #40

MaxwellKennerly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent system is supposed to encourage the commoditization of inventions by using a trade-off: if you invent something novel and useful, you can get a patent that gives you a complete monopoly for a limited amount of time, but in return you have to completely disclose how your invention was made, so that, first, others can see if the intention would be useful for them right now (and thus negotiate a license with…

>so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized You are confusing utility patents and design patents. They are very different things, and design patents are intended for "designs" and the designs of devices. This is not a perversion, this is just you not understanding what patents are ! Secondly you guys constantly claim that these things are not nove…

There's been ample citation of prior art, everything from prior working and publicly shown prototypes to actually shipping devices. Apple was not the first company to show a capacitive multitouch screen (LG Prada was), they were not the first to show pinch-to-zoom (numerous examples, Jeff Han, Diamond Touch, 20 years of research prototypes), they were not the first with double-tap to zoom (there's 2 decades of ZUIs, zoomable-user-interface work that predates this), they were not the first with software to detect phone numbers in text and make them clickable, they were not the first with an uncluttered rounded corner flat, face-plate design (see disallowed Samsung F700 face), they were not the first with universal search (PalmOS had it first on the original palm pilot) and on and on.

And don't give me that crap about "it's not about the idea, it's about the implementation". Apple's pinch to zoom patent, for example, covers implementations on ANY kind of touch surface. It claims are vague like "That gesture adjusts an image in some way", covering not just zoom, scale, and rotation, but any transform of the image.

When someone makes such an absolute claim, that they've never seen any genuine prior art, even though tens of thousands of engineers in forums are pointing to research and devices that are at least arguably prior art and cast Apple's patents in a grey area, to have such an absolutist assertion indicates to me that that person is not interested in fairness, or truth, but on banging the drums of tribalism.

There are for sure, people in the Android camp that are rooting for Android in this case because they like Android devices. I'm not one of them. For me, the issue is about software programming freedom.

Whether it is SOPA/PIPA, or patents being used against open source, attacks on computing freedom in general are more important than Samsung, Android, or Apple. We should not assign away the future of software or networking by granting monopoly power to the largest corporations in the world.

Not when the whole edifice was started by Homebrew hackers to begin with.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#73

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:36 AM UTC

eddieplan9 wrote: post #18

martythemaniak wrote: post #3

The verdict was a monumentally stupid decision and I hope it won't prove to be too harmful in the long run. One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past…

I am all for all inventions must eventually become a commodity . However, if you look at the long term instead of just getting innovation to become cheap commodities available to everybody as soon as possible, some protection should be provided to the inventor so while cool new progressive "stand on the shoulders of giants" changes can keep coming, risky groundbreaking innovations can also emerge once in a while. Wit…

I'm all in for revolutionary changes. Unfortunately, that's not what Apple did in this case.

The iPhone is outstanding design. And that is the extent of their work: with enough computing power, they made the first smartphone that didn't suck. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#74

Post by bmuon » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:37 AM UTC

cheald wrote: post #47

doktrin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to see someone highlight the fact that design patents are inherently illogical, and in fact run altogether counter to the purpose of the patent system. Too often this is obscured, and/or all patents are lumped together as being generally awful. I personally do not ascribe to the notion that all patents should be outright abolished. Design patents, however, should simply not exist. Rounded corners, rectangles…

To be really pedantic about it, it's arguable that they are inventions (someone had to be the first to put four rocks in a row), but it's such a blindly obvious "invention" that it's insanely laughable to afford it any kind of protections at all.

And that's because design, when done right, is obvious.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#75

Post by snogglethorpe » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:39 AM UTC

eddieplan9 wrote: post #18

martythemaniak wrote: post #3

The verdict was a monumentally stupid decision and I hope it won't prove to be too harmful in the long run. One way to look at innovation and progress is that all inventions must eventually become a commodity. Something which is novel, hard, expensive and rare today must become a cheap and ubiquitous commodity tomorrow. It is this process that allows you to "stand on the shoulders of giants" and easily leverage past…

I am all for all inventions must eventually become a commodity . However, if you look at the long term instead of just getting innovation to become cheap commodities available to everybody as soon as possible, some protection should be provided to the inventor so while cool new progressive "stand on the shoulders of giants" changes can keep coming, risky groundbreaking innovations can also emerge once in a while. Wit…

Apple is not a patent troll, but patent trolling is merely one facet of patent abuse.

We need to focus on patent abuse, and Apple most certainly is abusing the recent flaws in the patent system, by patenting things which do not deserve patent protection (because patent protection for these things does not benefit society at large, discourages innovation, and is contra to the original intent of the patent system). The problem, fundamentally, is the system, not Apple, but because they are benefiting from its flaws, it's very likely they will defend them.

Unfortunately this will be quite hard, because Apple (along with other abusers) is also extremely, extremely, rich, and the rich tend to get their way...

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#76

Post by harshreality » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 1:55 AM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #40

MaxwellKennerly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent system is supposed to encourage the commoditization of inventions by using a trade-off: if you invent something novel and useful, you can get a patent that gives you a complete monopoly for a limited amount of time, but in return you have to completely disclose how your invention was made, so that, first, others can see if the intention would be useful for them right now (and thus negotiate a license with…

>so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized You are confusing utility patents and design patents. They are very different things, and design patents are intended for "designs" and the designs of devices. This is not a perversion, this is just you not understanding what patents are ! Secondly you guys constantly claim that these things are not nove…

Design patents on the form of a utilitarian object become functional. People get used to handling an iphone with rounded corners. They get used to volume buttons being in a certain place, on/off buttons being in a certain place, charging/usb ports being in a certain place. Imitating those things strikes me as less of an attempt to "rip off" Apple and more of an attempt to make it easier to use for people who want to switch away from the iphone or ipad for other reasons.

Pagerank is a great example of something that's not supposed to be patentable. It's an algorithm. The claims are "computer implemented method of (description of some algorithm)" and "computer-readable medium that stores instructions (that implement some algorithm)". Absurd. I'd be in favor of someone trying to invalidate that patent. Google's algorithm incorporates so many more signals now than what is identified in the pagerank patent (#6285999). Putting that patent into the public domain wouldn't have any direct impact on Google's market share.

I'd like to know how duckduckgo or any other smaller search engine avoids getting sued. Is it possible to be in the search engine space and avoid infringing on any of the [invalid but granted anyway] patents in that space? The pagerank patent has a massive list of newer, mostly search related, patents in its "referenced by" list (which takes up the vast majority of the page). [1]

I think a lot of people most infuriated by Apple's patent suit against Samsung also think the Pagerank patent is not valid. If you're looking for bias, good luck with your search. I'm against all horrible patents even if they're owned by patent non-aggressors, and even if they're owned by companies I depend on for technology.

[1] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6285999

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#77

Post by cma » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 2:22 AM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #40

MaxwellKennerly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patent system is supposed to encourage the commoditization of inventions by using a trade-off: if you invent something novel and useful, you can get a patent that gives you a complete monopoly for a limited amount of time, but in return you have to completely disclose how your invention was made, so that, first, others can see if the intention would be useful for them right now (and thus negotiate a license with…

>so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized You are confusing utility patents and design patents. They are very different things, and design patents are intended for "designs" and the designs of devices. This is not a perversion, this is just you not understanding what patents are ! Secondly you guys constantly claim that these things are not nove…

Apple didn't invent multi-touch finger recognition via capacitive display. You could literally take the same software written for a display/camera system and use it on a capacitive display. It would have been written before Apple filed for the patent. Apple doesn't have an invention here.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#78

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 2:36 AM UTC

Either Gates foresaw the iPhone or... knew about the Simon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

Oddly enough, I find the folders reminiscent of Xerox's Star.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#79

Post by Steko » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 3:02 AM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #72

nirvana wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized You are confusing utility patents and design patents. They are very different things, and design patents are intended for "designs" and the designs of devices. This is not a perversion, this is just you not understanding what patents are ! Secondly you guys constantly claim that these things are not nove…

There's been ample citation of prior art, everything from prior working and publicly shown prototypes to actually shipping devices. Apple was not the first company to show a capacitive multitouch screen (LG Prada was), they were not the first to show pinch-to-zoom (numerous examples, Jeff Han, Diamond Touch, 20 years of research prototypes), they were not the first with double-tap to zoom (there's 2 decades of ZUIs,…

I love how people think Apple woke up the day before the iphone demo and threw it all together at the last second anything before that day is ironclad prior art.

The light bulb was invented over 120 years ago and they still hand out patents for light bulbs, imagine that.

Re: Apple v. Samsung Verdict: Could Bill Gates Have Patented The iPhone in 1995?

#80

Post by gcr » Tue, Aug 28, 2012, 3:09 AM UTC

tensor wrote: post #38

Cushman wrote: post #10

These articles are getting a bit tiring. > On December 14, 2007, Apple laid claim to the supposed novel invention of “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display,” the formal title of United States Patent 7,469,381 B2 For those of you who just joined us, you do not get patents for ideas , you get patents for inventions. The named patent is not for "List scrolling and docum…

As a minimum test for whether something is non-obvious enough to be patented, I like to think of whether it could have been published in a computer science or UI journal. Similarly, if it has already been published in a journal, then it should be off limits for being patentable. Let's consider multitouch. This invention has already had numerous articles written about it [1]. Thus it is patentable, but Apple is decade…

> Similarly, if it has already been published in a journal, then it should be off limits for being patentable.

It is. Patents can't be issued for something available to the public; this is called "public disclosure" and has bitten lots of researchers who publish before applying for their patent.