Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

Well surely any demonstrations of these ideas by other parties weren't thrown together at the last second either, so what's your point?

Even in the worst case, they hint at the possibility of independent invention; imagine that.

But people aren't patenting lightbulb interactions, they are patenting specific manufactured implementations.

Look at it this way, there were definitely people doing pinch-to-zoom that looks absolutely identical to the way Apple is doing it from the user's point of view. Jeff Han's demo is a perfect example of it. For years, many people have been doing demos like this, but they've been doing it on big bulky setups like projected-desks, or in Han's example, using total internal reflection.

Apple just made a different implementation, using the same interaction gestures, on a capacitive screen. From a software point of view, the implementations are rather trivial and don't differ much except via how you obtain the input (e.g. capacitive, FTIR, cameras, etc) The main difference is shrinking down the whole thing so it fits on a phone.

The reason why this was possible in 2007 had nothing to do with Apple's software and everything to do with the ability to manufacture a capacitive screen that has the right sensitivity, accuracy, cost, weight, and power to fit into a phone.

Apple deserves engineering props for this. But they do not get credit for inventing pinch-to-zoom nor the capacitive screen. Both of these inventions came prior.

If Apple invents an entirely new kind of touch screen and an entirely new way of manufacturing it, you could argue they deserve a patent.

But taking what existed before, pinch-to-zoom on projection displays, and implementing it on a different screen does not deserve patent protection, anymore than taking an existing business method (e.g. 'selling flower bouquets by phone', adding the text 'via web site' or 'via mobile app') and slightly tweaking the medium in which the business is done to obtain another monopoly.

Should 'internet shopping cart' be allowed a patent when real world shopping carts already existed? It's crazy absurd.

If Apple's patent had even been more specific like "pinch to zoom, but on this particular kind of screen" I'd even have more sympathy for the argument, because at least other people could do the same thing Apple did: copy an existing idea and apply it to a new circumstance. Samsung and others could innovate by creating new types of displays, maybe using microscopic cameras to track your hands like minority report or something.

But granting a patent to Apple for pinch to zoom on any kind of screen? Sorry, it goes too far.

I'm sure several commenters will soon note, the LG Prada was not multitouch, the Prada II was multitouch, but it came out after the iPhone. The Prada's "touch" was a really fake touch... like it would show buttons but you would have to press elsewhere to act on it. The iPhone was the first multitouch phone according to Wikipedia.

It's not that difficult to read the claims. Apple's patent covers distinguishing between pinch-to-zoom and scroll gestures based on whether one or two figures are touching. Prior art on pinch-to-zoom seems to show scrollbars for scrolling instead of single-finger-to-drag.

The simple workaround to apple's patent: allow two-finger drag. One or Two fingers close together (or moving in parallelt) is a drag. Two or more fingers far apart is a zoom. As long as there's no line of code that goes "if one finger down then it's a drag else if two fingers down it's a zoom" then the code doesn't infringe the apple patent. Easy peasy.

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