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

http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2012/08/articles/attorney/patent-infringement/apple-v-samsung/

93 98 14 years ago

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 technologies to produce newer, better ones.

Here we see Apple (and to a lesser extent, MS, RIM and other parties) actively fighting this process. None of these parties want touchscreen smartphones to become cheap commodities available to everybody - there's a lot less money to be made this way. Android is Google's attempt to commoditize the smartphone and is probably responsible for erasing tens of billions from the market caps of other companies, the flipside of which is that today tens of millions of people all over the world have access to technology that would otherwise not have.

This is why I think Android is ultimately a force for good and I hope it's simply too late to put the genie back in the bottle and that this verdict won't have a lasting impact.

MaxwellKennerly5• 14 years ago

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 you) and, second, once you're patent expires society can easily reach for and utilize your invention.

Unfortunately, that process has been turned on its head, so that patents are routinely granted for designs, devices, and methods that are already effectively commoditized or simply don't work patent protection. The iPhone's design is undeniably visually appealing and user-friendly, but it is by no means an "invention." It is a form of user interface, something that has already been held to not be patentable, and it is a form of branding, something that is protected, but through trademark law, not patent law.

I find this situation disturbing for the same reason I find it disturbing that pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than they do on research and the belt. Consumer electronics companies should not be investing the bulk of their resources playing legal games with one another over non-disruptive "inventions" like the idea to use asynchronous processing to make sure video and audio lines up. They should be using their resources making phones that are better and more alluring than one another.

doktrin• 14 years ago

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 and UI elements in rows of 4 are simply not inventions.

jeremyarussell• 14 years ago

I love how people like to forget about that, software patents never carry the actual code in the patent, so I can't see how they are really divulging how everything works without the code. As it stands when a patent for software finally does expire, no one gets how it worked except for those who had already re-engineered it.

Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this seem a bit strange?

nirvana5• 14 years ago

>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 novel, yet you are never able to provide good prior art. Yes, here, 11 years later, this stuff is commoditized. Mostly because android ripped off the work Apple demoed in January 2007 and brought it to market.

That doesn't mean in January 2007 it wasn't novel. I have constantly seen you guys claim that other people did this before, but I've never seen a single instance of genuine prior art. You guys cite movies (not understanding what prior art is, or what patents are) and you cite demos of completely different technologies (like microsoft's surface which uses cameras.)

So, you're projecting a completely false characterization of the situation and then saying its "bad" or has been perverted.

This feels like political propaganda to me. I notice that the anti-Patent movement started with google's lawyers letter and in defense of android which is a blatent ripoff of Apple technology.

So, lets see google donate Pagerank to the public domain, eh? They only have 6 years or so left on it anyway.... why haven't they?

bsphil• 14 years ago

Also, the evolution time of tech is remarkably fast. 10-20 years (I'm not sure how long these patents are valid) is an incredibly long time in computing to hold a patent on a small feature. Look at where tech devices/interfaces were 20 years ago. Prototyping something digital is far faster, and things can be changed and refined at a rate that physical objects just can't match.

lines2• 14 years ago

Note that the jury found that Samsung diluted Apple's trade dress, which is part of trademark law, not just infringed its design patents.

timr2• 14 years ago

"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 what the system was set up to do.

Patents aren't intended to ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest consumer gadgets; they're intended to provide inventors with incentives to produce non-trivial inventions, by granting them temporary monopolies on their ideas. To argue that Apple (and Microsoft, et al.) are wrong because they're artificially inflating prices on their patented products is to miss the entire point of the debate.

martythemaniak2• 14 years ago

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 the iPhone and forgone the massive revenue and profit stream.

More broadly, I often see people decrying that the poor have access to LCD TVs, ACs or decent smartphones, with the point being that they should stop being so demanding. But this is exactly what technological progress looks like - innovations which are expensive and exclusive are useful demos, but they don't become world-changers until they become widespread.

So yes, the patent system should ensure that consumers have rock-bottom prices on the latest gadgets, and any other technology. Otherwise, it is simply stifling innnovation.

Goronmon2• 14 years ago

Call me crazy, but I think we're seeing Apple using the process to defend their inventions, which is exactly what the system was set up to do.

What exactly are they defending their "inventions" from? Other companies making competing products seems to be the biggest thing.

Apple is an extremely successful business. What other incentives are necessary for companies like Apple to want to innovate?

eddieplan9• 14 years ago

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. Without effective patent protection, everybody will resort to do safer small-step improvements instead of spending years and billions to build (and market) something vastly different from what people are familiar with. In other words, with zero patent protection, you will still see cars getting better mileage, but you won't see an electrical car.

If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

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.

snogglethorpe• 14 years ago

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...

twoodfin4• 14 years ago

...with a patent application granted after a year-long review by the patent office that apparently didn’t include watching this scene from 2002’s Minority Report, where Tom Cruise does all of those things and more with a spiffy 3D interface.

This is silly, as is the Gates analogy. I assure you, if anyone manages to develop a practical holodeck, they will be able to patent the hell out of it. Star Trek is not prior art.

Practical is the key word. Lots of ideas sound great but are difficult or impossible to implement. Patents protect the implementation, not the idea.

tjoff• 14 years ago

But not nearly as silly as the patents themselves...

MaxwellKennerly5• 14 years ago

How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen?

Answer: not hard at all. In fact, it has been trivial for years. The hard part is implementing it in a cost-effective, reliable manner — something that Apple did with industry-leading industrial design/manufacturing efforts, not through patented technologies. But that's not what this case was about.

If this case involved Samsung bribing Apple employees to reveal the secrets at the Foxconn plants in China, then I would completely agree with you that that is wrong and that Samsung has broken the law by stealing a competitive technology. But that's not what's happening here; ironically, Apple is deriving part of its competitive advantage from using Samsung!

What's happening here is that Apple is suing Samsung over silly, trivial, and peripheral issues that played a modest (if any) role in the iPhone's success, silly, trivial, and peripheral matters that, unfortunately, have been granted the strongest property right in American law, which is a monopoly of their direct or indirect use by anybody.

twoodfin4• 14 years ago

How hard do you think it is to implement scrolling, the rubber band effect, and pinch-to-zoom on a display screen? Answer: not hard at all.

So surely there were dozens of devices with these features (I assume you mean inertial scrolling) prior to the patents being granted?

This stuff is not trivial: Only a handful of multitouch devices even existed prior to the iPhone, and exploiting that technology, along with improvements in mobile hardware generally, was hard, or smartphones prior to 2007 wouldn't have sucked so very badly.

SteveArmstrong• 14 years ago

They shouldn't be able to patent the idea of a holodeck, which I thought was the main argument in this article. The mechanics of using force fields (or whatever) would still be the subject of the patents if they were novel.

danielweber• 14 years ago

The depiction of a holodeck would not stop someone from getting a utility patent for a holodeck.

But the appearance of an identical work in fiction should stop a design patent. So if you wanted to get a design patent on a duplicate of a PADD, Star Trek would count as prior art.

twoodfin4• 14 years ago

I'm fairly certain most of the posting's examples center around the utility patents under dispute.

philwelch2• 14 years ago

In fact, Paramount has been awarded design patents for Star Trek phasers, uniforms, and starships: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek_design_patents

felipeko• 14 years ago

You don't need to develop neither have a pratical thing to have a patent over it on USA.

You can read a time machine patent here: http://www.google.com/patents?id=hNHIAAAAEBAJ&printsec=f...

If you ever happen to develop this machine, this person who just imagined it can ban you from selling. So tell me, who do you think worked harder on this invention? And why would this paper (the patent) be worth more than the real invention?

SubFuze• 14 years ago

If you ever really developed a time machine, you could go back in time and either pay off (with money made from placing bets on events you know the outcome of) or in some other way prevent the original filer from submitting his claim.

mratzloff3• 14 years ago

It's an application, not a patent. Anyone can apply for a patent, but they're not always granted.

mindslight2• 14 years ago

> Patents protect the implementation, not the idea

That's certainly the supposed goal, but it clearly does not match reality. What actually happens is a company implements a long thought-of idea using modern technology, and then writes a trolling-ready patent which claims the entire idea by way of obvious and extraneous details.

This is a major reason why nobody bothers to read the patent claims when discussing bad patents - they're basically the synopsis of the patent combined over and over with straightforward technical 'chum' to make them seem specific and complex.

Cushman2• 14 years ago

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 document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touch-screen display", which is an obvious idea. It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.

Now, one could well argue that that specific method also is too obvious, non-novel, or trivial to deserve patent protection, but one had better be bringing some evidence to the table for that argument. This whole "your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it, but not so obvious that it ever occurred to anyone else" feels like shaky moral ground to me.

MaxwellKennerly5• 14 years ago

But it had occurred to other people, and lots of them. You can even watch Tom Cruise pinch-to-zoom, and scroll by waiving his hands.

Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:

US5844547 May 9, 1995 Dec 1, 1998 Fujitsu Limited Apparatus for manipulating an object displayed on a display device by using a touch screen

US6567102 Nov 25, 2001 May 20, 2003 Compal Electronics Inc. Touch screen using pressure to control the zoom ratio

US20050168488 Jan 31, 2005 Combination tool that zooms in, zooms out, pans, rotates, draws, or manipulates during a drag

All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding into some arguably-new form, and, viola, they had a patent for something everybody was doing.

I doubt you really contend that, in late 2007, Apple invented scrolling and zooming with your fingers, or that you contend that Apple's implementation was substantially different (and both novel and useful) from those prior forms. If you don't contend either of those, then why, exactly, should Apple have a patent over their implementation, which was at best modestly different from prior implementations?

otterley• 14 years ago

Are you honestly contending that if anything depicted in a sci-fi movie cannot qualify as patentable subject matter when actually implemented? E.g., if someone invents a matter transporter as depicted in Star Trek, the inventor cannot patent it?

mratzloff3• 14 years ago

It was apparently novel enough that a number of companies and open source projects have now implemented similar UI feedback where they didn't have it before.

nirvana5• 14 years ago

>Look at the prior art in the patent itself, e.g.:

Since the patent itself cites prior art, obviously the patent isn't patenting the same thing as the prior art.

>All Apple did was jumble these same longstanding .... was at best modestly different from prior implementations

You have provided no evidence or reason to believe this. In fact, I've seen this claim hundreds of times, and never seen anyone even attempt to provide a defense for this assertion.

Yet the evidence at hand shows the opposite- the patent was reviewed for a significant period of time by the patent office. Further, this isn't Apple's rodeo. After the Microsoft loss, Apple has a great deal of incentive to make sure that their patents are solid.

So despite evidence to the contrary, you just repeatedly assert this position because it helps your ideological position. But we need more than mere assertion.

In fact, your assertion isn't really consistent with history. To make this obvious lets change the context. Imagine it is motorola being sued by Bell:

Graham demonstrated and patented the telephone, therefore phones are longstanding and the cellphone is just "modestly different from prior phones".

The iPhone doesn't have cameras three feet behind the screen taking photos of your fingers. But you would have us believe that a patent on using that method of touch interface means that apple didn't invent nothing for the iPhone.

You're relying on the ubiquity of copies of Apples devices to make an emotional appeal claiming these things were obvious.... yet this is post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Before 2007, Android was working on a blackberry ripoff, not a touch UI.

And your argument fundamentally misrepresents what patents are.

Cushman2• 14 years ago

Sorry, it's not clear to me which one of those patents you feel is prior art for Apple's specific claim of a method for scrolling on a touch-screen display where a distinct area past the edge of the document is displayed and then removed when the touch ends. Can you clarify?

Joeri2• 14 years ago

How do you know it wouldn't have occurred to someone else working in the same field? I find the assumption of the patent system that the patented innovations wouldn't have happened without being patentable to be fundamentally flawed. That may be true for fields with huge R&D cost, like medicine, but in fields with near-zero R&D cost like software I find it hard to argue for the necessity of any sort of patent protection.

nirvana5• 14 years ago

And yet, repeatedly in its history, Apple has come out with major new inventions, while its competitors seem to just ship the same old stuff.

The primary improvement for most PCs has always been the work of Microsoft or Intel, not Dell, HP, et al. Yet Apple has worked to actually improve the design and technology of the PC itself.

The truth is, genuine innovation is exceedingly rare. Nobody was working to revolutionize the cellphone industry except Apple. Apple was the only one who cared, and that's why they caught everyone flat footed.

Anyway, patents don't require that nobody else be working on the same thing you are, quite the opposite: patents are designed to get everyone working on this new invention, by publishing it.

Two people who happen to come up with the same method at the same time is so rare I cannot think of a single example... and if they did, there would still likely be differences that result in both getting patents (even if one of them gets the patent on part of the solution because he files first.)

If samsung had been doing the fundamental research that would allow them to release an iPhone type device in 2008, Apple being to the patent office first would not have been a problem for them--- because the phone they produce in 2008 would have been so different because they would have had 5-7 years of working in isolation with the priorities of a korean company and sensibility of korean culture.

They would have produced very different solutions to these same problems if they had been working on them.

Instead Samsung was not working on a touch UI, not even trying to do novel work, and simply decided to copy apple thinking the litigation risk was worth it.

tensor3• 14 years ago

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 decades too late. That it can be used with any input device that supplies multiple touch inputs is obvious. You cannot write a paper about that.

Can you write an HCI paper about the disappearing scroll bars? I would be a bit surprised, although possibly. I imagine if you did, it wouldn't be a very prominent paper or in a very good journal.

In any case, I think that an invention being publishable is a minimum. There are also many publications that do not represent techniques so innovative as to deserve a short term monopoly.

Also, your distinction of ideas vs invention is not shared by books that describe good patent drafting. On the contrary, the book Invention Analysis and Claiming [2] opens with:

"Part I - Identifying the Invention - takes as its central premise that an invention is not a thing, but a concept."

[1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html [2] http://books.google.ca/books/about/Invention_Analysis_and_Cl...

nirvana5• 14 years ago

Repeat after me: Patents do not cover ideas. Patents do not cover features. Writing about an idea or a feature in a computer science journal is not prior art.

Star Trek has the warp drive. So, if someone invents the technology to give us a warp drive, you think that it isn't novel because we've seen it on TV going back to the 1960s!

gcr• 14 years ago

> 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.

mindslight2• 14 years ago

> you do not get patents for ideas, you get patents for inventions

That's how it's supposed to work, which is a large part of why people are up in arms about the broken patent system. A patent on an idea and a patent on any possible implementation of that idea are effectively the same thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440807

> It is for a specific claimed method of enabling that task, involving the display of an area outside of and distinct from the document or list, which then disappears when the scrolling input ends.

That supposed specificity is nothing but a way of describing an aspect of the general idea in terms of generic implementation details. Any implementation will have some part that can be construed as similar ("they're just generating the 'area' on demand", etc)

wtetzner2• 14 years ago

"your invention is so obvious that you shouldn't be incentivized for inventing it..."

Isn't selling iPhones enough of an incentive?

nirvana5• 14 years ago

Special effects are not prior art. Demonstrating a feature does not give you prior art neither.

Patents cover implementations. Two people can invent two different methods to do the same thing. It is not the case that the first patent gives them a monopoly on the features.

Just because the internal combustion engine (eg: with pistons) exists, doesn't mean that you can't patent a rotary engine (like Mazda did). Both are internal combustion engines, but the rotary engine uses a novel method.

So long as your position requires pretending that patents are something other than they aren't your arguments are going to be logical fallacies.

This article is thus nonsense.

learc834• 14 years ago

>Special effects are not prior art.

Special effects can be prior art, if they are sufficiently descriptive. Just like drawings, sketches, and textual descriptions can be prior art.

dougmccune2• 14 years ago

Can someone explain to me (like I'm 5) exactly what, besides the general concept of list scrolling with bounce-back to indicate end of list reached, it was that Samsung copied from the 7,469,381 patent? The Apple fans here get pissed when someone argues that Apple is trying to patent an obvious "idea" and they claim that the general idea of bounce-back scrolling isn't patented, but instead it's a very specific implementation. And yet I've never heard an explanation of what the technical details are that specifically are patented. I've tried reading the patent, but my head exploded.

So please, for the love of god, can someone explain the non obvious implementation details that were copied?

If I were to see someone use bounce-back scrolling, or if I saw it in a movie, or even if I heard someone explain the idea, I'd go off and code something up. My amateur implementation would use the general principles of inertia and physics. Is there a way to do that without violating this patent? Because I'm tired of people yelling about how the idea of intertial bounce-back scrolling isn't being patented, only a specific implementation is, and yet I have no idea how that's possible. If that's true I should be able to implement the same general idea without violating the patent, right? How?

lines2• 14 years ago

When reading patents, only the claims matter. In this case, anything that matches claim 19, which is anything that does bounce-back scrolling the way iOS does it, is infringing.

dougmccune2• 14 years ago

I get that the claims of patents are supposedly very specific, and what I'm asking is if someone can actually explain why and how this particular patent has anything non-obvious in its claims (without all the ridiculous patent jargon).

I've just read claim 19 about 5 times. I also studied Figure 5, which seems to lay out the process in a way that's a little easier to understand.

I have absolutely no idea how what is described in claim 19 is not the "idea" of inertial/bounce-back scrolling.

As far as I can understand, the layperson's explanation of claim 19 goes something like this: drag some content on a touchscreen at the speed that the dragging finger is moving, once you hit the end of the scrollable range, start slowing down the speed at which the item moves, and show a different background to make it clear you've reached the end of the list, once the finger releases move the list back into place.

I'm trying sentence by sentence to translate the words in the patent claim to english that I can understand. And it sounds to me like this is the general idea of this method of scrolling. There are no specifics, no specific easing algorithms, no specific method of tracking the finger's movement, no method of actually implementing this at all.

codeka• 14 years ago

This may be slightly off-topic, I'm not sure, but I was just reading Apple's patent on pinch-to-zoom[1], and in claim 8 (which is the one the jury were instructed to rule on) it says:

"determining whether the event object invokes a scroll or gesture operation by distinguishing between a single input point applied to the touch-sensitive display that is interpreted as the scroll operation and two or more input points applied to the touch-sensitive display that are interpreted as the gesture operation"

Now, I don't know how patents works, but on my Galaxy Nexus, you can scroll with two fingers, so this part about determining whether its a scroll or "gesture" by the number of touch points seems to work differently to what is described in the patent.

Does that mean the implementation in the Galaxy Nexus is non-infringing? I mean, if patents are supposed to protect the implementation of an idea, and the implementation is actually different then surely its not infringing?

Now admittedly I only tested a Galaxy Nexus, which is stock Android, so maybe Samsung made their version in TouchWiz different. Or maybe the implementation changed in later versions of Android, I'm not sure...

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US7844915

ender7• 14 years ago

The sad fact is that UI patents are even more bullshit than software patents. Does Apple have the legal high ground here? Yes, they have a patent on rubberbanding scrolling (among others). Arguments about 'prior art' and blah blah are pointless because they have been granted a patent on a UI design -- an idea, not an implementation, and not an invention. Yes, that's not what a patent is supposed to be, but that's what they've been given.

Was it a good idea? Yes. Should it be protected by a patent? No. I'm sorry, but no (and I say this as a UX designer).

Patents exist to incentivize effort. I would really like to hear someone argue that, without UI patent protection, Apple would have never bothered to implement rubberbanding scrolling. Even typing it sounds ridiculous.

veemjeem8• 14 years ago

I guess you need to google "design patents". I feel like 95% of the people on HN don't know the difference between the two. FWIW, philip morris patented rounded corners on their cigarette boxes. If you think that's crazy, you should see the ones filed by Gucci. Maybe design patents should be renamed since everyone confuses them with utility patents.

jussij2• 14 years ago

> smartphones in which the objects on the screen roll around and bounce back like you’re spinning the Wheel of Fortune.

What I don't understand about this 'bounce back' feature is that here in Australia we have software based poker machines (Vegas style slot machines to the yanks out there) and they have had this bounce feature for decades.

Edit: To help people visualise, what I mean is the reels of the poker machine spin in one direction and when they finally stop spinning they do a very short bounce back in the other direction.

rbanffy2• 14 years ago

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.

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

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