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I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process. If yo

I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process. If you consider android innovative, then the patent process saved google the 7+ years Apple spent developing the iPhone and allowed them to get to the market much quicker with a touch screen phone (they'd been previously working on a blackberry style OS for android.) I am the inventor of two software patents. One of which involved solving the visual glitches that appear in online games due to the high latency of playing over a modem. This patent involved a lot of timing issues, and was pretty narrow. However it was claimed on slashdot that we "patented the idea of online gaming!!!!" Later, in a discussion list, they claimed we'd patented the idea of IRC! People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas. In the case of the patents I've been involved in, that is not what has happened. In fact, the portrayal of what was covered by the patent didn't match the patent at all, and it is clear that the people putting forward those patents as examples of bad patents were, frankly misrepresenting them. Every time I've seen a bogus patent claim and actually read the patent, I've found this to be the case as well. (I don't remember the linked-list example, so haven't read that particular one.) I'm not saying that bogus patents don't exist. I'm sure you can get things by the examiner. But the system has a solution for this-- if your patent is bogus then it won't stand up in court. If prior art exists, then you run the risk of spending a lot of money, only to have the patent nullified when someone presents prior art. (And I mean real prior art, not the kind of stuff that people claim is prior art, like the claim that IRC is prior art for solving clock jitter in 3D online games) The patent system, as with anything else that relies on the meager US court system, is expensive... but there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed. Google is certainly capable, both financially and intellectually, of getting a bogus patent thrown out. There's no reason they should be calling on the federal government to intervene with a political "solution" on their behalf... unless they know that there isn't actually prior art and the patents are, in fact, legitimate. In fact, I think googles call for reform is an admission that the patents aren't bogus after all. Edit: I didn't change the text above, but want to clarify- I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents, though not named as an inventor (I didn't realize the significance at the time.) For the other I am the sole inventor, but it hasn't been brought forth as "bogus" in a public forum yet, though, for those who don't read it carefully, they could easily make the claim. This is why I'm being vague about the specific patents. Previous experience on Hacker News tells me that if I wasn't vague the topic would turn to how those patents are so obviously "bogus" (to people who haven't read more than the headline)... and well, frankly my name is on them. I really don't to be discriminated against in business for having a pr-intellectual property position. The current climate makes that fear seem pretty legitimate.

nl 15y ago
I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process. Seriously? I can see you might say Android would not have shipped a touch-screen version if the iPhone hadn't first, but I can't see the argument that public patents helped with that much at all. Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it.
- gjm11 15y ago
  > Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it. I can't comment on whatever patents Apple may have, because I haven't read them, but the above is surely an oversimplification. Let me describe how a typical capacitive touch sensor works. It's basically a grid of wires, one set running horizontally and the other vertically. (They aren't really wires, and the difference matters a lot for multiple reasons, but we can ignore it here.) For each wire, you can measure (kinda) whether a user's finger is near to it, and how near if so. (Because the finger will couple to it capacitively, which changes how the wire responds when you wiggle its voltage up and down.) So you use the horizontal wires to measure where the finger is vertically, and the vertical wires to measure where it is horizontally. So far, so good. Now you want to make it work with multiple fingers. Problem 1: if you have a finger at position (3,3) and another at (10,10), what you see is (crudely) lots of coupling to wires 3 and 10 on each axis. But that is also what you'd see from a finger at (3,10) and another at (10,3). How do you tell the difference? Problem 2: if you have a finger at (3,3) and another at (3.5,10) then you can see the y-coordinates clearly enough but the signals on the x-measuring wires are going to be hard to disentangle. These are not trivial problems to solve. (I know of a few approaches. I don't know what Apple actually do. I have worked for a company that makes capacitive position sensors, but not for Apple. Nothing I've said here is anyone's trade secret.) The more-obvious things you might do to try to solve them all have substantial difficulties. And of course these aren't the only difficulties in making a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen. (Making a decent capacitive touchscreen at all isn't trivial, though it's pretty much a solved problem nowadays.) So this is exactly the sort of situation in which, in an ideal world with a sensible patent system, patents might be the Right Thing: there's a tricky technical problem, it's solvable but you can't just Do The Obvious Thing and have it work, so having someone find a good solution, publish it, but still be able to get commercial advantage from it seems like a pretty good outcome for everyone. (Note: this does not constitute an endorsement of how patents currently are in the real world.)

nl 15y ago

I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process. Seriously? I can see you might say Android would not have shipped a touch-screen version if the iPhone hadn't first, but I can't see the argument that public patents helped with that much at all. Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it.

gjm11 15y ago
> Once you've seen a multi-touch touchscreen work, it isn't hard to work out how to make a capacitive touchscreen do it. I can't comment on whatever patents Apple may have, because I haven't read them, but the above is surely an oversimplification. Let me describe how a typical capacitive touch sensor works. It's basically a grid of wires, one set running horizontally and the other vertically. (They aren't really wires, and the difference matters a lot for multiple reasons, but we can ignore it here.) For each wire, you can measure (kinda) whether a user's finger is near to it, and how near if so. (Because the finger will couple to it capacitively, which changes how the wire responds when you wiggle its voltage up and down.) So you use the horizontal wires to measure where the finger is vertically, and the vertical wires to measure where it is horizontally. So far, so good. Now you want to make it work with multiple fingers. Problem 1: if you have a finger at position (3,3) and another at (10,10), what you see is (crudely) lots of coupling to wires 3 and 10 on each axis. But that is also what you'd see from a finger at (3,10) and another at (10,3). How do you tell the difference? Problem 2: if you have a finger at (3,3) and another at (3.5,10) then you can see the y-coordinates clearly enough but the signals on the x-measuring wires are going to be hard to disentangle. These are not trivial problems to solve. (I know of a few approaches. I don't know what Apple actually do. I have worked for a company that makes capacitive position sensors, but not for Apple. Nothing I've said here is anyone's trade secret.) The more-obvious things you might do to try to solve them all have substantial difficulties. And of course these aren't the only difficulties in making a multi-touch capacitive touchscreen. (Making a decent capacitive touchscreen at all isn't trivial, though it's pretty much a solved problem nowadays.) So this is exactly the sort of situation in which, in an ideal world with a sensible patent system, patents might be the Right Thing: there's a tricky technical problem, it's solvable but you can't just Do The Obvious Thing and have it work, so having someone find a good solution, publish it, but still be able to get commercial advantage from it seems like a pretty good outcome for everyone. (Note: this does not constitute an endorsement of how patents currently are in the real world.)