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HTC wins swipe to unlock patent dispute against Apple
- rodion_89 14y agoI'm curious, can Neonode now sue Apple over the use of "swipe to unlock"?
- felipeko 14y agoThey probably didn't believe this "technology" was worth a patent.
- zmmmmm 14y agoJust like Google probably would not have even contemplated patenting a search that draws on multiple data sources back in 2004 (it's actually kind of hard to conceive of search in the modern world that doesn't!) - but Apple came along and patented that. I'm coming to a belief that the patent system's brokenness is hugely amplified by the presumption of validity given by the courts. You can either have a very rigorous up front patent examination system and a presumption thereafter of validity, or you can have a loose / quick review process and a balanced treatment in the courts (no presumption either way). But you can't have a patent system where > 50% of patents fail to be proved valid when challenged in the courts (which is how the current system is) AND a presumption of validity. If I could change one thing about the patent system, I would probably introduce a "vexatious litigant" style restriction that said if your patents fail to survive court challenges > 50% of the time then you lose the presumption of validity on ALL your patents. That would put an immediate stop to all these BS cases that are basically just trying to trip up / delay competitors with patents that they know will fail eventually under scrutiny.
- fpgeek 14y ago> Just like Google probably would not have even contemplated patenting a search that draws on multiple data sources back in 2004 (it's actually kind of hard to conceive of search in the modern world that doesn't!) - but Apple came along and patented that. Now just think about Google's (and Samsung's and HTC's and ...) probable reaction to discovering they can be blindsided by not patenting something they thought was obvious. If you think things are bad now, just wait a few years.
- vidarh 14y agoApple's patent on multi-source search appears to involve search of local and remote sources. There are far older examples of multi-source search that live entirely on the server (e.g. MetaCrawler from '94) But that just makes matters worse - once you have search over multiple sources, and you have search on the desktop, and you have web based search, the multiple sources bit is a small iteration.
- mrkmcknz 14y agoIt infuriates me when I hear of these 'swipe to unlock' and 'pull to refresh' patents that actually get issued. Defensive use only when patents as pathetic as these are used is all well and good. Wasn't the patent system created to protect real innovation? A fucking slide to unlock gesture is not innovation. Now let me go and patent that 'dance to pay' gesture.
- rorrr 14y ago> 'dance to pay' gesture Strippers already have prior art on that one.
- flyinRyan 14y agoNo, that's dance to receive. Having to do the work and pay is pretty unique, though it has probably been thought of before...
- da_n 14y ago> A fucking slide to unlock gesture is not innovation. Come on, yes the patent system needs reform but inventions do need to be protected/nurtured. Disregard the details here, and when I hear people having little rants it sounds like they advocate a kind of anarchist cookbook approach to innovation saying 'fuck it, you just make it better than them, who cares if the ting you worked on for 5 years was copied in 5 minutes by xyz, just make it better than them you litigious assholes'. Suppose I said this about your fucking homework? Hey, nice answers you put in there, I just copied them because they were obvious. Fuck you. So yeah, you say swipe to unlock is obvious, tell me what the fuck you invented that was 'obvious'? Nope? Nothing huh? Nada? Oh well, guess that makes you an expert or something.
- fpgeek 14y agoPatents aren't like copying someone's homework - that's copyright. It's important to remember, there's no suggestion in any of these cases that anyone stole Apple's source code. There isn't even an allegation that they did any nontrivial reverse-engineering of an iPhone (it clearly wasn't necessary). Instead, at most, people saw a behavior and independently re-implemented it (and often might not have even seen the behavior first - many of these patents date far back before the iPhone - to the point where "infringing" implementations existed well before the iPhone), without studying the implementation at all. That's like... getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject (when they might not have even known the subject of your paper and even if they did it wasn't cheating).
- azakai 14y ago> The judge said that HTC's "arc unlock" feature - which also involves a predefined gesture along a path shown on-screen - would have infringed Apple's technology had it not been for a device released in 2004. No, no, no. It is clearly obvious, the fact that there happens to also be prior art just adds insult to injury. If there had not been prior art, it would still be a frivolous, trivial patent. This is exactly what's wrong with the patent system - you don't need prior art to tell you something is obvious and should be unpatentable.
- vibrunazo 14y agoI perfectly agree. But how do you prove in court that it was obvious? Most countries do have that paragraph in their legislation stating patents need to be non-obvious to someone of similar skill. But you almost never see that being tested in court, because how the hell do you prove it? One of the big problems with the patent system is that it tries to implement solutions that are not viable in practice. There's no good, plain, clear, and unbiased way to prove a patent is indeed trivial. Even if we us hackers look at each other and agree that it's trivial. I'd love to live in a world where innovators of non trivial solutions were rewarded money from others, without punishing these other innovators. But that's not possible to implement in practice!
- azakai 14y agoI don't think this is so difficult. Something has to be nontrivial to practitioners in the relevant field, so just survey a few random software engineers - not some clerks at the patent office. Pay them for their time, obviously, and that cost should come from the patent application fee. If this were done the vast majority of software patents existing today would not have been granted. Which is probably why the system wouldn't do it.
- vibrunazo 14y agoI really don't think it would be that simple to make sure that process in unbiased. And that the additional costs wouldn't make patenting exclusive to billionaire companies. But I very sincerely hope you're right :)
- studio625 14y agoWhat would the world look like if these patent trolls got their wishes?
- laic 14y agoPeople's Republic of China?
- drcube 14y agoLike the 20th century, with IBM and Ma Bell. Or else every industry will be just like the current monopoly and duopoly dominated electric utility, POTS phone service, and ISP industries. Once a company has staked a place in a new industry, every one else will barred from competing.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- oraj 14y ago"We remain disappointed that Apple continues to favour competition in the courtroom over competition in the marketplace." This. I do think that Apple is an innovative company which creates great products. But this does not in anyways justifies its actions in courtrooms all over the world trying to exploit a system that is clearly outdated.
- azylman 14y agoI struggle to think of Apple as innovative - I consider them iterative. They DO make amazing, fantastic products. With few exceptions, however, their products tend to be things that are iterative improvements over already existing technology. For example, iPhone and iPad - both of these concepts (smartphone and tablet) already existed. Only, a lot of them were shitty before Apple came along. They basically swept through and fixed everything that was wrong with these devices, but it's not like they came up with the idea for a tablet or a smartphone.
- mkaltenecker 14y agoThey basically swept through and fixed everything that was wrong with these devices a.k.a. innovation.
- rayiner 14y agoTouch versus stylus wasn't iterative. It was revolutionary. "Swipe to unlock" wouldn't even have been practical in the prior resistive touchscreen/stylus paradigm.
- Jaecen 14y agoApple didn't invent the touch paradigm, not even for "swipe to unlock", as demonstrated by the Neonode N1 mentioned in the ruling.
- koide 14y agoApple doesn't create new product areas, it grabs an area and disrupts the status quo by offering significantly improved user experiences. In that pursuit they have really innovated in various areas, from UI design to manufacturing to logistics. The fact they haven't created a new product area by themselves doesn't mean they don't innovate at all.
- dataminer 14y agoFollowing video of Neonode N1 (cited in the article) shows slide to unlock feature predating the iphone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0&t=4m3s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0&t=4m3s
- robomartin 14y agoI like the "yes" and "no" gestures.
- scott_w 14y agoInteresting how "prior art" can require a product to be released in a country to apply. So, an international company can just see what is developed in another market, copy it and patent it in their own country? I can understand this being the case in 1912, but we have the world wide web. Surely this concept is out of date?
- molmalo 14y agoAs something I read the other day stated (I think it was that Stratfor monograph that was posted here, but I'm not very sure), it looks like the US is using its patent system as a means to protect their global interests against foreign companies/countries. So, "if it's not here, you can still patent it" is a way to protect their interests, and then use that new patents all over the world. But as this case proves, maybe that strategy works against smaller adversaries, but the ones with big pockets can still prove it wrong. > So, an international company can just see what is developed in another market, copy it and patent it in their own country? Multinational companies are global when things go nice, (moving money around the world, minimizing taxes, and so on), but then they remember their homeland when they can take advantage from that.
- tedunangst 14y agoI'm not sure I understand what you're saying. You're saying a company can obtain a patent in the US and then use that patent in other jurisdictions?
- molmalo 14y agoDepends on the treaties signed by those countries.
- novalis 14y ago"Apple declined to comment on the specifics of the case. Instead it re-issued an earlier statement, saying: "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."" This reaks of disastrous lazy damage control PR.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoIt'll probably work though. I can't imagine someone falsely claiming to own real property that's actually public, suing someone over it and getting the case thrown out of court and then saying "We think going to the beach/park/nature reserve is healthy, but tourists should create their own original recreation areas and not steal ours" without being laughed at for sheer cheek but for whatever reason it works with "intellectual" property all the time.
- prawn 14y agoWas that a statement from Apple or Neonode? ;)
- nickzoic 14y agoXerox PARC :-)
- beedogs 14y agoIs Baghdad Bob running their PR department now? Jesus.
- flyinRyan 14y agoI don't think Apple do damage control PR. Just like with the antenna scandal with the iPhone 4: Apple just honestly tells you how they feel. Apple never cared about "swipe to unlock", that's obviously silly. But they do feel (rightly IMO) that they've completely revolutionized how smart phones and tablets are made with everyone else just making cheap versions of what they came up with. They don't have a way to go to court and get people to stop making cheap rip offs of their stuff (so long as they're sufficiently different) so they're trying to find anything that will stick. A ridiculous system will produce ridiculous interactions.
- MichaelApproved 14y agoI see a lot of comments saying swipe to unlock is obvious but I disagree. Just because something is simple doesn't mean it's obvious. Now, that doesn't mean I think Apple deserves a patent for swipe to unlock but I do think people are mixing up the terms "obvious" and "simple".
- molmalo 14y agoWell, the judge addressed this. The Neonode N1 showed a padlock on its screen with the words "right sweep to unlock" when it was in its protected mode. A later version replaced the text with an arrow. The judge said it would have been an "obvious" improvement for the developers to have offered users visual feedback in the form of a "slider" in the way that Apple later used. He added that the concept of a "slider" was not new since it had already appeared in Microsoft's CE system. As a result Apple's claim to the innovation was rejected. The Neonode N1 already had a swipe to unlock, just that it lacked visual feedback. But from that point, providing feedback would have been obvious.
- ajross 14y agoFirst off: the use of "obvious" in the law is technical, and not a synonym for "simple". It means obvious to a learned practitioner in the field. If you handed a touchscreen UI to 100 handset designers in 2007 and asked them to come up with a unlock mechnism, you really think that none of them would have invented a slide gesture? More broadly: I think your attitude is, in fact, exactly the problem. The existing patent regime tends to defaults to a judgement that if something "hasn't been invented" (worse: "the patent office wasn't presented with specific evidence that it has previously been invented") that it must be non-obvious. Some things are obviously obvious, and I know it when I see it. Slide to unlock is obvious, period. Arguing otherwise invokes a universe where every tiny bit of nonsense in every product becomes someone's property. Basically: if slide to unlock is not obvious, then everything is non-obvious and all hope is lost. Think this through -- I really don't think you want to live in that world.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoIf "some things are obviously obvious" that implies there is an objective (or universal subjective) criterion for judging obviousness. What would this be? Note that a lot of brilliance looks obvious ex post facto because one is looking up the branch and seeing only one branch instead of down it and the bifurcations.
- jiggy2011 14y agowhooopeee, does this mean my HTC phone will now get rid of that stupid "pull ring to unlock"/"pull ring to answer call" crap?
- petitmiam 14y agoIn tennis and cricket, you get a set amount of challenges. Once you've used them up, you can't make any more. Could the courts implement something similar for patent disputes?
- T_S_ 14y agoWe need an independent invention defense. If I can show I had no knowledge of your patent and came up with the idea on my own then it must have been obvious. If 2 other parties did also, then it must of been painfully obvious.
- kogir 14y agoI slid to unlock the bathroom door in elementary school in the early nineties. I fail to see how doing it on a phone is new or innovative.
- gerhardi 14y agoI just hope that someone in a high enough position would roar "STOP THE MADNESS!". These kind of patent trials are only harming the end consumer. What kind of legislation even makes it possible to patent things like "Method of swinging on a swing" ( http://www.google.com/patents/US6368227 http://www.google.com/patents/US6368227 )?
- edwinyzh 14y agoSorry, but I just simply can't understand why "swipe to unlock" can be a patent...
- chris_wot 14y agoWell, this is interesting! This is a valid patent in the U.S., but not in the U.K. - I guess that the UK had a more sensible patent system. A real pity for consumers in the U.S. I guess.