This is entirely untrue. A patent that has been granted by the USPTO is deemed valid and binding unless decided otherwise in court or by a re-evaluation by the USPTO.
By your standard, patents are never meaningful, because a higher court (or the same court) could always invalidate the patent.
Did BeOS not have a very similar animation in one of its 3d demonstration widgets? The one you could drop images or videos on, flip pages and have them deformed and rendered in real time?
That was, what, in the mid-90s? 15 years before Apple's patent was even filled?
I think this is a huge win for Apple with all the major companies like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books and others all using page turn animations, much like iBooks uses. I could see easily in the next few months more licensing deals being made.
Funny you should use them as an example, because there's a lot of interesting history surrounding that, which you can read about here. I'll give you the highlights for a quick skim, but there's a lot more to it:
The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral roll control.
The concept of lateral control was basic to all aircraft designs; without it they could not be easily or safely controlled in flight.[7]
The broad protection intended by this patent succeeded when the Wrights won patent infringement lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators who devised ailerons to emulate lateral control described in the patent and demonstrated by the Wrights in their 1908 public flights. U.S. courts decided that ailerons were also covered by the patent.
[...]
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[10] Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in favor of the Wrights against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties through legal tactics.
[...]
The patent pool solution
In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.[11][12][13]
This was exactly my point. The patents were overly broad and designed to hinder competition. The overall result was negative for society, not positive. While the Wrights were "first in flight," I have zero confidence that flight wouldn't have been invented without the incentive of a monopoly on flight control.
Writing a double-negative like that forces me to do a double-take when trying to understand you. Or is it a triple-negative?
I'm going to go with, "there were so many inventors, its invention was inevitable" as my interpretation, which I believe is the most correct rendition of the story of flight as I know it.
The point of a patent isn't that it wouldn't have been invented eventually (because that's impossibly hard to demonstrate) but that someone was first to come up with it and it is novel.
> Is there any teaching in the prior art, as a whole, that would, not simply could, have prompted the skilled person, faced with the objective technical problem formulated when considering the technical features not disclosed by the closest prior art, to modify or adapt said closest prior art while taking account of that teaching [the teaching of the prior art, not just the teaching of the closest prior art], thereby arriving at something falling within the terms of the claims, and thus achieving what the invention achieves?
> If the skilled person would have been prompted to modify the closest prior art in such a way as to arrive at something falling within the terms of the claims, then the invention does not involve an inventive step.
It needs to be more than novel, it needs to be a reasonable leap over the existing state of the art. You shouldn't grant someone a 20+ year monopoly over an idea just because they were first to encounter a particular problem and come up with an obvious solution.
Huge win? It will just make them change it. And we'll all be better off for it, frankly - there's few things I loathe more in e-readers than page turn animations that often can't be turned off.
Years and years ago I was a flash developer. I had a client who wanted a catalog that looked like it flipped pages. Even back then (this would have been pre-2000) there were a lot of ways to solve for this, and numerous examples.
There are a number of publishing platforms for magazines that use these online (Ceros, Zinio etc).
As for touch related, I think they both have iOS / mobile web apps as do others.
They have all been around since before iBooks.
The first time I saw a finger following page turn on iOS was pre iPad via Pixelmags. I am not sure when it make it to market though, but I'm sure it was before the iPad launched.
Well, then it's just a matter of time until some random company 'X' gets sued for having page-turn animation that they had implemented decades ago, I guess.
Yes a small company called that were working on a CPU that would become the ARM cpu was happily demoing there new computer the archimedies and to demonstrate the new CPU they did something that had not been done in realtime. Yes the page turn effect, was also a waving flag surface and few other demonstrations of this great processing power.
Now If I watch a film on TV on a digital screen and in that film somebody turns a page of a book, then would I also technicaly be violating this digital patent.
Patents like this are fine, as long as there are in a common-sence pool of free use for all, anything else is well, just wrong.
Well, if "software is eating everything", soon traditional books will become extinct. The next generation will probably find page-turning effects a bizarre thing that their computer does (similar to how very few people understand why "radio buttons" are named thusly ).
Think of a "design patent" as being a subclass of "trademark", rather than a subclass of "patent". Do you think companies should be able to get trademarks? If so, then you believe most of the case for design patents.
I believe that trademarks should be granted (and patents too, for REAL non obvious innovations), but watching the black and white sketches it looks like they "trademarked" the very idea of an animation showing a page folding on a digital book. Following the trademarking analogy, this looks to me like trying to trademark the word "Apple" for a company selling apples - which AFAIK isn't allowed.
I'm pretty certain trademarks are distinct from design patents, but that the same thing can claimed as both a design patent and a trademark. Many design patents are simply designs and do not reflect a brand or manufacturer of a product. Likewise many trademarks are merely words/phrases or iconography/brandmarks and are not patentable.
I disagree with the concept of design patents. I believe that determining the novelty of a design is mostly subjective.
Wouldn't there be some significant issues with patenting a skeuomorphic design? Couldn't a physical book be used as a form of prior art? If this is not the case and anything that exists outside of the realm of computing can now be patented by being modeled digitally, wouldn't that have wide sweeping ramifications?
For example, what stops someone from taking a pharmaceutical that they do not own the patent to and getting a patent for that same drug but the patent is for a digital model of the molecular structure? Then litigate against the pharmaceutical company if the pharmaceutical company chooses to store the structure digitally.
I'm generally curious about this. If anyone can help me understand what I'm missing here, I would appreciate it.
2) Design patents are not the same as regular patents.
This Apple patent is a design patent, not a normal patent. It protects a very specific visual design in a specific use case. Design patents are very narrow in scope. The same design in a different context is not protected by this patent nor does it affect the patentability (it might affect the obviousness but obviousness is a frustratingly rare objection in patent reviews).
I have re-read this argument "design patents have a very limited scope" a few times over the latest Apple patent craze. What I am wondering is what the reasoning behind all these questionable patents is and if they are indeed hardly enforceable. Or is Apple, maybe as a consequence of the Samsung disaster, going into "patent whatever is remotely patentable" mode?
Lots of companies "patent whatever is remotely patentable". If your business is intellectual property, it's common practice. My experience with patents comes from working at a number of engineering companies whose approach truly was: patent everything you do. It's as crazy as you'd think: your daily work is not that novel but you're asked to describe it as though it is.
It is ferociously hard to read patents (for everyone: lawyers and inventors included) and people get confused by the patent titles (which are deliberately vague and have no legal meaning). Since these titles are ridiculously broad, people think the patent is trying to clamp down on everything the title describes (which is never the case).
However, non-design patents play a game of making the claims as broad as possible (even when the described embodiments are quite narrow). The claims often become a game of starting unenforceably broad and only subsequently narrowing to something reasonable. Of course, it is the broadest claims that get tested in court.
Why are design patents different? They don't really have claims in the same way. A design patent can be flawed (by having prior art or by failing the novelty test) but can't greedily try to expand its claims to cover everything in the world.
Of course, many patent lawyers think design patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on precisely because they can't expand to cover everything in the whole field.
As for Apple's situation... they write software. The questions: how novel is it? How much protection does that novelty earn? These are subjective questions. Of course, Apple will always think the answers are "Very novel and lots of protection". Their competitors will always disagree. And there is no way of saying who's correct expect dragging the whole affair through the court system for years.
I don't think Apple's patents are of worse quality than most patents. But the patent system never has a clear "this is protected and this isn't". It's always contentious because everything has a precedent of some kind -- but does that count as prior art? Who the fuck knows.
I have re-read this argument "design patents have a very limited scope" a few times over the latest Apple patent craze.
It's not an argument, it's a fact. Design patents are not utility patents. Utility patents are not design patents. They work differently, and the objections people have to "questionable" utility patents do not apply equally to design patents.
It comes up a lot because the press seems to be willfully ignorant of the distinction, and the people arguing about the reports tend to be universally clueless.
Look at the bright side: there are a number of pretty text-scrolling effects that have been not been appreciated enough. Scrolls unwinding, tablets thrown back and forth etc.
There's too much prior art for this. Back around 97-99 there were plenty of shareware apps shipped on magazine cover CDs for reading ebooks.
They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy) page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"
This could be easily circumvented by animating a page ripped out of the book, made into a ball, and tossed in the general direction of an Apple-looking product.
Quite a few people are mentioning prior art and then going on to give examples where it's just an animation. I'm not saying that there isn't prior art however it does specify that the animation is initiated with a finger:
"The animation responds to a simple swiping motion with the finger, which turns the page over just as it happens on a paper book. A different swiping motion will flip the pages quickly, and a vertical finger movement will flip the page just enough to reveal what’s on the next page."
Talking of which - does anyone find the iBooks animation to be slow and annoying? On my iPad 3 it lags for a split second and generally feels a bit rough. It sounds picky but it's quite annoying and judging by a quick search on Google, others are annoyed by it too. Has it always been this way or is this a bug that will be fixed?
I'd like to see Apple's cost-benefit analysis on something like this. Patents aren't cheap; if this is as unlikely to be defensible as some people are claiming, Apple must expect a huge upside. (Decreased risk? Licensing fees?)
I don't know much about the patents but is grammer of the claim is considered or not as in the claim it is referring to finger and if i implement the same animation which is done by using two or more fingers, am i infringing the patent.
52 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadI don't understand. I saw this effect on dozens of web pages over the last decade. Do patent examiners just live in a little box?
The validity of any patent then has to be established by a judge in court.
By your standard, patents are never meaningful, because a higher court (or the same court) could always invalidate the patent.
We invented books and page-turning 500 years ago. This is just an animation.
I'm having a hard to time understanding how this comparison makes any kind of sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war
The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral roll control.
The concept of lateral control was basic to all aircraft designs; without it they could not be easily or safely controlled in flight.[7]
The broad protection intended by this patent succeeded when the Wrights won patent infringement lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators who devised ailerons to emulate lateral control described in the patent and demonstrated by the Wrights in their 1908 public flights. U.S. courts decided that ailerons were also covered by the patent.
[...]
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[10] Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in favor of the Wrights against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties through legal tactics.
[...]
The patent pool solution
In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.[11][12][13]
I'm going to go with, "there were so many inventors, its invention was inevitable" as my interpretation, which I believe is the most correct rendition of the story of flight as I know it.
http://classicsapp.com
Apple was certainly aware of it. Very popular app, and was in an Apple tv commercial too.
Edit: Here's the Apple ad with it: http://youtu.be/HhGnS4YvWKA?t=14s
> If the skilled person would have been prompted to modify the closest prior art in such a way as to arrive at something falling within the terms of the claims, then the invention does not involve an inventive step.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn... )
It needs to be more than novel, it needs to be a reasonable leap over the existing state of the art. You shouldn't grant someone a 20+ year monopoly over an idea just because they were first to encounter a particular problem and come up with an obvious solution.
In fact, here's a post from 2003 describing exactly this. http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-Brandon...
A nice live demo of one of the other tutorials. That one dating from 2006.
http://www.actionscript.org/showMovie.php?id=459
Over a decade ago I was a moderator on the FlashKit forums[1], and this page turning effect was all over the place.
[1] I'm surprised this is still here (in all its cringeworth glory) after 12 years: http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?243303-NETbre...
As for touch related, I think they both have iOS / mobile web apps as do others.
They have all been around since before iBooks.
The first time I saw a finger following page turn on iOS was pre iPad via Pixelmags. I am not sure when it make it to market though, but I'm sure it was before the iPad launched.
Now If I watch a film on TV on a digital screen and in that film somebody turns a page of a book, then would I also technicaly be violating this digital patent.
Patents like this are fine, as long as there are in a common-sence pool of free use for all, anything else is well, just wrong.
I fail to see how this is in any way a unique feature warranting a patent, what a fucking joke.
CLAIM The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described.
Reading this, I wonder: How did "design patents" even come to be? I'm tired of saying it, but this is a real aberration.
[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
BS. see fashion - strongly enforced trademarks, no design patents.
I disagree with the concept of design patents. I believe that determining the novelty of a design is mostly subjective.
For example, what stops someone from taking a pharmaceutical that they do not own the patent to and getting a patent for that same drug but the patent is for a digital model of the molecular structure? Then litigate against the pharmaceutical company if the pharmaceutical company chooses to store the structure digitally.
I'm generally curious about this. If anyone can help me understand what I'm missing here, I would appreciate it.
1) Is is possible to take a known, existing invention and simply change the context a little and repatent?
The answer is yes, if the original existing invention had never been documented to be used in this new context.
This is a highly contentious area of patent law and I personally disagree with it.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/patently-obvious...
2) Design patents are not the same as regular patents.
This Apple patent is a design patent, not a normal patent. It protects a very specific visual design in a specific use case. Design patents are very narrow in scope. The same design in a different context is not protected by this patent nor does it affect the patentability (it might affect the obviousness but obviousness is a frustratingly rare objection in patent reviews).
It is ferociously hard to read patents (for everyone: lawyers and inventors included) and people get confused by the patent titles (which are deliberately vague and have no legal meaning). Since these titles are ridiculously broad, people think the patent is trying to clamp down on everything the title describes (which is never the case).
However, non-design patents play a game of making the claims as broad as possible (even when the described embodiments are quite narrow). The claims often become a game of starting unenforceably broad and only subsequently narrowing to something reasonable. Of course, it is the broadest claims that get tested in court.
Why are design patents different? They don't really have claims in the same way. A design patent can be flawed (by having prior art or by failing the novelty test) but can't greedily try to expand its claims to cover everything in the world.
Of course, many patent lawyers think design patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on precisely because they can't expand to cover everything in the whole field.
As for Apple's situation... they write software. The questions: how novel is it? How much protection does that novelty earn? These are subjective questions. Of course, Apple will always think the answers are "Very novel and lots of protection". Their competitors will always disagree. And there is no way of saying who's correct expect dragging the whole affair through the court system for years.
I don't think Apple's patents are of worse quality than most patents. But the patent system never has a clear "this is protected and this isn't". It's always contentious because everything has a precedent of some kind -- but does that count as prior art? Who the fuck knows.
It's not an argument, it's a fact. Design patents are not utility patents. Utility patents are not design patents. They work differently, and the objections people have to "questionable" utility patents do not apply equally to design patents.
It comes up a lot because the press seems to be willfully ignorant of the distinction, and the people arguing about the reports tend to be universally clueless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
P.S. I've seen plenty of page turning effects like there's in advertising catalogs built in Flash. But in this case, let Apple have their way.
They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy) page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"
"The animation responds to a simple swiping motion with the finger, which turns the page over just as it happens on a paper book. A different swiping motion will flip the pages quickly, and a vertical finger movement will flip the page just enough to reveal what’s on the next page."
Talking of which - does anyone find the iBooks animation to be slow and annoying? On my iPad 3 it lags for a split second and generally feels a bit rough. It sounds picky but it's quite annoying and judging by a quick search on Google, others are annoyed by it too. Has it always been this way or is this a bug that will be fixed?