Apparently, if pro-patent advocates are to be believed, this arcane knowledge would be lost to the mists of time if we didn't grant Apple a twenty-year monopoly in return for their deigning to disclose it, Prometheus-like, to us poor mortals.
As stupid the "slide to unlock" patent is. Copying it is even dumber. There are numerous equally user friendly ways to unlock a phone. What Samsung does to Android cheapens the user interface and generally makes it worse.
I don't care who's "dumber". Samsung copying the idea doesn't change the legal system for everyone else. Apple patenting and suing everyone for ridiculously obvious "ideas" does.
Samsung's software designers may be cheap hacks, but they're (inadvertently) serving the same good that Newegg serves. Both are infringing patents that make the world a shittier place and refusing to settle. The only difference is that Newegg does it out of righteous indignation rather than rank incompetence. Either way, the correct party to root for should be obvious.
The first Castlevania game for the DS [1] had a system where you used the touch screen (with a stylus) to draw "runes" (simple patterns like a triangle or square) to either a) defeat bosses or b) unlock doors. This might seem a bit cute, but it covers the basic idea to me. The game was released in 2005 and I believe Apple's first patent on slide-to-unlock was filed in 2009.
> [A] computer process that enables a single machine to distribute a single information identifier and provide that to multiple “rules of thumb” so that each “rule of thumb” can search different locations using different criteria designed for that location is a major innovation in computer science; it improves the speed and efficiency of the computer and generates more useful results. It is not an abstract idea.
Thanks to Apple, we now have the technology to pass a parameter to multiple functions implementing the same interface. Incredible!
That's insane, I implemented something similar 12 years ago, a massive hack-up involving Excel, MS Access and PHP.
If a clueless (in hindsight; I thought I was God's gift back then, a super VBA ninja) kid can "invent" something, then it's the textbook definition of "obvious".
EDIT: their patent predates this. if someone somewhere is unlucky enough to still be using my fantastic invention, now might be a good time to find an alternative..
This is the part of the software patent I've never understood. Surely if the standard of "non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art" was applied sensibly then most of the more absurd patents wouldn't be granted.
Of course there is the 'obvious in hindsight' problem but this test has been weakened beyond all recognition.
We don't even need to look to that subjective standard. We grant people exclusive rights or patents for sharing novel techniques with other people skilled in the art, yet I have never seen a professional software programmer look to patents for information or algorithms. It just doesn't happen.
So the tradeoff here is exclusive rights for zero public benefits. That is not the way it was intended.
You wouldn't necessarily read the actual patent, but it could happen that you read a conference paper, or attend the presentation, and then learn that the technique described in it is the subject of a patent application. The paper will still be a better source of information than the patent.
I don't know how often this happens, but I have seen it.
I work on compilers, and while I don't read patents, I read papers which explain patented ideas. I think it is reasonable to assume that some of compiler-related papers from, say, IBM, wouldn't have been published and kept secret if IBM couldn't file patents before publishing papers.
So "programmers don't read patents" does not prove "zero public benefits", because I think it is more like "programmers do read materials which wouldn't have been published if they couldn't be patented".
Yeah, one would think that a widely infringed patent was a good signal that it was already obvious to those skilled in the art, but the patent bar seems to have this fantasy where people are reading patents and cackling gleefully stealing all the ideas from them. So they see it more as "massive business opportunity" than a signal that the system is not providing the alleged benefit to the public.
And to be honest, from those I've discussed it with, they are largely concerned with monetization and don't give a damn about any sort of public benefit.
I suspect novel grammatical constructs in English would fail part one of the patent-eligibility test: does the idea fall within one of the four permissible classes, those being process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. See http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2106.html. If it was deemed to fall within one of those categories, then it'd still have to qualify as either being non-abstract or, if abstract, having some further technical advance.
I am not talking about the current state of patent law in the US. I am talking about the patentability of software in general. Not as the US implements it, but as it could ever be implemented, by anyone.
> does the idea fall within one of the four permissible classes, those being process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.
It would be a process in exactly the way that software is. Obviously the process can be carried out by a human (as can software), but never mind that, we'll just tack on a prior art typewriter or computer input device to make it a machine, right?
This whole mess is a result of the Federal Circuit reading everything too broadly. "Process" traditionally meant a manufacturing process or the like. If I'm not mistaken the only "software" patent the Supreme Court has found valid covered a manufacturing process.
And that's where software patents should live, if anywhere. Covering novel machines that happen to require some computation rather than novel computations that happen to be done by a machine.
The test such patents would fail is utility, which is mostly understood to be industrial, technical or commercial utility. This is the same reason recipes are generally not patentable -- they are, after all a "process of manufacturing something" -- except when they have "utility". A common example is a recipe for cattle feed that can reduce illnesses in cows, which clearly has utility in farming.
That test is unintelligible. Anything has industrial or commercial utility if you can find someone to buy it. A recipe for chicken soup clearly has such utility for Campbells because it's how they make their product. How is that supposed to be distinguished from someone making Playdough or artificial sweeteners, which presumably are patentable if novel and non-obvious?
You just mentioned examples that are very likely patentable. The difference is, you cannot try to patent a recipe if your only "utility" is "it helps my restaurant run better" or "it can help my book sell better". The test is fuzzy, sure, but it's an important grounds for rejection since any invention must be novel, non-obvious and useful. You could try to patent recipes and novel structures, but whether the PTO or the courts will buy your claim to usefulness is another matter.
> You just mentioned examples that are very likely patentable.
That's what I mean. How is the "recipe" for Playdough supposed to be different than a specific recipe for chicken noodle soup?
> The difference is, you cannot try to patent a recipe if your only "utility" is "it helps my restaurant run better" or "it can help my book sell better".
That's the utility of any commercial process. To make the product more desirable to customers. The utility the of process to make Playdough is that it helps you sell the product as compared with some other recipe that turns to stone on the retailer's shelf after a week.
Does this mean we'll be able to use the "stretch" behavior when finger-scrolling past the end of a list on a Galaxy, or will we be stuck with the inferior "glow" technique.
We're going to see lots more of these claims by patent-infringement defendants, whose trial counsel will figure, what the hell, let's give it a shot.
Therein lies the practical problem with the Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. [1]: Just about any new technology could be described as a "generic implementation" of an abstract idea --- which the Court said is unpatentable. The Court gave us little or no useful guidance for distinguishing between an unpatentable generic implementation and a patentable "invention."
Even the court's hint that combining multiple abstract ideas in a way that improves the state of the art of existing tech provides no clear distinction between what is and isn't patentable. Until the Court understands that composing mathematical expressions doesn't turn them into a different kind of thing, and writes clear rules one way or the other about what's patentable, nothing is really resolved.
> Therein lies the practical problem with the Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. [1]: Just about any new technology could be described as a "generic implementation" of an abstract idea
This may be true in the domain of software patents (though not of technology generally.)
OTOH, I don't think that's a problem with Alice so much as with many, if not all, software patents.
(1) “to detect contact with the touch-sensitive display at a first predefined location corresponding to an unlock image”; (2) “to continuously move the unlock image on the touch-sensitive display in accordance with movement of the detected contact”; (3) “to unlock the hand held electronic device if the unlock image is moved from the first predefined location on the touch screen to a predefined unlock region on the touch-sensitive display”; and (4) “visual cues to communicate a direction of movement of the unlock image required to unlock the device.”
It really sounds like Apple's lawyers are struggling to make "drag the image to unlock" sound more complicated than it really is.
No, Apple's lawyers are just trying to make it sound more concrete than Samsung's lawyers are trying to make it sound abstract. The key difference is complexity has no bearing on patentability, but abstractness does.
To be fair, the claims do require all those elements, so it really is narrower than "moving an image to unlock a device". You could imagine a number of implementations of the latter that would not be covered by the claims.
Yes, but what aspect of it is novel? Images, touch screens, animation? None of it is new; "the conclusion that when a patent simply arranges old elements with each performing the same function it had been known to perform and yields no more than one would expect from such an arrangement, the combination is obvious." I would venture to say the patent NEVER should have been granted, even under pre-Alice conditions.
Parent was talking about complexity, I simply corrected them to say that it was about abstraction, and why it mattered. I was not making any point about the novelty or other quality metrics of the patent.
However, now that you've brought it up, possibly outside of material science, every invention in the history of engineering falls under the description of "old elements doing old things producing expected results". Taking that quote out of context misses a very important question: was it obvious beforehand that such a result was desirable enough to put those elements together?
The answer to your question of "what's novel" is, literally, the combination of elements and the difference it presents over prior art. However, at a higher level, what this quantitative approach misses is this: slide-to-unlock provides a convenient, usable and visually appealing way to unlock a phone. You'll note that these adjectives are some that Apple users regularly attribute to Apple products (since before the iPhone!). These qualities are arguably a primary reason for their success.
Sure, when boiled down to their implementation, they don't look so impressive, yet few others are said to match Apple's level of polish. Why is that the case if such features are so easy to implement? Maybe because the feature itself is not obvious. Such qualitative aspects are not always apparent from looking at the claims alone.
Slide-to-unlock was probably a pretty important, cool idea for whoever first invented it (not Apple -- though maybe they reinvented it from scratch). It's one of those things that's obvious in retrospect but difficult to necessarily think of when you're starting from a white page.
But not all important, cool ideas are patentable -- nor should they be. Patents are meant to reward research, not "good ideas."
> Slide-to-unlock was probably a pretty important, cool idea for whoever first invented it
You mean whoever invented the sliding lock? It is indeed obvious in retrospect, but was probably a breakthrough when it was invented (that is ages ago).
Such kind of patents are coming very close to patenting a wheel.
Is there going to be a big freeing up of lots of obvious patents in the late twenty-teens? I feel like a lot of this started in the late 90's, and I believe they only last twenty years. So will a lot of this just go away soon?
Misleading headline, but on par for Ars reporting on patents. It makes it sound like Apple has been negatively affected due to the Alice ruling, whereas all that has happened is Samsung has made a new argument that they should be. There has been no response from the Judge yet.
I hope Samsung will succeed in knocking out these patents. They indeed shouldn't have been granted to begin with. Hopefully more knockouts will follow (not just for Apple, but for anyone who abused the patent system by using the "on the computer" trick).
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 93.7 ms ] threadhttp://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...
Regardless, they should NOT be sued for it.
Samsung's software designers may be cheap hacks, but they're (inadvertently) serving the same good that Newegg serves. Both are infringing patents that make the world a shittier place and refusing to settle. The only difference is that Newegg does it out of righteous indignation rather than rank incompetence. Either way, the correct party to root for should be obvious.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Dawn_of_Sorrow
Thanks to Apple, we now have the technology to pass a parameter to multiple functions implementing the same interface. Incredible!
If a clueless (in hindsight; I thought I was God's gift back then, a super VBA ninja) kid can "invent" something, then it's the textbook definition of "obvious".
EDIT: their patent predates this. if someone somewhere is unlucky enough to still be using my fantastic invention, now might be a good time to find an alternative..
Of course there is the 'obvious in hindsight' problem but this test has been weakened beyond all recognition.
So the tradeoff here is exclusive rights for zero public benefits. That is not the way it was intended.
I don't know how often this happens, but I have seen it.
So "programmers don't read patents" does not prove "zero public benefits", because I think it is more like "programmers do read materials which wouldn't have been published if they couldn't be patented".
And I am sometimes a programmer.
And to be honest, from those I've discussed it with, they are largely concerned with monetization and don't give a damn about any sort of public benefit.
But it's been a thing since way before you were born.
Even if it is genuinely novel (unlikely) and a non-obvious innovation (also unlikely), is that really something that we should consider patentable?
It would be a process in exactly the way that software is. Obviously the process can be carried out by a human (as can software), but never mind that, we'll just tack on a prior art typewriter or computer input device to make it a machine, right?
This whole mess is a result of the Federal Circuit reading everything too broadly. "Process" traditionally meant a manufacturing process or the like. If I'm not mistaken the only "software" patent the Supreme Court has found valid covered a manufacturing process.
And that's where software patents should live, if anywhere. Covering novel machines that happen to require some computation rather than novel computations that happen to be done by a machine.
That's what I mean. How is the "recipe" for Playdough supposed to be different than a specific recipe for chicken noodle soup?
> The difference is, you cannot try to patent a recipe if your only "utility" is "it helps my restaurant run better" or "it can help my book sell better".
That's the utility of any commercial process. To make the product more desirable to customers. The utility the of process to make Playdough is that it helps you sell the product as compared with some other recipe that turns to stone on the retailer's shelf after a week.
Therein lies the practical problem with the Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. [1]: Just about any new technology could be described as a "generic implementation" of an abstract idea --- which the Court said is unpatentable. The Court gave us little or no useful guidance for distinguishing between an unpatentable generic implementation and a patentable "invention."
[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-298_7lh8.pdf
This may be true in the domain of software patents (though not of technology generally.)
OTOH, I don't think that's a problem with Alice so much as with many, if not all, software patents.
It really sounds like Apple's lawyers are struggling to make "drag the image to unlock" sound more complicated than it really is.
To be fair, the claims do require all those elements, so it really is narrower than "moving an image to unlock a device". You could imagine a number of implementations of the latter that would not be covered by the claims.
However, now that you've brought it up, possibly outside of material science, every invention in the history of engineering falls under the description of "old elements doing old things producing expected results". Taking that quote out of context misses a very important question: was it obvious beforehand that such a result was desirable enough to put those elements together?
The answer to your question of "what's novel" is, literally, the combination of elements and the difference it presents over prior art. However, at a higher level, what this quantitative approach misses is this: slide-to-unlock provides a convenient, usable and visually appealing way to unlock a phone. You'll note that these adjectives are some that Apple users regularly attribute to Apple products (since before the iPhone!). These qualities are arguably a primary reason for their success.
Sure, when boiled down to their implementation, they don't look so impressive, yet few others are said to match Apple's level of polish. Why is that the case if such features are so easy to implement? Maybe because the feature itself is not obvious. Such qualitative aspects are not always apparent from looking at the claims alone.
But not all important, cool ideas are patentable -- nor should they be. Patents are meant to reward research, not "good ideas."
You mean whoever invented the sliding lock? It is indeed obvious in retrospect, but was probably a breakthrough when it was invented (that is ages ago).
Such kind of patents are coming very close to patenting a wheel.