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| Authored by: Ian Al on Tuesday, January 01 2013 @ 06:01 AM EST |
Those monster video screens seen at major events use panels of LEDs. I doubt
that it is patentable because in Japan and the US, previous lower definition
displays used incandescent lamps. OLED displays use individual LEDs in the same
way.
Apple's bounce-back invention could be implemented on all of them if the
finger-swipes were on a touch-pad interface such as a Wacom Bamboo Touch. The
display of juddering or bouncing images is prior art (See the Pixar, Anglepoise
lamp animation from a couple of decades ago. The use of multiple finger gesture
touch panel display software is similarly ancient (I could point you to Steve
Balmer demonstrating it on a monster screen, but, hey, it is the season of good
cheer).
So, Apple's patented invention is the combination of two pieces of prior art in
an obvious way (that they saw demonstrated by someone else). KSR v. Teleflex
showed that such patents are invalid.
Software patents are, apparently, a special case whereby you can, indeed,
combine prior art and be awarded a patent which is then deemed infringed if
someone else implements any combination of prior art claimed in the patent. This
is even if each software component implementing each individual claim is from
multiple authors who wrote the software without the patented invention being the
targeted functions.
Samsung infringed on the Apple invention by using standard Android APIs for the
display of stuff with the standard Android multi-touch input device and used a
common software approach to make it look like stuff was bouncing. Anyone can
make anything bounce with any multi-finger gesture they like as long as the
bouncing does not occur when an image or a display of characters is bounced from
side to side when it is the first or last display page in a series of any
length.
The whole of Apple's commercial success is a nexus on that very narrow example
of the combination of two bits of prior art.
Sheesh, where did my Christmas spirit evaporate to?
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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