Apple Counter-Sues Motorola Over Touchscreen Patents 201
Earlier this month, we discussed news that Motorola had sued Apple, alleging infringement of 18 patents involving the iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices. In response, Apple has now launched a pair of lawsuits alleging that Motorola is the infringing party, pointing to a number of patents involving touchscreen displays and multi-touch technology, and also methods for interacting with settings and data on a device. Apple wants the court to award them damages and prevent Motorola from continuing to sell the offending devices, which include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, BackFlip, Devour i1, Devour A555, Cliq, and Cliq XT.
Begun, the clone war has (Score:4, Funny)
(n/t)
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Re:Begun, the clone war has (Score:5, Funny)
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Now you're just proving his point so you'll lose that one :D
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That's what I'm hoping, an all out patent war. Maybe some good would come out of it because things can't get bad any more.
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peace has been patented.
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No wonder it leads to stagnation. We need a good, brisk, war to drive development!
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or, the desire to return to peace.
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peace is overrated.
just give patents a chance.
that's all we are sayin'.
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luckily my country is not infringing.
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War probably qualifies as a 'business patent', there's a bit of prior art but that doesn't seem to be a problem anymore...
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...or ground into meat.
And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This whole patent war reminds me of the famous computer science analogy: the dining philosophers [wikipedia.org].
If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
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forks down !
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all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
Well, that's a problem in closed-source land. In FOSS land, forks appear spontaneously !
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Ah, but things work out once a bunch of them use the fork they have to stab their neighbors and steal their forks.
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This would almost be funny, except that it's not forks, it's chopsticks...and you can eat perfectly well with ONE FUCKING FORK.
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The original analogy is forks and spaghetti (which is apparently difficult to eat with one fork - I've personally never used more than one fork and never had a problem).
Chopsticks and rice makes the problem more obvious.
More importantly, though, is that the analogy makes absolutely no sense in this context. The problem only occurs in mutual exclusion environments with no communication (i.e. computers). The only reason two vendors wouldn't cross-license is because they were pissed at each other and both be
Re:And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! (Score:5, Funny)
If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
Er.... yeah.
:-)
Unfortunately, you're likely to get sued because BadAnalogyGuy [slashdot.org] owns the patent on making very bad analogies on Slashdot.
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Hey! Your not allowed to just add "on Slashdot" to some widely used technique and then patent it!
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Hey! Your not allowed to just add "on Slashdot" to some widely used technique and then patent it!
hmm, actually, it would seem that you are allowed to.
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If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.
Er.... yeah. Unfortunately, you're likely to get sued because BadAnalogyGuy [slashdot.org] owns the patent on making very bad analogies on Slashdot. :-)
This being a reasonable good (even if not perfect) analogy, it doesn't fall under the patented method.
Re:And The Dining Patent Philosophers Starve!! (Score:5, Funny)
Fortunately they've learned they can stab each other with the forks, which doesn't make a smartphone but does provide entertainment value.
Poor lawyers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
The companies are doing fine. Now you know why iPads are 500 dollars. The only loser is the customer.
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I thought that the iPad was $500 because there is no competition that is worthy enough to drive the price down!
No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple has long over charged for their hardware. Notice their massive profits? Reason is they have massive margins. They charge much higher margins than other electronics makers. They get away with it because their products are trendy, fashionable, and fashion is one area where consumers' normal price sensitivity doesn't apply. You'll notice that the iPod was not the first MP3 player, nor the first portable music device. What it was was a fashion accessory, you had to own one to be cool. The white earbuds we
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Now cue to Apple, corporate site, where they don't talk customer language but investor language. Why should I buy AAPL, according to Apple? According to Apple, because of their profit maximization. Funny, that.
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Yep, investors love Apple. Part of this is just because Apple is heavily hyped and a media darling and people are influenced by that, even though they might pretend to be 100% objective. However another part is they are immensely profitable compared to the volume of sales they have and the fact that they are in consumer electronics. Normally CE companies don't make a ton of profit margin. They can still have good profits, but it is in volume, not margin. Consumers are highly price sensitive, so you have to
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Those aren't investors. Those people are speculators. Investors are people who understand what they're putting their money in (eg Warren Buffet).
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What makes you think they are contradictory? Apple can provide good value for money AND make great profits.
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Every piece of hardware that Apple uses, anyone else can get, minus a few tiny customizations, and the price is actually higher than their competitors for the same price. If you took a competing arm based tablet and stripped it of all of it's peripherals, and then reduced the price accordingly you'd end up with a cheaper tablet. The thing is that other tablet makers actually add more value for the money by giving you the ability to use SD cards, USB input, and mabey even a camera (or at least the ability
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Your analysis assumes tablets are a commodity; they're all identical except in a few well-defined ways, so we can objectively classify Apple's tablet as "Tablet, 10" screen, ARM Based, Wifi" and assume that it is interchangeable with other tablets with the same specifications, and strictly inferior to "Tablet, 10" screen, ARM Based, Wifi, SD cards, USB input". They aren't, though.
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Apple's value is in its OSs and software. Evidently you assume that doesn't cost any money or require any R&D. But go on with your lack of logic, this is Slashdot -- you'll get modded up as long as you hate on Apple.
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Well, yesterday I saw an article [techcrunch.com] on how Apple now has a higher total revenue than Microsoft, but much smaller profits. I guess that's the big con of being a hardware-selling company...
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MS has stellar profit margins because they are in software. Software has the advantage of having nearly zero unit cost. Even if you aren't just selling licenses, as MS often is, the cost of making and distributing a box is a buck or less. The unit cost of software is nothing. Means all you have are your fixed costs, your R&D, support, that kind of shit.
With hardware, you have that too, but then you have a unit cost. This is actually higher than the raw parts you put in it because you have to deal with f
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Another trick MS has pulled is making volume license windows sales upgrade/downgrade only and OEM ones non-transferable. So either you pay full retail upfront (few people do) or every time you replace a computer you pay for windows again even if you don't particulally want a new version (witness the number of machines that were available with vista or win7 downgraded to XP). Worse I belive OEM downgrades have now ceased so if you want XP now afaict you need to buy a machine with win7 and then buy a volume l
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AAPL Net Income last quarter $4.308 billion
MSFT Net Income last quarter $5.4 Billion
A 20% difference is not what I would call "much smaller".
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Apple's fiscal year ends in September. Last quarter was Apple's fiscal fourth quarter, not their third quarter.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL&fstype=ii [google.com]
Microsoft just released their latest quarterly results. Google Finance hasn't updated MSFT's earnings yet.
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The problem with claiming that Apple overcharge for the iPad is that in the days before the iPad launch, blogs had pretty much guessed the form factor and specification, but they were estimating the price point to be $999.
$499 isn't overpriced. It's just that some people will say Apple products are overpriced whatever the actual price is.
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Funny how everyone forgets the $1000 predicted sticker price when ranting about how expensive the $500 iPad is.
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple doesn't overcharge for their hardware. They charge what the market can bear (i.e. what people are willing to pay). To do anything else would be ridiculous for any company.
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Every single device that matches specs is $700 plus. now don't go find a resistive touch screen, I said match specs.
If you really need the exact, precise combination of features on some Apple product - with nothing you can do without and nothing you need that it doesn't offer - your options are obviously going to be limited, but the main people who seem to need that are Apple fanboys.
What's more, that argument works the other way too. For example, I was considering buying the Acer Timeline 1810T. Try matching the specs of that in an Apple device - and I mean with the full 4GB of RAM and plenty of storage, not the meagre
Re:No iPads are $500 because they are Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, why do people get their panties in such a bind over these arguments? Every time there is an Apple article on slashdot, the conversations quickly devolves into a flamewar over whether Apple is ripping you off or not, how good or bad their products are, and so on. I mean with your reply--who gives a crap? If you like the Acer--buy the Acer. If you like the MBA--buy the MBA. Think of this as an optimization spectrum with points such as price, weight and size, appearance, computing power, software, flexibility, build quality, and so on. Believe it or not, not everybody is going to optimize in the same directions!
I just don't get why it seems to bother some people so very much that different people might like different products. If somebody likes Apple products, what's the big deal--why are they automatically a fanboy who you seem to hate?
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Its a manifestation of human tribalism, they're not part of the FOSS/tech group, they're sheep(insert other deragotory term).
Besides most geeks seem to not place much value on design, they care more about raw specs.
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If the ipad is overpriced, then why hasn't anybody been able to duplicate it in less than a years time? Just try to find a capacitance touch screen with an OS designed for touch screen use(windows 7 isn't a touch screen OS, it has touch elements but still needs a mouse to work right, and is way over priced) For $500 find one you can buy right now.
Apple has been competitively priced for the last decade. You get less processor options, but overpriced they are not, stop trying to compare them to dell, but instead to thinkpads.
I don't know about the ipad, but apple laptops are definitely overpriced -in this decade-. Last two laptops I bought I did out of curiosity compare with the prices I would get for an apple of same specs, and both times found that the apple option was almost exactly twice as expensive. My current laptop I compared with a mac air that weighted the same, but to get the 128GB SSD on the air the price went over the roof. The difference is smaller (but still there) if you buy the basic device, because all of the
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if the ipad is over priced why isn't their a single competitor with a similarly priced device? Every single device that matches specs is $700 plus. now don't go find a resistive touch screen, I said match specs.
Uh, OK. [dell.com] Boy, that was easy. [engadget.com]
Oh, you said match specs. I don't know if Dell offers a cheaper, more Apple-like alternative to the Dell's far superior Gorilla Glass [youtube.com].
Not really matching specs (Score:3, Insightful)
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There can only be one winner here, and it won't be companies who are suing each other.
Actually I figure anywhere from 20-50 winners, but yeah Apple and Motorola won't likely be among them.
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Microsoft since years has been patenting 'ideas' (not always their own) that they have never (thought to) put into production, just because they can. Apple has been guilty of the same crime in the past, but they have a much better patent/real product ratio. Why else do you think that Mac fanboys are always looking to the patent registry for clues about the next product Apple will make? One would be completely lost if he tried this with MS's patent applications.
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Hmm? Apple's products are refined, but technologically innovative? No.
As for why Apple fanboys love patents ... if you had any experience with fanboys you would know all hardware fanboys love patents. If you look at consoles or graphic card fanboys it works exactly the same. Microsoft in general (with exception for their consoles) does not have fanboys in quite the same way as Apple because it wasn't a vertically integrated software/hardware company for the most part ... and software patents are boring.
Befo
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In particular, all their multi-touch technology was from a company they bought up a few years ago...
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like you care more for hardware, so check these examples out:
Unibody laptop case. These are much stiffer for their weight than any other manufacturer's laptop.
Magsafe power connector. Eliminates the number one cause of laptop damage/PSU damage. No one else has it.
Mac Mini - When launched by far the smallest desktop computer on the market. Now copied by others, but most copies still aren't as small.
There are many many more hardware innovations, and of course many software ones too.
Clearly you don't like Apple, and that's your prerogative. But the claim that they aren't innovative is demonstrably pure bullshit.
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Most of these are marketing innovations, not hardware innovations.
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They are very real hardware innovations. For sure Apple takes full advantage of them in marketing. That doesn't take away from the fact of them being innovations.
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Those aren't particularly good examples if you're trying to wow us with technological innovation.
The first one isn't even an innovation, it's just expensive and inferior in a couple ways some people find very important. Overall a good idea, but it isn't like they created a new manufacturing process to pull it off. It's just a hollowed out piece of aluminum instead of a molded piece of plastic.
Magsafe is cool, and I like it very much, but I wouldn't really call it a "technological innovation", just a cleve
Re:Poor lawyers (Score:4, Insightful)
I wasn't trying to wow anyone. They are not the greatest innovations of Apple, but they are certainly very concrete, specific and unquestionably the first to do each. And that is enough to prove the GP wrong.
Yes, Apple did invent a new process to pull it off. In the days before Apple unveiled the unibody process, the secret was leaked. And virtually everybody said it was impossible to do mass production of laptop bodies that way. And they were wrong. They were wrong purely because no one else had ever done it before for a product anywhere close to a laptop. That's unquestionably innovation.
Saying "Just a hollowed out piece of aluminum" is either being flippant, or not realising the significance of the innovation.
Innovation *IS* a clever new idea made concrete in an actual product. That's exactly what Magsafe is.
Mac Mini isn't a thin client. It's a full desktop PC in a tiny box. Again NO ONE had put a PC in a box that small till Apple did it. That's innovation.
I agree thatApple have more important examples of innovation in their software , in integration of system and business practices. But for the GP who clearly values hardware innovation more, the ones I gave were better examples.
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To insinuate that the iPhone is comparable to the smartphones that came before it is dishonest. Would you really choose to go back to the set of smartphone UI's that existed before the iPhone?
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A car monocoque is made from multiple steel sheets, which are bent and then welded together. The Apple Unibody is made from a single aluminium casting, which is then milled and machined with lasers. It's then screwed to other parts of the case. That's not the same technology at all.
Your mini-itx motherboard (not computer) link dates from a year after the Mac Mini launched. Not only that, the measurements of the mini-itx board itself are larger than the external dimensions of the Mac Mini.
More to the point,
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Clearly someone thought of the poor struggling lawyers. They needed some love too.
I thought lawyers just used high-priced hookers.
You're confusing Lawyers with Charlie Sheen. Charlie Sheen uses lots of lawyers and high-priced hookers. Interesting ...
Best defence is a good offence? (Score:2, Informative)
You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
No wait, that's not it...
Got it! (Score:5, Funny)
1. Do something. Or perhaps nothing.
2. Sue!
3. Profit!!! [1]
[1] Profit only available to lawyers and other assorted douchebags.
Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just glad to see another example of patents promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts [wikipedia.org].
Because we all know that without these patents, Apple would never have bothered to produce devices with multitouch, nor would Motorola, nor would anybody. And really, the whole idea of using compound gestures like pinching is completely non-obvious. And we wouldn't want little startup companies to make multitouch products; we only want big companies with lawyers to be able to do it.
Can't you just feel the Progress?
Go, Apple! Cry havoc and let slip the lawyers of litigation!
steveha
Armchair "Expert" Progress (Score:2, Insightful)
What's your point? Your particular "winner" didn't get picked? Patents have always been about a particular winner. The whole "advancing society" comes with the expiration of the patent much like with copyright. During the patent any benefit we gain comes from how well the patent holder executes their idea. That's the way it has always been. As for the obviousness of it, are you by any chance an expert in the particular field the patents are in? Seems that's one of the requirements, not "armchair expert" w
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What's your point?
My point is that patents are not achieving their goal of promoting Progress. Patents have been granted on things that are IMHO obvious, such as using two fingers to make a pinching motion. Only companies with lawyers, and a library of patents to cross-license, have a chance. This is stifling Progress, rather than promoting it.
I am not calling for an end to patents. I make my living writing software, and if there were no patents, the company for which I work wouldn't have the money to p
Re:Progress (Score:4, Insightful)
And do you know why we see now the multi-touch technology used everywhere and every company is so aggressive to push it? Because the multi-touch technology was developed in the 1980/1990 years and now all the patents on the basic technologies are expiring. What all the companies are now doing is to improve on the expired patents and get their own patents to sue the competition.
It's like why the price for pills and medicine is dropping significant after the patents expired and you start to see only slightly different pills and medicine in the pharmacy to buy instead of the generics. That's also the reason why the pharmacy industry put so much money into advertising the new pills, so the people think that the slightly different pills are so much better instead of the now really cheap generics. For more information visit Wikipedia on Generic Drugs [wikipedia.org]
What patents basically did was to make the multi-touch technology so expensive that the devices were on hold for about 20 years.
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I'm not entirely sure that's right. I very much doubt you could bring out a multitouch device in the 90s that had a battery life of more than an hour. There was also not really much of a point. The reason we like these touch screens now is that we need lots of screen space for our browsers and games, something else you wouldn't really be running on something of this form factor in the 90s.
I think patents do hamper progress a lot, but a lot of technology takes a while to make the jump from the lab to real wo
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He's saying the core tech and patents are that old, not that there were any devices then. Patents expire based on the date they were filed, it doesn't matter how long it takes to get a product to market. 17 years from the initial filing and it's done.
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If it happened before 1993, it dun expired already.
Yawn (Score:4, Insightful)
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
Is there a reason this still makes the news every time?
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money. Sometimes the price might be too high, of course. But there's always a price.
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That happens all the time.Not to the Apples and Motorolas of course, but for small to medium size companies a patent lawsuit can be a huge deal: It's not just license, it's also the legal costs. The price can easily be large enough that the only sane option is to abandon that technology..
In a lot of cases the patents seem to only function as barriers to market entry.
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When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money.
Large companies often have to pay penalties and modify their products. Small companies, however, go out of business when this happens. The patent system basically creates an oligopoly where only companies with lots of lawyers and resources (=tons of money) manage to survive the inevitable patent lawsuits.
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When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course;
Kodak by Polaroid over instant film.
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That's now completely wrong; Cross-licensing is the old way. The new way goes
A develops something; hives half the patents to a holding company (C)
B develops something;
A sues B
B countersues A
A and B settle
A and B issue press releases that they have cross-licensed their technology
C sues B anyway.
B goes bankrupt,.
Cross licensing deals are no longer trustworthy with companies like Microsoft. The only way is a true deathmatch and even that isn't certain. Hive off your patents into a NPE and sue bab
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Microsoft's XML dispute with i4i.
Kodak's instant cameras.
It happens all the time with smaller companies which are crushed out of existence, you just don't hear about it.
Oooh! (Score:4, Funny)
Will this add a Hamilton cycle to the who-sues-whom graph of smartphone makers?
get rid of multitouch already (Score:4, Interesting)
Multitouch is a gimmick, something Apple can use to distinguish themselves from the rest. It's like their menu bar and their Finder.
Anybody who thinks that multitouch helps usability hasn't tried explaining it to their mother. And even for experienced users, it's an exercise in frustration: it works in some apps and not in others, it does different things, and you need to cover up even more of the screen with your hand. Furthermore, it doesn't carry over to pen-based input, and as the number of handwriting and drawing apps on App Store shows, people want pens.
Let Jobs pursue his insane obsessions. Google should focus on usability, do everybody a favor, and eliminate multitouch from Android.
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You're kidding, right? If multitouch is eliminated from Android, there's very little reason for me to keep using Android. The problem isn't with the apps that support it, it's with the apps that don't support it. Multitouch adds a lot of power to the UI for those apps that can make use of that power.
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Not arguing on the usefulness of Multi-touch but do you think it's actually an invention worthy of patents or simply a natural extension of touch screens?
Personally I don't think apple invented anything. I think the desire to use two or more fingers was a simple modification of the original invention of touch screens. I don't think it should have ever been patented and I think if Apple foolishly keeps pursuing them one of the dozens of courts they are pursuing cases in will invalidate the patents for exactl
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The point of a multitouch screen is to create UIs which can more accurately draw on extablished metaphors. Were it not for the multi-touch screen, you'd need multiple buttons for the same purpose. So for a touchscreen device:
How in your single-touch technology do you implement music apps, which need keyboard say on-screen keyboard, guitar or drum kit representations?
You can't do a worthwhile DJ mixing UI without multi-touch.
Most arcade games won't work - for example where you need to be able to move and sh
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What you're now talking about is gesture recognition, not multi-touch. And the only 2 gestures that require more than one touch are pinch-zoom and pinch-rotate. Scrolling is not connected to multi-touch at all.
As to the patent claims, 2 are mostly about multi-touch, one partly about gestures, and 4 not related to touch screens or gestures at all.
I
Er, WHAT?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Every tried gaming on a non-multitouch phone? Since the screen can not report two locations at once, you can't hold down two virtual buttons at once - making the whole thing useless.
Don't even get me started on pinch to zoom.
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Anybody who thinks that multitouch helps usability hasn't tried explaining it to their mother. And even for experienced users, it's an exercise in frustration: it works in some apps and not in others, it does different things, and you need to cover up even more of the screen with your hand. Furthermore, it doesn't carry over to pen-based input, and as the number of handwriting and drawing apps on App Store shows, people want pens.
I don't know about your mother but I never had to explain it to my mother. I just showed her once and she knew how to use it after that. That goes also for my two year old niece. I suspect the complaint you have is not that multi-touch isn't useful; it's that multi-touch isn't useful for very complicated things you need to do. Judging by the sales of iPhone and Android phones, most people don't want complicated and find it useful enough.
There is a tradeoff between size and UI. The smaller you make the
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Multitouch is fine. People don't want pens.
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Your post is reminiscent of the thousands of geeks who don't get it. Pen-based input? That died along with my Palm PDA.
You probably think Apple's success is all because of their supposed shiny marketing as well.
Android (and the rest of the market) is right to follow Apple's lead, because Apple has nailed it.
Patents. (Score:2)
describe me how this is not feudalism. but dont use self-fooling believer talk as ayn rand while doing it.
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a simple thing as touching something to activate something, can be 'owned' by some private party. a very basic act since stone age.
[Citation needed].
Please provide a link to a patent that says: "1. A method of activating something comprising touching the something."
Doesn't exist. You're outraged over something you made up.
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just like how everyone has equal votes and right to get elected, and it is defined as such in the dictionary and with citations, but, somehow, the ones with the money ends up enjoying those freedoms.
that is also something i made up.
Time for the consumers to sue the corps (Score:2)
It's time we the consumers start suing the companies.
wait, the lawyers will win again, damn.
this reality is starting to suck.
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Finnish? Are they going to sue Linus Torvalds?
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We represent Nokia and we're going to sue Apple too.
Oops, we already are.
Fine, we're going to sue Motorola
I think they already did? Or was it the other way around? Anyway, point is, it's not time, not yet. Give it half a decade or so, and if both companies are still afloat, it may be time for another round...
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Just wondering... given the load on the USPTO, how likely would it be that both Apple and Motorola are violating each others patents on technology they themselves hold the patent to? Really: this lawyer frenzy just shows how big a mess it is.
Very likely, and it has no bearing on the load at the USPTO or whether it's a "mess" - say you and I run car companies. I get a patent on headlights that turn with the steering wheel to follow curves in the road. You get a patent on a constant load automatic transmission. I can infringe your patent and you can infringe my patent, even though they're not at all related and the USPTO would never have found one while searching for the other. Machines are complicated, and there's a lot of technology there.
Furt
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People used to file lots of patents on "doing X on a computer", then "doing X over the Internet", and "doing X in Java".
Yes, and in every case, "X" was patentable. They add dependent claims of "The method of claim 1, wherein the network used is the internet." Claim 1 was patentable on its own, and this claim just adds a further limitation. Primarily, it's done for a doctrine called claim differentiation - if claim 5, for example, says that the network is the internet and it depends on claim 1, then claim 1 must be broader and include every network that isn't the internet, including home networks and private networks.
In oth
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Damn clouds!
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A lawyer patented the wheel in Australia a few years back; patenting patent-trolling in the US can't be much harder than that! Didn't one of the more recent patent rulings suggest business method patents were going to be legit again? If so this one is definitely possible.