I think double-tap-to-zoom is a perfect example of something that should be patentable. It's a huge improvement over existing systems that often used a zoom box you would position with cursor keys. To work properly it has to take into account the major design elements on a web page and make intelligent choices based on the user's tap target. Web browsing before double-tap-to-zoom and multi-touch zoom was a nightmare. These two features reinvented web browsing on small displays. This was clearly one of the killer features of the original iPhone.
Technology has and continues to advance at ridiculous pace. Many software developments are dependent on hardware. Until the hardware exists no one can even try to solve the problem. I don't want a company which has first access to hardware to automatically get all the software patents that derive from it.
Google is hard at work on their glasses. Lots of companies are. The hardware isn't there yet. We're getting there though. Eventually someone is going to have hardware that enables all kinds of cool things to be done that have never been done before. Our culture / society / economy doesn't need to compound their reward of being first with a 20 year exclusive.
My old Symbian phone in 2006 had an intelligent zoom, either in the built-in browser or in Opera Mobile. May have just been the latter. You didn't tap to activate it, you moved a little box, but it smart-sized the column you selected to fill the screen.
So is changing the mechanism to a double-tap when implementing it on a device with a touchscreen worth patenting?
And that's the thing about software. It's so easy to make, compared to designing/manufacturing something physical, that there are thousands of programs out there that you've probably never used, doing who knows what, and yet people are expected to know if something's novel and patentable?
> To work properly it has to take into account the major design elements on a web page and make intelligent choices based on the user's tap target.
And that is what should be patentable, if anything at all should be patentable. The algorithm to account for design elements and make intelligent choices.
In theory, patents exist to cover ideas which are hard to think up, but obvious once you've seen them. Double-tap fits this description perfectly.
I am against patents in general. But this is perfectly in line with past hardware patents. For example compare to 1950s radios where the volume control was also the on/off switch. Pull it out, and the radio was on, push it in, it was off, and it remembered the volume that you wanted. That button design was patented.
I don't see a difference in kind on that patent and the double-click patent.
I'd wager anybody with a little work, when told "Don't add another interaction point to this radio" or "Try to find some way of cutting down on distinct inputs" would stumble upon the radio knob solution given a little time.
This isn't art--even a cursory exploration of the solution space with vague constraints should get you there.
I've been trying to think up a practical way to use that very test as the barometer for patentability. Announce the problem that has been solved, and let the public submit solutions. If any of them are close to what is in the prospective patent, the patent shouldn't be granted.
It's tough though, because often the inventive thing is framing the problem correctly, or even identifying that there is a problem to be solved here. By assuming that, you're in danger of a hindsight bias.
Patents were never intended to grant monopolies over a given problem. If you're solving a problem that no one else has solved before, people will try to solve it once they use your product. I don't think granting monopolies over a problem space helps society. Quite the contrary.
> Patents were never intended to grant monopolies over a given problem.
Well I didn't say that they were... but I'm not sure I agree with your statement anyway. Do you have any evidence that that isn't what they were intended for?
I don't have any evidence. It just doesn't make sense to grant monopolies on a problem. It would harm innovation rather than help it. We'd have one medicine to treat each ailment, for instance.
Like the article that was recently posted about smart headlights letting drivers see through rain. Once you read the headline, you instantly know "camera(s), projectors, and motion-tracking algorithms" without having to click through to the article. Maybe the specific combination of motion tracking algorithms could be patentable for a short time, but not in such a way that an independent implementation necessarily infringes the patent.
That may be. But my point is that the standard that is being applied here is exactly what has been applied in hardware for decades, and what has been held up before legislators as exemplars of what patents are supposed to be for.
Incidentally I think that there was some ingenuity there. When Jacob Rabinow created the pull-button, he had been asked to improve a push-button tuner. (A review of the source informs me that when you pulled it had the station, not the volume. My bad. I have not seen one of these radios in decades...) His reason for switching is that he knew the problems with existing push-button tuners, and could design a better pull-button tuner. The manufacturer he invented it for did not want to accept it because nobody else was building them.
Incidentally the inventor of that was Jacob Rabinow. Take a glance at http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/patents.html to see all of his patents. Given how many inventions he had, he clearly did not spend long on each. But his claim would e that without the patent system he would have had no incentive to invent them, and would have worked on other stuff.
I'm not defending this either way. Merely stating the official view of what the patent system is supposed to have been for. (And my personal feelings are the other way.)
The patent system is supposed to encourage the progress of science and useful arts, not to reward inventors. While that is a good thing, it's not something to sacrifice progress for.
We're heading towards a world where all the money is getting funneled towards patent lawsuits and away from building products. This is not a good thing.
That's well and good too--excepting the fact that the free market already does this, and at the rate the patent system/legal system move, the deck is utterly stacked against the pioneers unless they've got gigantic money behind them.
And since software has such low barriers to entry, this really does not help progress.
Excuse me, what on earth is non-obvious about that?
When enumerating the alternatives to the pinch-gesture (the awkwardness of which becomes obvious within the first few days of use) then you end up with a rather short list of 10-12 items - and that's counting rather esoteric ones like a physical jog-dial.
Apple chose double-tap, just like anyone else in their right mind (other than Sony) would.
If that's not textbook example for a trivial "invention" then I don't know what is.
Actually, double-click was invented at Apple in 1980 or 1981, some ten years after the WIMP paradigm was invented at Xerox, and 18 years after Ivan Sutherland invented a sort of graphical user interface for Sketchpad, which Alan Kay credits as "the invention of the GUI".
See http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s..., in the comments: "I remember when Larry was doing that testing. One of the things he tested was the three-button mouse, which is what Xerox had used. He found out that inexperienced computer users (the market that Lisa was aimed at, believe it or not) got too confused -- they couldn't remember what each of the buttons did. Same problem with a two-button mouse. So the one-button mouse was born. Of course, that meant that we needed double-click and triple-click, but that's another story..."
That doesn't mean that Apple deserves a patent for every double-finger-twitch action in perpetuity, or that double-click doesn't logically follow from the reduction in mouse button count.
The parent was pointing out the conflation of action (double-tap to fit, overloading volume control with on/off features) and mechanism (fitting algorithm, physical design of said button). The former is not patentable, or rather should not be, while the latter might be.
It's the difference between going to the patent office with an idea for "an engine that runs on steam" and actually designing a steam engine. See how much broader in scope the first one is?
I have serious trouble figuring out any possible difficulties in implementing this. Text is already in a bounding box. Zoom to the width of that box, and give it a little margin to make it look pretty.
It's not like zoom hadn't been implemented, or they had to reflow anything.
Patents aren't about doing something new. They are non obvious ideas - read the definition please. Amazon 1 click patent was an example of idiodicy of "something new".
This blasé attitude to patents is extremely dangerous. It stifles innovation and hurts society - the exact opposite of why patents were created.
Imagine if i patented RGB 128, 179, 253 because I couldn't find that value hadn't been used before. Should this be patentable? What about patenting a piece of timber 3.914 ft x 1.234 ft?
This is where Apple deserve a really hard kick in the balls. They patented something so generic and obvious that it is almost impossible not to breach it.
You've heard the saying "standing on the shoulders of giants" - what it means is that technology has enabled a bunch of potential inventions. Patterns of these combinations emerge naturally - sine pick up on it quicker than others... But such incremental steps should not be patentable because someone else would have easily come up with the same thing.
Now if you tell me that someone invented a new DSP, or a new compression algorithm that was genuinely different, then that is a good example.
Ask the question: would someone have easily come up with it, roughly at the same time ... And... Does it help of harm society to grant this patent... Then and only then should a patent bd granted.
- posted from my iPhone
Actually, part of the criteria for getting a patent (at least in the states) is that the invention is non-obvious to those in the trade. So patents kind of are about doing things that are hard.
And you could argue that zooming in on an HTML bounding box would be obvious to an engineer developing web browsers.
As Rob Pike has said about his patents, everything is obvious in retrospect.
In any case, if it's so obvious, where's the prior art? It's not as if web browsers haven't been around for nearly 20 years.
It seems to me that Apple has justification to defend wholesale copying of the myriad of little design decisions that they made that are synergistic. It's clear that they spent a huge amount of effort and cost doing this, and were able to succeed in a way that many had tried previously and failed.
The legal ways that one can defend such synergistic design work is limited. One common way, for better or worse, is to patent some of the individual elements to throw gum in the works of anyone trying to make derivatives of your work.
Web browsers on tiny devices that have the processing power to do a scaled zoom in a reasonable period of time have most certainly not been around for 20 years.
In theory, you're wrong (and you certainly should be).
In practice, I'd take it a step further: Patents aren't about doing things that are hard. They're about doing things that are new... to the patent office.
Not that I was making any comment on patentability.
But if the process isn't difficult, and we can assume that people individually have used zoom to zoom in on text, then the extent of the innovation is having it as a preset.
I'm sure you also believe the UX in any given video game should be patentable, and video games need to license each other for the effect of tapping buttons here or yanking joysticks there in order to even build their own.
"it has to take into account the major design elements on a web page and make intelligent choices based on the user's tap target"
That's fine, so patent the _specific algorithm_ used to make that decision. Implementations are fine to patent, IMHO. Broad concepts, such as "it should zoom in when I tap twice" are not.
