They patented "a grid of icons" when it's literally the first way you'd think of doing the UI - basically the definition of an "obvious patent". Not to mention that it'd already been done that way many times before and was the standard thing on smartphones by that point. So both obvious and massive prior art.
Nonsense; I generally find that dismissive drive-by comments on Hacker News are better much thought through than actual court decisions made at the conclusion of a court trial. /s
Well, I think average HN'er has much better judgement over average Joe jury in Apple's hometown on technical design and patent issues. The role (or problem) of non-technical jury in highly technical patent litigation is also often debated in academia too.
Keep in mind that most of the people in Apple's hometown are have graduate degrees and work in the technology industry…though, it's likely that they wouldn't be selected for the jury at this trial.
I was surprised to find that only two of the first jury had any technical background at all. In that case however one such member helped to ignore the jury instruction and somewhat mislead the rest.
They might have lost them in the end, but they were certainly not “thrown out” as would have happened if they simply patented a grid of icons with trivially-obvious prior art. Regardless of your belief in the overall merits of their case, it’s very obviously a much more nuanced issue than people here apparently believe.
?? Apple's claims were dismissed in summary judgements -- yes, their cases were "thrown out" elsewhere. Where there were actual trials, in the UK for instance, Apple not only lost and was even sanctioned by the court for disobeying the court decision. Your "belief" that Apple won by merit really has no reality outside Apple's hometown. Yes and only in Apple's home country, as other commenters have noted, do you have the chief executive Obama coming out reversing Samsung's win at ITC that would have ended all these unnecessary lawsuits years back.
Apple also had it's home-country's executive intervene when the Obama administration blocked the import ban Samsung won against Apple. Yet snarky HNers act like there were no fingers on the scale.
I wrote they both appear to be an evolution of the visor's design. Which makes me wonder why something like the iPhone's home screen could be patented in the first place. Where's the novelty?
Design patents don’t protect novel technology (and in fact, if there is a functional benefit to the design you can’t get a design patent). Design patents protect arbitrary design elements to keep people from copying the non-functional look of someone else’s product.
Hmm I'm not convinced. If the iPhones home screen was so obvious why didn't others do it before? Those examples you listed are fairly different from iPhone at the time in a way that the Samsung phone wasn't.
They did, but Apple's hometown court judge didn't allow prior arts to stand in that case. Apple's design cases elsewhere failed because of the obviousness (and prior arts).
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level. It was never going to happen a minute earlier, and it was absolutely inevitable a minute later. It was just a question of who was going to build it.
Apple kept their eye on that particular ball, while Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, Samsung, and others did not.
As a result, Apple was (properly) rewarded by the marketplace for their insight. There was never any need to grant them an artificial monopoly on trivial and/or obvious design elements.
This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.
And I’m not at all convinced that it was such an obvious idea given the development of multitouch. I think it only seems obvious after the fact.
> This is such a blatant attempt to diminish the massive effort huge numbers of very talented people put in in order to make the iPhone a reality when it became one.
Krustyburger, it sounds like you're directly quoting Tim Cook.
> I think it only seems obvious after the fact.
It's easy to say that now, to claim that nobody would have thought of it. But of course we know the history of technology and innovation in a competitive marketplace sees many innovations and evolution in design.
There is no doubt in my mind that Apple tried to cling to something which would have been absolutely "discovered" and developed very soon after. It was a land-grab for profit reasons, nothing to do with "diminishing efforts of talented people" that is such a cheesy line btw.
Sorry, but the idea is so obvious that the burden of proof lies with those who suggest that an iPhone-like device isn't inevitable once capacitive multitouch tech appears.
Or do people think Apple invented that, too?
And make no mistake, it's ideas, and not implementations, that are behind these ludicrous half-billion dollar patent judgments. Patents were not supposed to work that way, but they do.
If you don't agree with the patent system, the only solution is to lobby to get the laws changed. Why should Apple voluntarily withdraw if all their competitors (e.g. Samsung, Google, Microsoft) sure as hell aren't going to?
Actually the burden of proof is on you to substantiate your claims. If the idea was so obvious, why was it so widely ridiculed in the industry for having no hardware keyboard? It was widely predicted to be a failure.
It was ridiculed only by people like Steve Ballmer who were either whistling past the graveyard or just plain dense.
It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
To me, and to most other people I hung out with at the time, it was very obvious that physical keyboards on cell phones were not going to be A Thing for very much longer. Everything else that happened simply followed from that.
> It wasn't ridiculed by myself, or by anyone I knew.
How exactly does this contribute to the discussion,
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
To counter your point, my friends were blackberry fanatics, they just laughed when they saw the iphone without a physical keyboard and said this will never work.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the patent in question. It seems very important to the people in this thread to deflect from any discussion of the actual case. I wonder why that might be?
So if its not relevant why bring it up in the first place?
To bolster the argument of inevitability, as opposed to divine inspiration worthy of eternal reward (or at least 20 years).
The iPhone depended on a single gating technology: touchscreens that didn't suck. Those appeared on the market a couple of years before the iPhone, but none of the major players took advantage of them. Apple did, and the rest is deterministic history.
Yes, some people laughed at touchscreen UIs. Yes, they were wrong to do so. Both of these facts are irrelevant to the underlying argument.
Someone else would have made a phone with the same multitouch idea eventually.
But it would have been one phone among 50 they sold, the gestures would have been clunky, it would still have had a physical keyboard lurking somewhere, their salespeople wouldn’t have known how to sell it, and everyone else would look at the market crater and decided the idea would never sell.
The LG Prada had a touch screen. But did it have A full HTML browser? A music/video store ecosystem? Would LG have been able to create an operating system on par with iOS? Within a year would they have had a development environment and a platform to create what became the App Store? Would they have been able to dictate to the carriers that they were going to upgrade their own OS and not be beholden to them?
The original statement that I was replying to was:
The iPhone was always going to happen as soon as capacitive multitouch technology became feasible at the consumer level.
The LG Prada being a touch screen and therefore would have evolved into the iPhone is as unrealistic as thinking whatever the knock off touch screen phone that Sprint released in late 2007 was going to evolve into an iPhone.
Which explains the incessant mockery Apple received when they revealed it.
Many things Apple does seem obvious in hindsight, but that doesn’t mean the industry would have converged there without them. Look at how awful Windows was for years. Or beige PCs. Or 20lb laptops.
The tech industry likes to sell what’s already selling. Apple tries to sell what people don’t know they want yet.
The original iPhone used a Synaptics touchscreen IIRC, so it's pretty reasonable that Apple and every major phone manufacturer has been shown the Synaptics tech demo in 2006, probably earlier.
That was the point: The evolution of stylus-based interfaces to multi-touch was clear to the major players in the field, and the direction the necessary UX changes had to evolve to were obvious.
But Facebook wasn't a thing that had to be "invented." It was simply an incremental refinement of things that already existed. Only its marketing was innovative -- the key idea being to build, then connect, audiences of homogeneous users at colleges.
And that 'innovation' isn't worth a half-billion dollar patent suit, either.
You could make calls on the Palm Treo. It was released in 2004, three years before the iPhone. It had a touch screen (resistive) and a web browser. It was a pretty great phone for its time.
Your anecdote is valid, but there are A LOT of PDA's out there. Many of them have a grid of icons layout. For instance, consider the Sharp PDA's GUI -- it's a grid of rectangular icons broken up into pages (albeit with named tabs).
That being said, there may be something unique to Apple's patent, but on its face, "grid of icons" as a UI pattern predates the iPhone considerably.
You know we are talking about design patents. In which case Apple's patent is completely legitimate since the home screen remains unique to this very day.
You have a complete misunderstanding of how design patents work. It's akin to those ignorant fools running around talking about Apple patenting round corners.
What Apple patented was their design for a grid of icons. You could have created your own just like Google and many others did.
What you couldn't do was blatantly rip off their design which Samsung did.
You know a Coke bottle, right ? That has a design patent.
Other drink makers are not allowed to make the exact same bottle shape. But you can still make a bottle. And you can still make a bottle that is very similar to the Coke design. But it can't be nearly identical. Translate that to Apple's home screen and that's what we are talking about.
It is not nearly identical as did the Supreme court find.
These patents are 10 steps back in the direction of inmovation and fair market competition; 10 steps forward in the direction of market monopoly.
Let others to copy, educate the consumer, but leave the consumer to make the decision what to buy not some judge in California.
This isn’t monopolizing some technology. These are purely arbitrary aesthetic choices, and the only reason to infringe the design patent is to make your product look like someone else’s more popular product. That’s not socially valuable activity, it’s free riding.
Design is a tradecraft like any other. It involves research, experience, skill, trial and error, time, and resources. Unfortunately, once a design is out there, it takes 5% of this initial effort to duplicate wholesale.
What you are saying is tantamount to asserting that this work should have little to no protection, and be freely copyable once a design is made public.
What is special about Apple's grid of icons? Icon sizes are -- due to convention -- almost always some power of two, or other standard size. The number of icons you can fit on a rectangular screen is going to be pretty similar because of the size of the appendage that will be interacting with it (a human thumb).
If this was simply about rounded corners or a grid of icons, they would have been laughed out of the court.
Trade dress not about any single design choice but the combination of dozens of design choices which, when combined together, become an aesthetic trademark. And importantly, Apple spent millions of dollars on marketing to promote the fact that the iPhone looks a certain way and operates in a certain way.
The issue is that Samsung cloned this aesthetic in detail for the express purpose of hijacking Apple's existing media goodwill and advertising spend. And it also dilutes the value of Apple's brand.
For instance here's a Nokia phone from 2005:
https://phys.org/news/2005-03-nokia-3g-imaging-smartphone-sh...
And a Cingular branded HTC Windows phone from 2006:
http://www.flobee.net/wp-content/uploads/cingular2125.jpg