[mtgx]

Like the bounce-back effect patent, which is even sillier than the slide-to-unlock one. The main problem by far is still having these patents granted in the first place, and then either having multiple companies getting harassed by others to pay them money for the bogus patents (like what Microsoft does) or spend millions and years in Courts to resolve just a handful of them.

Sounds like a terribly inefficient system to me. Not to mention that because the US Patent Office has such low standards for accepting patents, that also means lawyers will file just about any crazy idea they can come up with, backing up the USPTO for 4 years.

If the USPTO took a stance to reject 80% of the filed patents while still charging them a few thousand dollars per application, I think the quality of the patents would significantly improve in a few years. so if there are some good patents in there, perhaps from a startup, that startup will have to wait 4 years to get it. That sounds like ages for a small company and it could be long dead by then, especially if it doesn't get funding because of the lack of an approved patent.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2042023/apples-crucial-overs...

http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-bounce-back-patent-declar...

[davidy123]

I had a Sony Ericsson P800 (an early full touchscreen device), it implemented a bounceback effect.

[AndrewStephens]

I remember watching the original iPhone presentation thinking "this looks OK but touch screens suck" then having the UI-design-oriented part of my brain completely blown by the bounce-back effect. No other touch screen software worked that way and it is hard to think of something physical that bounces like that (unlike the swipe-to-open metaphor).

I am not a lawyer and I have no opinion on the validity of the bounce-back patent (although the German court rejected it based of publication date rather than merit), but from a business point of view I can see why Apple was so keen to hog bounce-back for itself. I didn't buy a iPhone for a few years but they won a customer that day.

[jasonkester]

It wasn't novel though. I had personally implemented a drag-to-scroll interface with momentum and bounce-back for a Web 1.0 startup in 1999. Just substitute mouse pointer for finger and it's exactly the interface that mobile devices use today.

I can't think it even remotely conceivable that I invented that. It's just one of the first things you think of.

[Retra]

>it is hard to think of something physical that bounces like that

Have you never quickly opened a drawer with stuff in it?

[talmand]

I think a better example would be a drawer with rubber stops that causes the drawer to bounce back if you open it too quickly.

Or a door with a rubber stop on the wall. Or even a door with a soft spring that prevents it from opening too far.

Or a car with good bumpers.

Or a chair that springs forward if you rock back too far.

Or bungee jumping.

Nope, can't see any evidence of that action in the physical world at all.

[AndrewStephens]

Good examples, but I would be willing to bet that at some point all those things have been covered by different patents. The company who patented a chair rocking mechanism would not be affected by the inventor who made a door with soft springs (although I have never seen a door that works exactly that way).

[gamblor956]

The difference is that those patents would cover the specific mechanisms by which the bounce-back effect was achieved. In this case, the Apple patent covered the bounce-back effect itself, without regard to the code or other specific mechanisms used to achieve the effect.

[georgemcbay]

"I would be willing to bet that at some point all those things have been covered by different patents"

I agree, but whether they have been covered and whether they should have been are very different things.

"The company who patented a chair rocking mechanism would not be affected by the inventor who made a door with soft springs"

Probably not, given how messed up the patent system is, but if you read Thomas Jefferson's writings on patents, it isn't too hard to imagine him spinning furiously in his grave at where the patent system is now because of this sort of thing.

See, for example:

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letter...

What the founding fathers considered "non-obvious" was a vastly higher standard than what is passed off as non-obvious these days (these days it seems like most people who talk about patents consider "non-obvious" to be about the equivalent of "could someone have come up with in in a minute off the top of his or her head?", but for Jefferson, et al, these "X but on Y" patents would have been considered laughably weak and extremely damaging to the public good.

[harywilke]

Clearly only rich people should get patents! /sarcasm