[drats]

Minority report was released in 2002. What about interfaces in Lawnmower Man (1992) or Johnny Mnemonic (1995)? Or endless other sci-fi?

Sit a UI designer and an engineer down for a couple of sessions to talk about a touch screen (x,y coordinates coming into software from human hands) anytime in the last fifty years and they will come up with the concept of gestures in at most a few hours. What about Douglas Engelbart's work or the work at Xerox in relation to Apple's later ridiculous attempts to claim the windowed GUI as their own?

You accuse others of making up facts but you are ignorant of quite a few.

[hackinthebochs]

The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go. You have to actually be able to demonstrate how it works.

If someone develops warp drive or the transporter, does star trek count as "prior art"? That would be ludicrous.

(trying to figure out what comment you're replying to is exactly why whitespace-as-blocks is a brain-dead idea in python/coffeescript)

[hn_decay]

>The point he's making is that showing a rendered clip of some UI is not prior art, as far as patents go

While the discussion was targeted more at the actual value of software patents (i.e. what specifically Apple 'invented' with their multitouch patents), in actual practice yes such a movie is prior art if the novelty of the patent is the application of multifinger gestures. The idea that you need to show a working implementation is nonsense, and has never been a requirement of the patent system.

Regarding warp drive, the novelty of multitouch is the mere concept of using multifinger gestures on an interface. The novelty of a warp drive is the mechanism of achieving warp drive, not the concept of it.

To put it another way, if you patent a method (or system) of making a car fly, maybe that's an invention. Patenting the concept of flying cars, however, is not.