| >I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process. You made this claim yesterday as well. It is so ridiculous that I find it hard to take the rest of your comment seriously. The iPhone most certainly showed consumer acceptance of a touchscreen. It was a consumer test that demonstrated that the lack of a physical keyboard and minimal physical buttons is acceptable if not preferable by customers. Did any patent application teach anything technical, though? That is laughable. >People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas. Most patents are on ideas. There have been a tremendous number of misunderstandings or outright lies about patents on here- -patents are not some great mystery only known by a few, and are overwhelmingly boilerplate. Every single independent claim stands on its own and can be infringed. -some have posited that patents are highly specific and no one is qualified to comment on them save super experts. Any criticism of a patent will yield a "you have to look at the specific claims!". Yet here's Apple's own patent lawyers description of why HTC Android handsets violate their patent- "the Nexus One includes Android's "Linkify" functionality, which "take[s] a piece of text and a regular expression and turns all of the regex matches in the text into clickable links. This is particularly useful for matching things like email addresses, web urls, etc. and making them actionable". That is the meat of it. The rest of the text is boilerplate expanding on the concept of "on a computer". -patents do not need a working implementation. As others have pointed out, people have patented perpetual motion motions, among other hilarious patents. |