[djackson]

One of his supporting arguments cuts both ways.

Apple's patent on "hand scaling velocity" simply gives a mathematical formula for the sentence: "scale at a speed proportional to how fast the fingers are moving."

There is nothing groundbreaking or advanced about the math here, or the idea behind it. Anyone implementing a multi-touch screen is likely to come to discover that a fixed scaling speed sometimes feels sluggish or awkwardly fast, and so that speed should adjust based on user input. And now, without realizing it, they've infringed on Apple's IP and are open to being sued.

[azakai]

Yes, the math he shows there from Apple's patent looks very obvious. Anyone looking to implement detection of multiple touches on a touchscreen would end up with basically those equations, or others that are functionally equivalent to them.

I want to give TFA's author more credit, but I worry that he is just copy-pasting some math, in hopes that math will just look incomprehensible and hence novel. But that a patent has some equations in it doesn't make it novel. This math certainly isn't.

If you want an example of a patent that actually does have nontrivial math, then the MP3 patents for example qualify. (Whether you think even that should be patentable is of course still an open question - but at least the math in the MP3 patents isn't obvious.)

[derleth]

> simply gives a mathematical formula

For a lot of people, 'simple' and 'mathematical formula' is practically an oxymoron. I know, I know, it's a cliche to point it out, but it also illuminates the heart of the problem: The patent examiners are too overworked to pick up on the obviousness, and it doesn't look obvious to most people. It looks densely complex and inscrutable to most people. (The notion of whether we need to allow patents to be densely complex and inscrutable in the first place is another issue.)

Therefore, it's difficult to communicate just how bad the patent is to enough people to convince lawmakers to change the system.