[mrkmcknz]

It infuriates me when I hear of these 'swipe to unlock' and 'pull to refresh' patents that actually get issued.

Defensive use only when patents as pathetic as these are used is all well and good. Wasn't the patent system created to protect real innovation?

A fucking slide to unlock gesture is not innovation.

Now let me go and patent that 'dance to pay' gesture.

[rorrr]

> 'dance to pay' gesture

Strippers already have prior art on that one.

[flyinRyan]

No, that's dance to receive. Having to do the work and pay is pretty unique, though it has probably been thought of before...

[da_n]

> A fucking slide to unlock gesture is not innovation.

Come on, yes the patent system needs reform but inventions do need to be protected/nurtured. Disregard the details here, and when I hear people having little rants it sounds like they advocate a kind of anarchist cookbook approach to innovation saying 'fuck it, you just make it better than them, who cares if the ting you worked on for 5 years was copied in 5 minutes by xyz, just make it better than them you litigious assholes'. Suppose I said this about your fucking homework? Hey, nice answers you put in there, I just copied them because they were obvious. Fuck you.

So yeah, you say swipe to unlock is obvious, tell me what the fuck you invented that was 'obvious'? Nope? Nothing huh? Nada? Oh well, guess that makes you an expert or something.

[fpgeek]

Patents aren't like copying someone's homework - that's copyright.

It's important to remember, there's no suggestion in any of these cases that anyone stole Apple's source code. There isn't even an allegation that they did any nontrivial reverse-engineering of an iPhone (it clearly wasn't necessary). Instead, at most, people saw a behavior and independently re-implemented it (and often might not have even seen the behavior first - many of these patents date far back before the iPhone - to the point where "infringing" implementations existed well before the iPhone), without studying the implementation at all.

That's like... getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject (when they might not have even known the subject of your paper and even if they did it wasn't cheating).

[flyinRyan]

>getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject

No, what actually happened would be more like writing a brilliant paper on Roman Empire exploring it in a way that no one had before, and suddenly this guy who's been stuck for years suddenly "comes up with" a paper that appears to borrow heavily from yours.

[darkarmani]

What's the problem with that as long as it is plagiarized? If it actually borrows directly it just needs citations.

[da_n]

Good point, thank you. I guess my thought is that the slide to unlock implementation and idea is being copied. Calling it obvious (legal definition notwithstanding) is something I do not agree with, there are many ways that one could think to unlock such a device.

[saket123]

This is one of the better explanations I have seen for this patent game. I remember the same thing came up with Google vs. Oracle. In that Google did a near clean implementation (albeit those 9 lines and few test files) of JAVA. I think clean implementations should be made part of Patent proceeding. This won't be applicable to this case but still would go a long long way in stupid idea patents like these.