[ajross]

First off: the use of "obvious" in the law is technical, and not a synonym for "simple". It means obvious to a learned practitioner in the field. If you handed a touchscreen UI to 100 handset designers in 2007 and asked them to come up with a unlock mechnism, you really think that none of them would have invented a slide gesture?

More broadly: I think your attitude is, in fact, exactly the problem. The existing patent regime tends to defaults to a judgement that if something "hasn't been invented" (worse: "the patent office wasn't presented with specific evidence that it has previously been invented") that it must be non-obvious.

Some things are obviously obvious, and I know it when I see it. Slide to unlock is obvious, period. Arguing otherwise invokes a universe where every tiny bit of nonsense in every product becomes someone's property.

Basically: if slide to unlock is not obvious, then everything is non-obvious and all hope is lost. Think this through -- I really don't think you want to live in that world.

[esolyt]

I think it really is a great idea to unlock a touchscreen device and Apple deserves credit for that. But it doesn't add much to Neonode's implementation. It is basically the same swipe gesture. It just additionally has a UI element which moves as you move your finger, showing you the progress until the gesture is complete.

[JumpCrisscross]

If "some things are obviously obvious" that implies there is an objective (or universal subjective) criterion for judging obviousness. What would this be?

Note that a lot of brilliance looks obvious ex post facto because one is looking up the branch and seeing only one branch instead of down it and the bifurcations.

[ajross]

No. You're arguing precisely the fallacy I tried to refute. The fact that you personally (or any given judge or patent officer) didn't think of something isn't reasonable grounds for making it non-obvious, which is a technical (legally "objective", if not logically) distinction.

So if you want to make that case, make it. Show me the "brilliance" in Slide-to-Unlock that makes it a unique flower worthy of protection. Don't hide behind platitudes.

[tedunangst]

Show me the "brilliance" in Slide-to-Unlock that makes it a unique flower worthy of protection.

It's not clear how one would do this. You could reply to any evidence presented "meh, not impressed." Your position is basically the mirror of the fallacy you're arguing against. The fact that you personally are not impressed doesn't make it non-obvious either. [oops, meant obvious]

[ajross]

Certainly it can be done for some inventions. The RSA cryptosystem patent comes to mind as something that even experts wouldn't have seen. Likewise much of the original work on image compression, etc... You don't have to look that far to find brilliance -- we're swimming in it. So again, that just sounds like a platitude to me. Rather than try to defend the nonsense, you're hiding behind the fact that you can't be proven wrong.

Or conversely: the world you apparently want to live in is one where "protectable innovation" is cheap and worthless. Every simple improvement on an existing system becomes someone's property. Do you really want that? I don't think you do -- I think, frankly, that you want every simple improvement made by Apple Computer to be protectable. Prove me wrong. I don't think you can. :)

[tedunangst]

RSA is an interesting example, because that definitely seems to fall into the territory of "you can't patent math". "Oh, it's just some multiplication, how hard can it be? You can fit the whole thing on a single whiteboard."

[ajross]

You're on a tangent. The point wasn't whether or not RSA is patentable (it was patented, obviously, though it was released to the public and would have expired by now anyway). It's that even among people ("experts in the field", legally) who understand modular exponentiation and can implement RSA correctly, the discovery of public key encryption represents a sublime moment of brilliance. I certainly never would have seen it, nor do I know anyone who claims they would have. Your point was that this kind of certainty didn't exist, and thus you're wrong (or else you're actually claiming that you think RSA was an obvious innovation, in which case let me compose myself before continuing...)

Even to someone (Hi!) who thinks all software patents are bad, RSA is patentable if anything is patentable. Slide to unlock, not even remotely so.

[JumpCrisscross]

Patents aren't granted for brilliance, merely novelty. This is good - novelty is objective, "brilliance" or "obviousness" are not. Thus it makes sense to default novelty to being non-obvious and deal with the exceptions on a case-by-case basis. The forum democratic societies do this in is the court system.

[esolyt]

Actually, novelty implies non-obviousness. So you can't possibly think novelty is objective but obviousness is subjective.