[oemera]

Sure 100 engineers would come up with the idea "slide to unlock". After you see and use something it's always easier to find this said solution. BUT before Apple it seems that none of the 100 engineers you mentioned came up with the idea and it was never build and that means it was never obvious before Apple created it.

Saying things are obvious after someone already invented a dead simple and good solution for a problem we had for years is always easy.

EDIT: Grammer.

[CamperBob2]

The relevant question is, are the teachings of the patent likely to be necessary in order for a person of average skill in the art to implement the claimed technique(s)?

If the answer is not only "No," but "Are you joking?", then the patent should never have been issued.

[taligent]

That's a ridiculous metric for whether a patent should be issued or not.

Many things are easy to implement but are difficult to conceptualize.

[CamperBob2]

Why, in your opinion, do we have patents?

Patents are a bargain with society: I, the inventor, will publish the details of my invention, instead of keeping it locked away forever as a trade secret. In return, you, the government, will grant me a limited monopoly on the invention.

But if the patent's teachings aren't even remotely necessary or helpful to those who implement my invention in the future, what exactly is society getting in exchange for the monopoly grant?

IMO, patents shouldn't be granted on anything that wouldn't otherwise be a candidate for trade secret protection. "Slide to unlock" certainly would never meet that bar. There is a 0% chance that anyone who is infringing on this patent needed to read it first.

[JackC]

You're making sense in general, but the other justification for patents besides encouraging disclosure of details would be encouraging exploration of a wide range of options. For example: I, the inventor, will experiment with thousands of materials to find the one most suitable as a lightbulb filament. In return, you, the government, will grant me a limited monopoly on use of that material as a lightbulb filament. Once I release a lightbulb with a bamboo filament my invention is trivial to reimplement, but that doesn't mean the patent isn't contributing anything useful.

Now in this case, the analogy would be I, Apple Computer, will experiment with thousands of touchscreen UIs to find the one most suitable for unlocking the device, and you, the government, will grant me a 20 year monopoly on whatever I come up with. I think the sane response is, "eh, no deal." We're just not getting enough out of the bargain. But "easy to reimplement once explained" isn't the problem there -- "easy to implement in the first place" or "no additional incentive required to encourage innovation" is.

[CamperBob2]

The light bulb example isn't adequately addressed by my original argument, but I have another one up my sleeve. Namely: If it's likely to the point of being almost certain that someone else will soon come up with the same solution, it shouldn't be patentable.

If inventors are to be rewarded by monopoly grants, it should be for doing genuinely challenging, innovative research, not for winning a foot race to the patent office, as happened with popular technologies like the telephone, or for trying random stuff until you hit the lottery, like Edison did with the light bulb. We, the public, would not have had to wait much longer for electric lighting if patent protection had been unavailable. We didn't get anything special in return for our monopoly grant to Edison.

An appropriate quote that I saved from an earlier HN thread: "It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later." -Aubrey de Grey

[tomp]

However, that is not the purpose of the patents.

You can't patent an idea, you can only patent an implementation of it. E.g., I can't patent a flying carpet until I actually know how to make it and prove that I can (by making it or being very specific in technical instructions on how to make it).

An patent is obvious if you can explain the idea, i.e. what you want the machine to do, to a graduate engineer/scientist, and have him implement it. As for the famous doubly-linked list patent: if I tell a programmer: "I have a number of items {A, B, C, D, E}, and sometimes I need to access them in the [A -> B -> C -> D -> E] sequence, and othertimes I need to access them in the [B -> C -> E -> A -> D] sequence. Make an efficient/working implementation of it!", then any programmer could come up with the doubly-linked list implementation. Ergo, it is obvious.

[reitzensteinm]

Come on, I clearly meant before Apple first used it. Today, 100 out of 100 engineers would consider it.

You are right that obviousness changes over time, and it's important to consider it from the perspective of the time of the invention.

But some things genuinely were obvious at the time of their 'invention'.

[Xuzz]

I actually wish it was that obvious: I used Palm OS, RIM, and Windows Mobile devices before the iPhone and the unlock mechanisms (on the touchscreens!) ranged from "press the tiny * key, then the unlock soft button" (which was awful) to "press the center button once" (somewhat less awful). Slide to unlock was a huge deal for me: I no longer dreaded the crazy key commands needed to unlock a smartphone.

Palm Treo: http://blog.treonauts.com/picKeyGuard01.jpg

Palm Windows Mobile: http://www.hpc.ru/lib/arts/2364/palm-treo-750v-keylock.gif

Windows Mobile: http://cdn.pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DeviceLo...

[taligent]

The obvious question is why didn't it appear on ANY of the major OEM's phones before the iPhone ?

[tjoff]

Because the previous touchscreens was resistive and used with a pen/nail. And their UIs wasn't at all about dragging stuff but rather clicking on them.

Once you define your UI around a capacitive touchscreen "slide to unlock" becomes trivial.

[huggyface]

Which is really the key aspect to all of this.

Technology moves forward enabling new behaviors that were never possible before, and much of the "innovation" that people declare is nothing more than a land-rush (see the "on a computer" that was the invention of countless patents). The iPhone stood on the backs of the GPS industry, for instance, that pushed much of the innovations in mobile chips, GPUs (OpenGL ES and mobile GPUs were made for the in-car GPS industry), screen and touchscreen technology. Suddenly the technology was there to do things that couldn't be done before and the land grab was afoot. Is a land grab innovation?

I don't discount that Apple invented and refined a lot, or that some companies seem to be addicted to simply cloning (Samsung is particularly guilty of this), but a lot of what Apple is credited with isn't much more evolved than "on a computer". And now that we have all sorts of innovations in battery technology, chipsets, etc, things like Google's glasses are possible, but only a fool would imagine that they created them out of the ether, instead of simply moved to where technology had brought them.

[codeka]

But there are numerous examples of "swipe to unlock" right here in this thread. By qualifying that with "major OEMs", you're just moving the goal post.

[taligent]

I'm not trying to move any goal post. We are dealing with the major OEMs who are alleged to be infringing. And numerous examples of prior art where ?

All I've seen in this thread is the Neonode. The video games and hardware locks are ridiculous because a patent is NOT a general idea it is a specific implementation of a concept.

[jerf]

"All I've seen in this thread is the Neonode."

It only takes one, and there is no requirement that that one be from a shipped product from a "major OEM". A sufficiently descriptive Usenet post is sufficient. Patents have been rejected because the described object was previously described in science fiction novels.

[pvidler]

That is a fair question -- the neonode phone may count as prior art (although it looks a bit different to Apple's patent claims), but it's not exactly a well known phone. It's very unlikely that people at Apple would have been aware enough of that to make their own implementation 'obvious' based solely on that -- unless it was big in the US but never made it far here? Edit: and two independent implementations (out of the hundreds of phone models) certainly doesn't prove obviousness; that's a nasty insult to the engineers/designers who worked on the neonode and may well have been proud of their innovation.

Still, for all that I love Apple and their products, swipe to unlock is a pitifully small thing to waste a patent on. To my mind, patents are needed but should be:

* non-transferable to a new owner -- no buying and selling, and lost altogether when the owning company is itself acquired.

* only applicable to actual products -- invalid if none of the company's products use it within, say, one or two years of application.

* short term -- two or three years from initial product release ought to be enough, while still allowing some competition down the line.

* very low base cost, but with a small cost per product model and maybe even a tiny cost for each device sold.

Those four changes could probably bring the patent system back to its original intent, in my opinion.

[dllthomas]

Prior art doesn't mean it was obvious, but it does mean the patent was invalid. It doesn't matter, for patents, whether you knew about the previous creation of the thing in question, your creation of it still can't be patented (and if the previous one was, you are still infringing - although you may not be "knowingly infringing", which can affect the penalties but not whether you infringe in the first place).

[pvidler]

Yes, but if i recall correctly, apple's patent claim is quite specific about dragging an on-screen picture across a visually represented path -- isn't that how google got around it in android? The neonode, on the other hand, doesn't look to have any visual indicator at all; it just uses a corner-to-corner swipe with nothing extra on the screen.

Also, it was the judge who said the neonode made it obvious, which seems wrong to me given the lack of mainstream implementations.

But none of this changes the fact that this patent is ludicrously trivial -- even if not obvious -- and should never have seen the light of day.

[beedogs]

"BUT before Apple it seems that none of the 100 engineers you mentioned came up with the idea"

except for, you know, the numerous examples of prior art given throughout this thread.

[jussij]

> BUT before Apple it seems that none of the 100 engineers you mentioned came up with the idea

Except for those Neonode N1m engineers, as the video clearly shows that they did.

But I guess they though the idea was so obvious they didn't apply for a patent.

[infinitex]

Yes, they do have a patent. U.S. Patent No. 8,095,879: Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...

[infinitex]

Neonodes Patent: http://www.google.com/patents?id=4vwAAgAAEBAJ&printsec=f...

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=24046

[TruthElixirX]

He just linked to a video of someone else doing it before Apple. Also physical world has had slide to lock/unlock for a really long time:

http://m2.sourcingmap.com/smapimg/en/n/11b/hardware-door-loc...

[denzil_correa]

I receive a 403 Forbidden Error on this URL.

[TruthElixirX]

Sorry, it is a sliding lock. Just went with the first image I found on GIS.