[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.