[rayiner]

Just because you can see the logical evolutionary history of a design in hindsight does not mean it's obvious.

One of the considerations for "obviousness" is "failure of others." Companies failed for a decade to have usable touch-screen devices before Apple came out with the iPhone. Within just a couple of years, smartphones all went from looking like Treos to looking like iPhones. Multi-touch was a game-changer and it wasn't obvious.

[vibrunazo]

You're reinterpreting what's written to fit your argument. Failure of others should be considered to define obviousness when you come up with something new that succeeds where others failed. Not because you can patent something someone else invented just because you sold better than the original inventor. That's absurd.

Apple's inventions existed before, so there's prior art, that's all. It's this simple.

[taligent]

If everything Apple has done existed before then it should have been EASY to find clear examples of prior art to convince the jury of this.

But there were no clear examples. Just stretches of the imagination e.g. Star Trek.

[wvenable]

> Within just a couple of years, smartphones all went from looking like Treos to looking like iPhones.

That's revisionist history right there -- every single phone from HTC going back to the original PDA/phone Pocket PC hybrids looked like iPhones. But they didn't have multitouch.