There's been ample citation of prior art, everything from prior working and publicly shown prototypes to actually shipping devices. Apple was not the first company to show a capacitive multitouch screen (LG Prada was), they were not the first to show pinch-to-zoom (numerous examples, Jeff Han, Diamond Touch, 20 years of research prototypes), they were not the first with double-tap to zoom (there's 2 decades of ZUIs, zoomable-user-interface work that predates this), they were not the first with software to detect phone numbers in text and make them clickable, they were not the first with an uncluttered rounded corner flat, face-plate design (see disallowed Samsung F700 face), they were not the first with universal search (PalmOS had it first on the original palm pilot) and on and on.

And don't give me that crap about "it's not about the idea, it's about the implementation". Apple's pinch to zoom patent, for example, covers implementations on ANY kind of touch surface. It claims are vague like "That gesture adjusts an image in some way", covering not just zoom, scale, and rotation, but any transform of the image.

When someone makes such an absolute claim, that they've never seen any genuine prior art, even though tens of thousands of engineers in forums are pointing to research and devices that are at least arguably prior art and cast Apple's patents in a grey area, to have such an absolutist assertion indicates to me that that person is not interested in fairness, or truth, but on banging the drums of tribalism.

There are for sure, people in the Android camp that are rooting for Android in this case because they like Android devices. I'm not one of them. For me, the issue is about software programming freedom.

Whether it is SOPA/PIPA, or patents being used against open source, attacks on computing freedom in general are more important than Samsung, Android, or Apple. We should not assign away the future of software or networking by granting monopoly power to the largest corporations in the world.

Not when the whole edifice was started by Homebrew hackers to begin with.

I love how people think Apple woke up the day before the iphone demo and threw it all together at the last second anything before that day is ironclad prior art.

The light bulb was invented over 120 years ago and they still hand out patents for light bulbs, imagine that.

But people aren't patenting lightbulb interactions, they are patenting specific manufactured implementations.

Look at it this way, there were definitely people doing pinch-to-zoom that looks absolutely identical to the way Apple is doing it from the user's point of view. Jeff Han's demo is a perfect example of it. For years, many people have been doing demos like this, but they've been doing it on big bulky setups like projected-desks, or in Han's example, using total internal reflection.

Apple just made a different implementation, using the same interaction gestures, on a capacitive screen. From a software point of view, the implementations are rather trivial and don't differ much except via how you obtain the input (e.g. capacitive, FTIR, cameras, etc) The main difference is shrinking down the whole thing so it fits on a phone.

The reason why this was possible in 2007 had nothing to do with Apple's software and everything to do with the ability to manufacture a capacitive screen that has the right sensitivity, accuracy, cost, weight, and power to fit into a phone.

Apple deserves engineering props for this. But they do not get credit for inventing pinch-to-zoom nor the capacitive screen. Both of these inventions came prior.

If Apple invents an entirely new kind of touch screen and an entirely new way of manufacturing it, you could argue they deserve a patent.

But taking what existed before, pinch-to-zoom on projection displays, and implementing it on a different screen does not deserve patent protection, anymore than taking an existing business method (e.g. 'selling flower bouquets by phone', adding the text 'via web site' or 'via mobile app') and slightly tweaking the medium in which the business is done to obtain another monopoly.

Should 'internet shopping cart' be allowed a patent when real world shopping carts already existed? It's crazy absurd.

If Apple's patent had even been more specific like "pinch to zoom, but on this particular kind of screen" I'd even have more sympathy for the argument, because at least other people could do the same thing Apple did: copy an existing idea and apply it to a new circumstance. Samsung and others could innovate by creating new types of displays, maybe using microscopic cameras to track your hands like minority report or something.

But granting a patent to Apple for pinch to zoom on any kind of screen? Sorry, it goes too far.

Well surely any demonstrations of these ideas by other parties weren't thrown together at the last second either, so what's your point?

Even in the worst case, they hint at the possibility of independent invention; imagine that.

I'm sure several commenters will soon note, the LG Prada was not multitouch, the Prada II was multitouch, but it came out after the iPhone. The Prada's "touch" was a really fake touch... like it would show buttons but you would have to press elsewhere to act on it. The iPhone was the first multitouch phone according to Wikipedia.

It's not that difficult to read the claims. Apple's patent covers distinguishing between pinch-to-zoom and scroll gestures based on whether one or two figures are touching. Prior art on pinch-to-zoom seems to show scrollbars for scrolling instead of single-finger-to-drag.

The simple workaround to apple's patent: allow two-finger drag. One or Two fingers close together (or moving in parallelt) is a drag. Two or more fingers far apart is a zoom. As long as there's no line of code that goes "if one finger down then it's a drag else if two fingers down it's a zoom" then the code doesn't infringe the apple patent. Easy peasy.

Design patents on the form of a utilitarian object become functional. People get used to handling an iphone with rounded corners. They get used to volume buttons being in a certain place, on/off buttons being in a certain place, charging/usb ports being in a certain place. Imitating those things strikes me as less of an attempt to "rip off" Apple and more of an attempt to make it easier to use for people who want to switch away from the iphone or ipad for other reasons.

Pagerank is a great example of something that's not supposed to be patentable. It's an algorithm. The claims are "computer implemented method of (description of some algorithm)" and "computer-readable medium that stores instructions (that implement some algorithm)". Absurd. I'd be in favor of someone trying to invalidate that patent. Google's algorithm incorporates so many more signals now than what is identified in the pagerank patent (#6285999). Putting that patent into the public domain wouldn't have any direct impact on Google's market share.

I'd like to know how duckduckgo or any other smaller search engine avoids getting sued. Is it possible to be in the search engine space and avoid infringing on any of the [invalid but granted anyway] patents in that space? The pagerank patent has a massive list of newer, mostly search related, patents in its "referenced by" list (which takes up the vast majority of the page). [1]

I think a lot of people most infuriated by Apple's patent suit against Samsung also think the Pagerank patent is not valid. If you're looking for bias, good luck with your search. I'm against all horrible patents even if they're owned by patent non-aggressors, and even if they're owned by companies I depend on for technology.

[1] http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6285999

Is that the point of the design patent though? Fashion designers always apply for design patents. The other day I saw that Philip Morris has a patent for rounded corners on their cigarette boxes. Gucci has a patent for the shape of their handbag handles. If form can be patented, why can't Apple be allowed to do the same? If we reform the patent system and disallow all design patents, then I'm sure the fashion industry would be pretty mad, since there would be nothing preventing a competitor from creating an equivalent "ugg boots".

China is one of those places where you can't patent design, and I suppose it kind of works in a strange free-market-way. The winners are those who can copy the fastest, and have enough money to bribe politicians to shutdown the competition.

You keep accusing people of not understanding what patents are, but most people aren't objecting to Apple having the exclusive right to an ornamental design (even if it isn't purely ornamental). Harping on this technicality allows you to dismiss the parent poster as not knowing anything about patents as though you're some kind of expert on them, while ignoring his point.

What people object to is Apple asserting dubious patents with broad claims to block competition. Mating a general purpose computer and an algorithm to produce a "new" "machine" is a stupid loophole. Patents are supposed to be an exchange where an inventor gets a temporary monopoly while the public gets instructions for implementing a new and non-obvious "process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter". You can't seriously argue that the world needed the bounce-back, data detector, or universal search patents to figure out how to accomplish those things. Patents shouldn't cover things that are, at best, features!

You might respond by pointing to Windows Phone as an example of a mobile OS that's different and NOT getting litigated over, but that's because Apple and Microsoft have cross-licensing agreements that have been in place since the last time Apple tried to pull this look-and-feel bullshit and lost.

Since you insist on using loaded language like "Android ripped off ... Apple", what evidence do you have to back that up? Also, what makes you say that the "anti-patent movement started with [Google]"? You're aware that people have had concerns about software patents long before this, right? Take Amazon's one-click patent as an example of something that stirred up a similar amount of nerd rage. It's not propaganda, just other people arriving at a pretty reasonable conclusion and stating it.

Apple didn't invent multi-touch finger recognition via capacitive display. You could literally take the same software written for a display/camera system and use it on a capacitive display. It would have been written before Apple filed for the patent. Apple doesn't have an invention here.