“According to a wide range of frothy mouthed pundits, Apple has announced patented ownership of ‘multitouch,’ and will now destroy the future we deserve by forcing all competitors to stop using a basic concept that was already in wide use long before Apple ever demonstrated the iPhone,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for RoughlyDrafted. “They’re wrong…”
“In large part, the brouhaha over Apple’s multitouch patent is a simple matter of ignorance combined with lazyness on the part of blogger-journalists who… weigh in on subjects with their opinion when they really have no idea what they’re talking about and don’t bother to to do a basic sanity check of their facts before rattling off their gut feelings on what they think is the issue at hand,” Dilger writes.
“Apple has patented specific claims regarding how it implements touch screen behaviors to deliver a significantly improved user interface. The name of the patent gives that away: ‘Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.’ It’s specifically claiming a unique method of determining how the user’s fingers hit the screen in order to decide whether to scroll only up and down, or to scroll around in any direction,” Dilger writes.
“It’s so smart and intuitive, few users will even notice that Apple has developed special software just to figure out what they want to do and do it for them. Now that Apple has released the iPhone with all these smart behaviors, it’s far easier to copy its behaviors than to develop a smartphone that works just as intelligently, just as Microsoft copied many of the nearly imperceptible smart behaviors that made the original Macintosh innovative and original over previous graphical interfaces such as those developed at Xerox PARC before it,” Dilger writes.
“Apple’s iPhone patents are valuable, even when (or perhaps, especially when) dealing with other companies in the smartphone industry. Other smartphone makers will have it in their best interests to avoid violating any patents that seem to be unique and potentially enforceable,” Dilger writes. “The iPhone has a lot of these, and that will ensure that the product Apple developed won’t be cloned to the same degree that Microsoft copied the Macintosh.”
There’s much more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Macaday” for the heads up.]
