cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/5636484
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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What did Android steal from Apple? Headphone jacks?
It's just a worse version of an already existing idea.
now you're Think Different™
Didn't we all end up just stealing a lot of todays shit from Xerox PARC anyway?
Fuck the slide to unlock discussion, let's talk about representing hierarchies of files in a file system as folders in a graphical environment and why the thing that shows our position on a screen is a slanted arrow.
I certainly don't take their side... but smartphones DIDN'T exist before the iPhone. Which phone would you say that was? BlackBerry?
Most people think of smartphones as a big touchscreen, and the iPhone was first, being released on June 29 2007, whereas the first Android phone was released over a year later in September 2008.
Mate I own a pre-iphone smart phone. What are you on about?
If you really wanna go back far enough, the first handheld, portable device which had both phone and computer technologies in one package dates as far back as the mid 90s. Touch screen and all. The term smartphone would first be coined in 1995. Heaps of other touch screen devices that could do phone calls, SMS, and had a suite of apps would come out in later years as PalmOS and later Pocket PC/Windows Mobile came to fruition in the late 90s/early 2000s. The iPhone was just iterating off technology and features already being seen in smartphones at the time, just in a sleeker, smoother, simpler manner with a capacitive touch screen rather than the resistive touch screens of most common devices at the time. Heck, the iPhone wasn't even the first phone with a capacitive touch screen.
The handspring visor phone launched in 2000 was arguably the first smartphone.
BTFO
Apparently the whole concept of a touchscreen only device, including the UI, according to Apple at the time.
Like the computers in Star Trek TNG?
Can fictional products be used as prior art against real world patents though? The entire idea of patents is to protect something someone made work in the real world.
"The whole concept of a touchscreen device..." is something that prior fictional examples prove false. They did not come up with the concept, but they did implement a prior concept.
"Nobody thought of it" and "nobody made it before" are two different things. Apple even pretended the second was true when they weren't even first to market on several of their products.
But that didn't come from a patent filing, that was my commentary on how they behaved. Patent filing language is much more precise for this reason.
Patents are about implementation, not concepts.
exactly! That tablet you saw in Star Trek TNG is not an implementation, as it's not a real device.
But is is a concept, which was what you appeared to be disagreeing with.
It is a concept indeed. When I said that, I merely provided commentary on how Apple was behaving, not what reflected reality. Apple weaponised their patents because they, or rather, Steve, believed they owned the concept.
My understanding is that patents are to protect novel new ideas. If something's already bean described in fiction, what innovation is protected by the patent?
So, I'd think "it's a tablet" wouldn't be patentable because that was described in Star Trek. But, "screen technology blah that makes tablets practical "would be patentable.
Neat post on related topic: https://fia.umd.edu/answer-can-science-fiction-stories-be-used-to-demonstrate-prior-art-in-patent-cases/
The implementation in the real world. Fiction does not tend to go into how these machines work beyond that which is needed for the narrative. You won't get enough information from such a book or TV show to be able to build something similar yourself, which is usually what you need for a patent.
I'm not saying that devices described by fiction are patentable based on the description in the fiction. But, those descriptions could be used to prove that the 'invention' is too obvious to be patentable. Page 7 of this document from the USPTO going over what 'prior art' is suggests that fiction can be used as prior art.
Fiction can only be used as prior art when what you see (or read about) is all there is to it, such as rounded corners.
It makes sense for fiction to be used as prior art in something like the rounded corners case, as the prop in question basically was an implementation of that patent in real life. Even though it isn't housing any real electronics, the plastic casing itself still exists, and simply putting some electronics inside doesn't make it a sparkly new invention.
It works less well when there are details in the implementation that aren't covered in said fiction or hand waved away with The Force or something. The sliding doors in Star Trek would be an example, as although the doors are seen to slide, you can still patent a mechanism that makes this effect possible.
I apologize, I don't think we're disagreeing. Fiction can, but often doesn't, describe something in sufficient detail to be cited as "prior art" during a patent application or dispute. It comes down to how broad the claims are in the patent.
If someone were to try and patent "sliding doors", a patent examiner could point at Star Trek and say "Sliding doors are already described in published material, your invention is not original".
If someone were to try and patent "Mechanism X, used for making sliding doors slide", that might be patentable because Star Trek (and other published material) didn't describe Mechanism X.
I would agree that we are... agreeing. Just with different wording lol
Patents protect the details of achieving an invention, not the idea for an invention itself (thereby allowing multiple different approaches to serving a market). Most courts are likely to rule that an electronic tablet is a market segment, rather than an invention. But listing out all the electronics and software needed to build one and or the industrial processes and machinery to build one at scale might be granted a patent. Fiction virtually never produces any such detail.
Inventions need to be non-obvious (35 U.S.C. 103: Conditions for patentability; non-obvious subject matter) in order to be patentable. Prior art can be used to show that an invention is obvious. The prior art doesn't need to rise to the level of detail contained in a patent to be prior art.
Not exactly, patents have to be specific, not generic, and Apple purchased the company that invented multi-touch.
The iPhone was a novel concept as a whole. I think that’s undeniable. There was nothing like it at the time.
edit: found the iPhone haters and their revisionist history. The iPhone changed everything. When it was announced, nothing like it existed. Before the iPhone, google was working on a blackberry clone, for instance.
This is blatant HTC and Palm erasure.
Windows mobile and palm had existed for years before iphone.
Why do you suppose both those companies fell off the face of the earth right after the iPhone came out? How many 12 year olds had them? The paradigm clearly shifted after the iPhone came out.
There were a bunch of products that had elements of the iPhone in them, but the iPhone was the first to bring a lot of them together into a technology that made the world shit it's pants.
The problem for Apple is, you cannot really patent nor copyright bringing together existing elements like that. Hence they had to rely on stupid sounding lawsuits on the tiniest things they actually had the patents for.
Just as novel as the whole graphical desktop concept which they claim to be the ones who invented it but always forget to state that Steve Jobs stole it from Xerox? By Steve's words, everything Apple does today is a "stolen product".