If you have actually lived in the society that actually exists, rather than the one entirely in your own head that you wish to believe in, you'll recognize that there is a positive correlation between social position and being unethical. (1) Power corrupts, (2) power attracts bad people, (3) bad people are more willing to make moral compromises to get power, (4) good people in power (it does happen) are usually not cynical enough to tell when they're being lied to by their lieutenants.

It's completely understandable that you'd rather live in your Pollyanna fantasy world, and that's fine. If you want to believe that the world is 6,000 years old, that is likewise OK with me (even if you're wrong). What I won't let you do is spread delusion to the young and gullible. If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, then kindly quiet down and let the adults talk.

(This originally read "regardless of how wrong you think someone is", but as someone pointed out to me, that was the wrong way to put it, and the original offender was upthread.)

Mixing in a gender slur makes it worse.

This is the kind of thing we ban people for, especially when they don't have a history as a positive contributor on the site.

I hear life is swell in North Korea where they do not have patents.

Utility patents are about novel original inventions, not ideas. You can't patent an idea.

If you've ever gone thru the process of patenting an invention, you'd know that it is not abundant.

In fact, any kind of brains at all is rare. (And for the record natural resources are abundant and only limited when government has control-- there is more oil in the world than we could ever hope to use at current rates. We'll have moved on to other technologies long before we run out- but the high costs of oil are artificial scarcity created by government.)

It's also not the only way to implement this concept as the newer Samsungs, LGs and HTCs all have their own version of it.

2. Real world things bounce. Copying the way something works in the real world and emulating that in software and sticking an Apple logo on it is not inventing something. That's just... building things.

3. I don't mean to misrepresent the first part of your argument, but "it's a good idea" doesn't cut it for patenting consumer software / hardware. There are real criteria (mentioned by others) that this doesn't meet.

Changing topic slightly, how is a jury supposed to decide "non obvious to a person skilled in the art", anyway? Does the jury consist only of hardware engineers? Because that would be the only way it would be fair. I can no more wonder what would be obvious or not to a doctor, teacher, lawyer, fireman etc. as they could wonder what would be obvious to an engineer.

To your first point: On the desktop there are three ways to scroll: the scrollbar, the mousewheel, the trackpad. Of those three, only the scrollbar makes it obvious when you've reached the end of a document. Also, it's not all that different – Apple has brought the same bounce-back behavior to the desktop when scrolling with a trackpad.

To your second point: Some real world things bounce. Balls bounce, and rubber bands do in a sense too. Documents don't. They aren't emulating real-world behavior at all.

Whether the patents are good/valid is up to a whole other set of (apparently very arbitrary) rules. But the points you make to refute taligent's are very weak.

  > Changing topic slightly, how is a jury supposed to
  > decide "non obvious to a person skilled in the art",
  > anyway?

Note that the article says the Korean case was decided by a panel of three judges, not by a jury.

Actually, there's the small detail of knowing what part of the myriad details of reality to imitate. If you the secret or principle that tells us that, please post it here.

The original purpose of patents was to serve as an alternative to trade secrets for the benefit of society, not merely to reward whoever can think of the most "non-obvious" concepts. Behavior patents such as elastic-overscroll or one-click-purchase do not serve this purpose.

There are tons of great, non-intuitive, ideas which aren't patentable (and this is very intentional).

[Apple has a lot of these, which is why their constant complaints about copying, while understandable, are not particularly meaningful. Copying ideas is OK (and indeed, good for society)...]

It is the people who want to excuse violating the patents who claim the patents are on ideas or behaviors.

Of course, if you'd actually read the patents in question you'd know this.

Because it's obvious. No person skilled in the art would ever have to refer to the teachings of the patent in order to implement a bouncing scrollable list.

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but Jonathan Ive said it best: great design makes the solution seem obvious in hindsight. This is why so many people (wrongly) take issue with Apple's patents: they seem obvious. But the fact is that if they were so obvious, then how come Apple was (in many cases) the first to successfully implement them?

Take your pick:

1) Because somebody had to be first.

2) Because no other major consumer electronics executives had the Jedi-level reality distortion skills needed to negotiate with the cellular carriers.

3) Because bouncing menus need a convergence of two technologies in order to make sense: a very fast CPU or GPU, and a fast, responsive touchscreen that can detect swipes. Resistive touchscreens were never going to work well for the purpose; only Apple had the foresight to move aggressively the second that capacitive multitouch tech became feasible.

As the other poster mentioned, ideas are worth jack shit. Implementation is all that matters. If Apple hadn't done it, someone else would have. Their reward for acting quickly is self-evident, isn't it? They sold 100,000,000+ iOS devices before they ever set foot in a courtroom.

Artificial market distortion in the form of patents on trivial "innovations" is demonstrably unnecessary for Apple's success.

The implementation (that which might be patentable), on the other hand is typically something any bozo could code up in half an hour without referencing anything, and thus "obvious."

What if someone decided to patent text fields? Or dropdown menus? It gets so crazy if absolutely every design feature becomes patentable.

Further, consider the case where there was no patent system. Apple invents a new type of touch hardware, but keeps it completely secret.

If this were the case, there would be no Android, and no Windows Phone 8 System either. Google would be spending years trying to reverse engineer how it all works (even with the advantage of patents they're still trying to make android work smoothly like the iPhone does) and Microsoft would be just stuck.

Because of the patent system, people can read Apple's patents and then extend them. And in the case of Microsoft a cross licensing agreement allows Microsoft to "infringe" on Apple's inventions without worry.

It even benefits Samsung-- as Apple offered them a license to these patents in 2010. Samsung could have used them and worried about other areas where they could extend the state of the art.

What's broken is that these companies think they can get away with violating the rights created in law-- they want the patents so they have access to the technology, but they don't want to pay for it.

What's broken is that you have this opinion about a system you don't seem to have any understanding of, because of an ideological position you've been told to have by a company who is profiting by stealing other people's work in order to try and dominate the phone industry the way microsoft dominated desktop operating systems.

What's broken is that HN is overrun with people who can't be bothered to learn about patents beyond the idea that "patents give you the right to an idea!!" and yet I suspect the vast majority of them get to vote in national elections!

> If this were the case, there would be no Android, and no Windows Phone 8 System either. Google would be spending years trying to reverse engineer how it all works (even with the advantage of patents they're still trying to make android work smoothly like the iPhone does) and Microsoft would be just stuck.

I don't know where you get the idea that other people's software patents are somehow a major component of the development process for these kinds of systems. It's a laughable idea.

1. The information you get from a good software patent would save you maybe 1% of the implementation effort. And most software patents are not good.

2. It's theoretical anyway, since nobody working on the iPhone or WP8 or Android on a technical level is ever going to be reading patents by the competition. Even if they were useful, having read the patent would potentially aggravate any infringement.

3. If you desperately wanted to clone something, you still would not work from the patents. You'd have somebody just use the system you're trying to copy and write down notes. It'd be much more efficient than trying to somehow translate a patent into a useful design doc.

I am absolutely, 100% sure that your claim that without Apple patents "Google [would need] to spend years reverse engineering how it works" is wrong. Most likely the only reason these patents are for the exact opposite reason - you need to know exactly what's patented so that you can work around the patent.

The suggestion that these patents would somehow be a key to smoothness highlights exactly why. There is not going to be a magical smoothness patent that would somehow be applicable to other systems with completely different design decisions done all over the system.

Great potential to find some high quality sites and information.