Apple Slide to Unlock Patent Granted by USPTO [USPTO Confirms Apple's Slide-to-Unlock Patent, Which Means Virtually Every Android Smartphone is Infringing on Apple's Patent]

Posted on TFTS by J. Angelo Racoma on Tuesday, 25. October 2011 under: Computers & Computing, Mobile/Cell Phones, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

Amid all the fuss about Android, patents and licensing from various other companies, it seems Apple has scored a big win, as the US Patent and Trademarks Office has confirmed the company’s patent application for slide-to-unlock.

If you’ve held an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or any Android smartphone and tablet, you’ll be familiar with the way these devices unlock the screen. For lack of adequate hardware buttons (at least for most devices), slide-to-unlock is the preferred way of unlocking the device. Steve Jobs, in announcing the first iPhone in 2007, even said it’s perhaps the most intuitive way to unlock a touchscreen device.

To unlock the phone, I just take my finger and slide it across. Wanna see that again? We wanted something you couldn’t do by accident in your pocket. Just slide it across – BOOM.

I recall Jobs half-jokingly saying that Apple has patented many of the technologies in the iPhone to avoid unauthorized use from competitors, and the slide-to-unlock mechanism is just one of these. Recall that a European court previously declared that slide-to-unlock could not be patented, due to prior use. While Apple’s patent application dates back to 2005 (two years before the release of the first iPhone), other companies were already using the technology before then.

The patent’s wording seems to be descriptive enough to cover all kinds of sliding actions, which include a feedback mechanism that lets users know if they’re doing it right. This means that other device manufacturers that use slide-to-unlock, such as Android and older Windows Mobile phones, among others.

A device with a touch-sensitive display may be unlocked via gestures performed on the touch-sensitive display. The device is unlocked if contact with the display corresponds to a predefined gesture for unlocking the device …

Apple may now have better legal ammunition against virtually every Android smartphone and tablet manufacturer out there. Does this mean Google should be worried? Microsoft already has more than half of all Android smartphones paying licensing royalties due to use of Microsoft-owned technologies. Google will have to find another way to unlock touchscreens or pay licensing royalties for the use of slide-to-unlock.

BarleySinger
The entire idea that things such as “slide to unlock” ought to have patent protection is an abuse of the patent system. I *WAS* a senior I.T. consultant back in the days when a patent had to have extremely technical detail to not get laughed at by the patent clerks (not to mention the courts).
Back then…. trying to defend a patent on a physical gesture, would have gotten you fined by the court for wasting its time (and rightly so).
FICTION AND “SLIDE TO UNLOCK”
Think back on fairly tales, science fiction and fantasy tales and movies. How many devices, crystal balls, magical mirrors and advanced computers, responded to a human gesture in various stories (books and movies)? A huge number of them.
The wizard moved his hand across the crystal ball and the colour inside of it began to swirl about.
Sound familiar?
Yet this is SUPPOSED to be a new idea able to be enforced by a patent. Ya Right.
Then again TEST.COM claims that they hold the patent as being first at doing what they do, when the truth is far from their claim. The educational company I worked for in 1986 did the exact same thing…delivering tests via a network infrastructure and storing the results in a server. The only differences where the type of markup language (we invented our own) and the use of twisted pair instead of the web.
A huge number of companies (and government offices) did the same things that test.com did, long before they existed, but for some reason the nuts at the US patent office gave test.com their patent and have sided with them in court.
As a result of all this, ANYTHING is now patent-able. Things once limited to copyright are now patent-able. Life forms that have been around for billions of years have been patented by corporations, where their employees just scooped a sample out of a geyser or bubbling mud pot a decade ago, and they decoded the DNA….and DESCRIBED the life form in terms of DNA (they did not invent the thing, they just described it, and they have no idea how LIFE actually happens…they just play with it).
The way things are now, new devices and new software are nearly impossible to produce by any individual person or startup company, without getting sued into oblivion.
Large organisations have to run their code (and conceptual ideas) past *LEGAL* before they produce anything at all. The legal costs of producing software and hardware will soon outweigh the cost in human technical hours (if it doesn’t already given what lawyers charge).
THE END GAME
The end gamer to all of the is obvious. For a while, there will be a time in which there are no start-ups, no new innovators, because fear of patent law and legal suits will cripple innovation. That is already happening. I am disabled and my only hope of a better life is my mind, yet I cannot use most of my ideas as they have been patented in ways that would not have been allowed 20 years ago.
So for a time innovation will crawl due to patent laws. Only large companies will be able to compete and the only winners will be the lawyers.
The second phase, the obvious end, will be the destruction of any respect or enforcement for international patents. The entire third world and emerging nations of the world will simply refuse to honor western patents.
They will have no choice, other than to rebel. It will be their only real choice, as the exchange rates and royalty costs attached to their technical innovations (to the worlds poorer nations), would cripple their economies.
Remember that these are people who are battling starvation and disease by using innovation and education. They want to escape death, not get a larger stock portfolio for the richest 1% of their population. Given the current direction of the misuse of patents, they will have no choice but to stop honoring any of them if they wish their people to live.
It will be very hard (if not impossible) for US companies like Apple, Microsoft, and the like to survive at all in a world where nobody honors US patents. Once you are off US soil people will do whatever they like, and then sell the results back into the USA.
After this has happened, and it will unless things change….eventually even domestic patent laws will fail. In a global economy US innovators will simply send their schematics or their code offshore, to produce their inventions offshore and then sell them back to the USA. This already DOES happen with those few countries that do no honor international patents. It will get far worse.
All of this will eventually happen, if things do not change. All because the US patent office has utterly lost the plot as to what can and cannot be patented. As result of their failure to police themselves properly.
It is only a matter of time…because the greed of corporate technical America is totally out of hand.
If we do not want that result, then we need to change the way things are being handled in regards to the patent offices RIGHT NOW.