Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, the original work undertaken by my team was done in 1984, the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, there was a significant body of prior art on which multi-touch was built.

The following is a very brief and incomplete summary of some of the landmark examples that I have been involved with and/or known about and encountered over the years. It is incomplete and a work in progress (so if you come back a second time, chances are there will be more and better information). I apologize to those that I have missed. I have erred on the side of timeliness vs thoroughness. Other work can be found in the references to the papers that I do include.

Originally Posted by tso

iirc, patents hold for 2 terms of 6 years, if one remember to renew them after the first 6. this means that unless this patent is taken down in court (or the patent office reconsiders), apple will hold this patent for 12 year.

Originally Posted by mikkov

Patents can be typically extented for 20 years period

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_patent

Originally Posted by qole

If that is true, then this patent can be made null by producing the "prior art" that shows someone else thought of it first.

This patent looks pretty specific, however, and I don't think they'll be able to prove that they own the concept of multitouch as a whole, just the iPhone's implementation of it.

Jeff Han drew gasps and applause from the audience when he demonstrated multitouch in Feb. 2006 at TED. Here's a demo of another multitouch device from 2006. In his demo, Han claims that "Bill Buxton" (?) was working on multitouch in the 80s.

Originally Posted by tso

iirc, patents hold for 2 terms of 6 years, if one remember to renew them after the first 6. this means that unless this patent is taken down in court (or the patent office reconsiders), apple will hold this patent for 12 year.

Originally Posted by ioan

JFax (if I remember right) owns a patent for "fax store and forward". So you can't build ANY kind of application that receive a fax, store it and then forward it (using any electronic method) without having to buy the rights from JFax. Isn't that crazy?