Check it:

http://mashable.com/2009/01/26/apple...-touch-patent/

Tim

Here's hoping there's a lot of cross licensing among the big players.....

Frank

ugh, while the concept of patents are good, sometimes this stuff just drives me nuts...

Can't wait to see this challenged...

What's good about them?
This isn't the 18th century anymore. The world and the economy have changed a lot since then. Patents are not used in their original sense anymore. They've become powerful weapons in a global war about market share and fighting competitors. They can be compared to an arsenal of nuclear weapons: an effective deterrent.

Who cares? Another trivial patent... and another example of how our legal systems allow companies to abuse the original (wonderful) idea of patents.

Remeber: The idea of a "patent" was created to encourage entrepreneurs to share their ideas and inventions. Instead of keeping them secret in their closed factory buidings, they should be given the opportunity to describe in detail how their machines work. This would allow other to copy their work, provided they pay a license fee to the patent holder.

Of course, this hardly applies to mechanisms and ideas that are so obvious for anybody to see that sharing them couldn't have been avoided in the first place.

Multitouch is a concept that dates back to the early 80s, 2 years before the launch of the Macintosh. How it works and what it is is very obvious to anybody who operates a multitouch enabled device. Hard not to make it public.

I really wonder when politicians will put an end to this patent mania.

At the company where I work we do faxes, email to fax, fax to fax, fax to email... etc.
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?

I agree, sometimes the the patents are just plain stupid.

the really big issue with patents, and even more so with copyright, is the timeframe.

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.

thats a very long time in this fast pace world...

In a developing economy (or more rather evolving economy) patents may have had some value - in that they allow the creator some protection to profit from his creation. This was more importantly true and effective in the age where new "things" (actual material scientific things) were being developed (like in the industrial age).

Nowadays patents have become an absurd abomination - used to prevent dissemination and active culture of knowledge and technique. Its just a tool to make profits above and exclusive of all else. And the extention of patents to include ideas and plans in the generic terms of an IP is even more so I believe.

Plus since the whole culture has been turned around - now corporations with money power can keep extending their patents through various subversive means and loopholes in discovery processes etc.

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.