Apple wins major patents, including scrolling via touch-sensitive displays

[*LTD*]

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...tents-for-iphone-gesturing-imovie-itunes.html

Apple wins major patents, including scrolling via touch-sensitive displays

"The US Patent and Trademark Office [has] officially published a series of 19 newly granted patents for Apple Inc.," Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple. "The notables within this group include five industrial design patents relating to the iPhone, iPod touch and iPod nano. Among the standard granted patents, we see that Apple has finally picked up two iMovie related patents that date all the way back to the year 2000 – as well as one for the iTunes interface and two for LCD related technologies. Yet the one that is likely the most important for Apple today is a major motion, gesturing and touch related patent that covers all of Apple's iOS related devices that will certainly provide Apple with a larger sledgehammer going into any law suit current or future."

"Apple's patent states that the motion, gesturing and touch related patent covers a handheld computer, a tablet computer, a personal digital assistant, a cellular telephone and/or a combination of two or more of these items. That's what was stated back in 2005, two years prior to the iPhone's arrival," Purcher reports. "The patent therefore, clearly covers all iOS related devices such as the iPod touch, iPhone, iPad and future related products like an iMac Touch."

Purcher reports, "Apple's abstract states that 'movement of a point of contact by a user of a touch-sensitive display is determined. In response to the movement, a list of items on the touch-sensitive display is scrolled through. The scroll through is accelerated in response to an accelerated movement of the point of contact. The scroll through and acceleration of the scroll through may be in accordance with a simulation of a physical device having friction.'

Purcher reports, "This is without a doubt a major cornerstone touch related patent that will assist Apple in any lawsuit relating to touch and gesturing..."

 

[kdarling]

The scrolling patent is very minor. It is only about a certain calculation method used to figure out an accelerated flick gesture:

"... accelerating the scrolling in response to an accelerated movement of the point of contact, wherein determining the movement of the point of contact includes

determining the accelerated movement of the point of contact over a predefined number of time intervals

and, when data for movement of the point of contact is missing for a respective time interval, the accelerated movement of the point of contact in the respective time interval is determined by

projecting accelerated movement of the point of contact in a time interval preceding the respective time interval. "

In other words, the patent covers a case where the programmer is determining acceleration using a predefined number of intervals, AND touch movement data is missing during one of those intervals, AND it is replaced with data projected from a previous time interval.

Not only is it easy to get around this patent (assuming anyone has implemented it EXACTLY this way - they could instead use a dynamic number of intervals, for example), but...

It also seems pretty easy to challenge it as being obvious. Think about it, students, if your physics lab had you do the classic sliding-object acceleration experiment, but you were missing data in one time interval, wouldn't you think about extrapolating that missing data using the data from a previous interval?

 

[Rodimus Prime]

It also seems pretty easy to challenge it as being obvious. Think about it, students, if your physics lab had you do the classic sliding-object acceleration experiment, but you were missing data in one time interval, wouldn't you think about extrapolating that missing data using the data from a previous interval?

That is one example but a better one I can think of is many of us have used data charts for information and often the exact point we need is not on the chart but between 2 points and then we just extrapolated to get it.
Like you said it pretty easy to argue that is is obvious as many of us can think of multiple examples in other fields that extrapolation is used to get missing data points.