Steve Jobs Patent On iPhone Declared Invalid 247
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's most famous multitouch software patents are increasingly coming under invalidation pressure. First the rubber-banding patent and now a patent that Apple's own lawyers planned to introduce to a Chicago jury as 'the Jobs patent.' U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949 covers a method for distinguishing vertical and horizontal gestures from diagonal movements based on an initial angle of movement. For example, everything up to a slant of 27 degrees would be considered vertical or horizontal, and everything else diagonal. The patent office now seems to think that Apple didn't invent the concept of 'heuristics' after all."
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I hear millions of ifans (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a sample:
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Rubbish. Here’s our own government handing the keys to our future economic prosperity over to Korea wholesale.
The sound of the jobs being flushed down the toilet may be your own.
Jubei
Friday, December 7, 2012 - 5:53 pm Reply
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Agreed. All this hard work from Apple invalidated giving the green light to slavishly copy them. The US is heading down irrelevancy by its own government.
khryshimself
Read more at Link [macdailynews.com]
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:5, Informative)
That's probably what killed him.
(Too soon?)
Not soon enough! Jobs was a class 'A' douche-bag. He openly flaunted patents, stole IP (every "original" design he ever produced or commissioned was a direct copy of an existing item from another company, Baun suffered greatly from this http://www.idigitaltimes.com/data/images/full/2012/09/04/1223-braun-or-apple.jpg [idigitaltimes.com]) and bullied countless REAL innovators out of business. The only "multi-touch" he ever created was what he did to customers' wallets, or it would be if screwing idiots over was anything remotely original. Jobs also abandoned and denied paternity of his first child and summarily ended all philanthropic programs (that's charity if anyone is wondering) sponsored by Apple when he took control. The only thing he ever achieved personally was to make sure anyone wearing a turtle neck (skivvy in local parlance) look like even more of a douche. What did Jobs ever do to us? He screwed us. All of us. Even those who have never and will never buy any iShit suffer because of what he's done to the industry as a whole.
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:3, Informative)
More Multi-Touch Prior art [ted.com]
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:5, Informative)
For a while Steve Jobs made his living peddling "blue boxes" that got free long distance calls by hacking the telco switching equipment. He even stole money from his friend Steve Wozniak. [gawker.com] And made a habit of parking in the handicap space. And smelled bad, which is some kind of crime against those in the immediate vicinity.
Re:As a satisfied owner of Apple products... (Score:4, Informative)
back to doing what made them the company they are now: Fucking over their customers based on the whim of a man child!
Some of us actually remember when Apple introduced the Apple II, the Lisa, the (original) Macintosh, iPads and iPhones rather than having to be told of these ancient things by our elders.
Each of those products represented a significant improvement in both quality and capabilities of consumer electronics. However, they didn't break much new ground. Their specialty was always making tech accessible to the mass market.
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:2, Informative)
arctan(1/2) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:why was it even granted? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how these "patent examiners" live with their mediocrity? I'm envisioning Amadeus' Salieri...
In the past, like many government bodies, the Patent and Trademark Office was underfunded/understaffed.
This meant the Examiners didn't have enough time to do the job expected of them and meet their targets.
When Obama signed the America Invents Act, he changed the USA from a first-to-invent to a first-to-file system.
The law also changed how the Patent Office is funded. Previously, Congress got all the patent filing fees, then gave the PTO whatever they felt like.
Now, the PTO sets its own fees and any fees beyond the Congressional allocation are placed into escrow, instead of the general fund.
This means that Congress can no longer siphon off the PTO's fees for other projects and the PO can try to get the funds re-allocated later.
TLDR: The Patent Office was wildly underfunded/understaffed and the situation should improve sooner rather than later.
Re:This is the price of going "thermonuclear." (Score:4, Informative)
There is no rational definition under which Apple is losing anything right now.
Umm, they lost $35B in market cap just a couple of days ago. That's something. Their stock is down about 23% from a couple of moths ago. They're losing something.
Re:What wrong has Steve done to you? (Score:5, Informative)
That story really puts things in perspective, doesn't it?
Woz: A brilliant engineer and a genuinely good person.
Jobs: A liar who will happily screw over even his closest friends to make a buck.
Which one does the media celebrate?
Jobs did this to a lot of people, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. For awhile his trick was insisting that a written contract was unnecessary and would get in the way of friendly future business relationships, but that he'd guarantee if person X delivered Y, Jobs would compensate him with Z. Then when Y was delivered Jobs would say that there was no way he would have made such an arrangement and that X was up shit creek without a contract.
Re:atan2 is a transcendental function (Score:4, Informative)
"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil", Donald Knuth