Apple Denied Trademark For 'Multi-Touch' 217
suraj.sun sends this excerpt from MacRumors:
"In a decision handed down by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Apple has been denied an application for a trademark on Multi-Touch. ... For trademarks, 'the greater the degree of descriptiveness the term has, the heavier the burden to prove it has attained secondary meaning.' The trademark attorney pointed out that the term 'multitouch' has taken on generic meaning, being used by a wide variety of publications to describe the touchscreen technology on Android phones, tablets, and notebooks."
Good News (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good to see a common sense result come out of the USPTO, I'm really hopeful that with additional funds gained from the recent patent bill the USPTO will be able to reach similarly sane conclusions when bad software patents are files too.
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I'm really hoping for a pony. And unicorns. Just saying.
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Very true. The only thing that is going to "fix" the problem is due diligence on the public side via constantly coming up with prior art for pathetically generic patent applications.
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Applied in 2007 (Score:3)
When Apple released the first mobile multi-touch device. And the trademark application is restricted to mobile applications.
However, it is so basically descriptive I can see denying it. I just hope the USPTO didn't factor in the use of the term today, after Apple already made it popular. That's basically ripping off Apple's work.
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They did not invent Multi-Touch, or the phrase, They bought the company that did invent it for mobile devices ...but Touch screens were around long before Apple, and Multi-Touch was invented in academia ... the first implementation for a mobile device (long after others had used it in other devices) was by Fingerworks who were bought by Apple after they had been making devices with multi-touch for 6 years ...
What Innovation did Apple do, they made a popular device incorporating it, and for many people thi
Re:Applied in 2007 (Score:4, Informative)
Innovation doesn't count in trademarks either - it is the mark that you use for your trade, that is all. You can be a car mechanic, innovate nothing, and still get the trademark "Fastest Car Care" for your shop.
If Apple had invented a phrase that wasn't a simple description of what their technology did, they would have been granted the trademark.
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Since trademarks are about protecting punters from being confused by similar but confusing branding
Since when does trademark require the products be different? Is a Chiquita banana different from other bananas?
PS isn't it a little two-faced for Apple Computers who used a logo *confusingly similar* to that of Apple Records, agrees to restrict themselves to computers so that their trademarks don't clash, then moves into the music label business and now is claiming trademark on everything that anyone else is doing?
I'm not going to let Apple's corporate behavior change my opinion of how trademarks should work.
I do have a problem with the decision (Score:2)
The USPTO described how the term has taken on generic meaning, specifically mentioning its use on Android phones and tablets. My problem is that they all started using this term well after Apple applied for the trademark.
The USPTO's two-year wait before official decision itself may have allowed the term to become generic. Had it been awarded within a year, Apple would have had a trademark to defend before Android was even released.
That's not to mean other reasons for denial are invalid, but this one does st
I know, but it's hope anyway (Score:3)
This was not about patents (which Apple richly deserves to own). It was about a Trademark.
Correct, BUT.
It's the same general organization. All I am saying is, it's good to see a result come out of one part that is reasonable - and that hopefully the OTHER part will start to issue more reasonable verdicts also when they have enough money to do proper patent examination.
It's a ray of hope from a very large cloud that until now had been raining on us.
It has always seemed to me rather loose language to say som
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On the general concept of multitouch, or on one method of implementing it?
Re:Good News (Score:5, Insightful)
What does MultiTouch as a trademark even mean? Apple doesn't sell "MultiTouch" phones, they sell iPhones. And sure, those iPhones are Multi-Touch iPhones, but they're also BatteryBased, can connect to WiFi, and HaveColor. They don't even make the screens themselves.
It's not like they're trying to trademark a business mark they're going to engage in trade under. It's a mark for, essentially, an advertising branding of a component they didn't even make. That's like Microsoft trademarking the START Menu. Or me trademarking ImWearingPants.
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What does MultiTouch as a trademark even mean?
Ohhhhhhhhhh, I feel a car analogy comin'...
It's a Dodge(tm) Ram(tm) pickup with Hemi(tm) V8.
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What does MultiTouch as a trademark even mean?
The ability to prevent competitors from advertising it as a feature?
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They may still hold a trade mark, but I'm guessing they dare not try to enforce it after what happened last time.
As early as 2002, a court rejected Microsoft's claims, stating that Microsoft had used the term "windows" to describe graphical user interfaces before the product, Windows, was ever released, and the windowing technique had already been implemented by Xerox and Apple many years before.[4] Microsoft kept seeking retrial, but in February 2004, a judge rejected two of Microsoft's central claims.[5] The judge denied Microsoft's request for a preliminary injunction and raised "serious questions" about Microsoft's trademark.
The last time they tried, they had to buy off the people they sued.
In July 2004, Microsoft offered to settle with Lindows.[6] As part of this licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million US, and Lindows transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed their name to Linspire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_v._Lindows [wikipedia.org]
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Or the color magenta (notice that Engadget's gone back to their magenta color theme since T-mobile's been circling the drain?)
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A double take? Hell, I would have had first post had I not fainted.
Now if only... (Score:2)
-Keeps dreaming-
Re:Now if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that it's relatively easy to conclude that a trademark is descriptive. It's relatively hard, unless you are an expert in a very narrow field, to cut through the B.S. of a typical patent, figure out what it is really supposed to cover, and realize that IBM already did it back in 1963.
Re:Now if only... (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, there's a very simple solution to that:
Allow people to file amicus curiae-style briefs on any pending patent. Bored Slashdot posters alone would be filing "examples of prior art" for pretty much everything.
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That would assume, however, that they actually want to improve things.... :-)
Re:Now if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, 99.9% of that "prior art" wouldn't actually fit the patent claims, and would be more along the lines of "art that does a similar job differently, and probably happened before the patent". The remaining 0.1% would be mostly things already included in the patent as prior art, but the submitter didn't bother to check that.
Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
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Agreed, like everyone is a self-appointed expert on everything. Think of these movies stars asked to comment on the economy.
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http://www.npr.org/series/5163715/-not-my-job [npr.org]
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That's a good point. You'd probably need to have some restrictions on people filing. Limiting it to "people with a degree in the relevant field" would probably be a good start - it would be wide enough to still be useful, but it would filter out many of the people who don't know what they're talking about.
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That would filter out all of the tech industry geniuses with no degree for example, and make signup a nightmare. Ah well, nothing a little photoshopping can't take care of, I'm sure.
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Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
You think of a forum that exists for the express purpose of trolling and stupid humor? Why? Why do you not think of Slashdot instead?
Imagine this patent comment system required a $10 signup fee and a reputation system that was based solely on the quality of submissions. It would be dead serious and would get the job done well.
If 50% of the prior art examples that go in are a good fit for the claim I'd say that would be good enough, and it would fix the patents-on-prior-art problem overnight.
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You think of a forum that exists for the express purpose of trolling and stupid humor? Why? Why do you not think of Slashdot instead?
Same thing, really.
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Any time someone suggests letting the public handle anything important directly, I think of 4chan.
Right, because crowdsourcing never works. For instance, it could never solve a complex protein-folding problem and get an article published in Nature [forbes.com]
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They lucked out. If it had attracted the attention of Anonymous, the lulz would have been epic, and the research would have been doomed.
Crowdsourcing, like democracy, is subject to the extremes of the crowd. The wisdom of a crowd of fools is not high, even in aggregate.
Re:Now if only... (Score:5, Insightful)
The obvious solution to software patent is to simply not allow them. That requires no expertise in a narrow field, it simply requires that if it is not a mechanical or physical invention, you can't patent it, so applicants can fuck off.
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If I have two inventions, and they do the exact same thing, but one uses an analog circuit and the other a microprocessor with software logic - why can I patent the analog circuit version but not the software version that does the same thing?
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Buying a faster CPU isn't a patentable improvement.
What about switching to a smaller CPU because I found a way to program it more efficiently?
I agree that most of the "software" patents are terrible, but there's no sense pretending that software is always separable from hardware. It would be silly to have rules where two otherwise-identical products have different rules depending on their "guts". An electric toothbrush with a motor speed controlled by resistors should be no more or less patentable than an electric toothbrush that uses a firmware controller.
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Easy. Don't allow patenting what is covered by copyright. Word processors are, typewriters aren't.
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So any device with firmware cannot be patented?
Now if only... (Score:3)
Americans would fund their government departments instead of asking them to be commercially indepedent so that instead of focussing on collecting as many fees as possible they can focus on quality.
But then, an American might have to pay TAXES! Boogaa boogaa! Cut funding to the bone and yet get bare bones service.
The USPTO is as good and as bad as Americans are allowing it to be through their votes for tax cuts.
There should be some penalties... (Score:5, Interesting)
How could Apple try to trademark 'Multi-touch' with a straight face?
This is like Ford trying to trademark 'Four-wheel drive' or Sony trying to trade mark 'Entertainment Center'.
Blatantly trying to abuse the system like this should warrant a paddling.
Re:There should be some penalties... (Score:4, Insightful)
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"How could Apple try to trademark 'Multi-touch' with a straight face?" They can't; that's why they do it with a flagrantly crooked one. Regarding penalties, I simply won't touch a Mac, or any Mac product. Especially after they fussed with that patent to remotely disable video on "smart" phones.
They probably used the same face that Google used when they trademarked: DIAGNOSTICS, CONTENT EXCHANGE, ENCRYPTED STREAMING MEDIA, LIKE and DOUBLECLICK. Corporations will apply for all sorts of crap just to see what they get away with just like tourists will raid the hotel buffet even though it isn't included in the super saver bargain basement economy vacation package because the worst that can happen is an embarrassing 15 seconds of looking like a cheapskate in front of dozens of people you'll never see
Re:There should be some penalties... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because they invented it, remember (you know, the multiple fingers thing... pinch to zoom, etc)? And the term "Multi-Touch" was never used before January 2007 (ever by anyone) when it was first revealed.
Wow, really? Synaptics might have a few things to say about that, since I was using their products and experimenting with multiple touchs on their touchpads in 2003, a full 4 years before it was even a gleam in Apples eye. If I were Synaptics, I'd be suing the shit out of Apple for patent infringement... even though a touch pad and a smart phone are two different things, Apple can sue Samsung for making their tablet, you know.. rectangular! Why not sue Apple for making their phone rectangular, just like a touch pad!
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Re:There should be some penalties... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as preposterous as it seems, especially considering how long these application processes can take. Before the iPhone, almost no one used the term "multi-touch". Here's Google's trending on the term. [google.com] Note that the iPhone was released in 2007. As the USPTO rightly points out, it is more descriptive than distinctive and has rapidly become a common phrase, so they rightly denied the trademark. But it probably didn't seem as preposterous when the request was originally made.
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Oops... mis-copied the link: Here is the Google Trends on the term "multi-touch" [google.com] (again note that the iPhone is circa 2007.)
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Interesting peak around 1987 when Multi-Touch was first demonstrated and when Apple were in crisis after Steve Jobs left ...
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Now "multitouch" is a bad example, because it is very descriptive. But just to be a devil's advocate...
Just because a phrase gets used does not mean it can't be trademarked. For instance, "Bud" is a trademark of InBev (shortened form of Budweiser). This, despite the word "bud" used for hundreds of years.
Unlike the word "multitouch", "bud" has no descriptive purpose to the beer.
Apple would have been able to trademark Simul-Touch or some other non-word.
Re:There should be some penalties... (Score:4, Informative)
Multi-touch devices have been in existence longer than Apple has been around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch [wikipedia.org]
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That's irrelevant, as we're talking about a trademark, not a patent. The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.
And obviously, the fact that it's generic, which is what the ruling came down to.
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The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.
Here's a paper from 1984: http://www.billbuxton.com/leebuxtonsmith.pdf [billbuxton.com]
Satisfied?
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The relevant factor is whether or not it was called 'multi-touch' by anyone before Apple.
Here's a paper from 1984: http://www.billbuxton.com/leebuxtonsmith.pdf [billbuxton.com]
Satisfied?
Trademark and patents are different things. Its not enough to show a single reference to prior art. Its a question of whether the term is in general use. In this case it has become so in the time since the trademark was applied for. At the time the term multi-touch wasn't in widespread use. Touchscreen was everywhere, but not multi-touch. It was a stretch for Apple to attempt to get the term trademarked, but not entirely unreasonable.
Re:There should be some penalties... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple bought it from Fingerworks, who based their innovations on the work of Wayne Westerman's doctoral research, his dissertation explicitly references Bill Buxton's work, including this paper where Buxton uses the term Multi-Touch ...
This would seem to be a case of this is the common term used in the field, and so not a trademarkable word
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Actually I think the example of the ThinkPad X60 used by another commenter was more salient, as it referred to an actual product for sale, as opposed to a concept in an academic environment. I'm assuming of course that the UoT never commercialised it.
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http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html [billbuxton.com]
It was
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You are brave to comment this way, but honestly, I was thinking the same thing. By my count, this is the 5th time Apple has been hoodwinked, i.e., they took something from obscurity, moved it to the front and center, made it ubiquitous, attempted to own it, and lost.
First, the original MacOS GUI. They saw what was happening at Xerox PARC, but Xerox was taking it nowhere... Apple was a part of that, and took some things, but also created original ideas and great interface design, and nearly perfected it...
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Even more farcical than trying to trademark something like "App Store". Though not quite as bad as claiming ownership on the idea of a rectangular shape with a touchscreen.
Phillip.
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Be quiet!
Dont give out stupid ideas to Sony what should be trademarked.
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Honestly, had you ever used the phrase prior to 2007? That's when they filed for the trademark.
It was an industry term (Score:2)
Have you heard the term tyrosine kinase inhibitor? Well people in cancer research know it. If some major cancer cures come out based on it .. it'll be a household term. Similarly people in the human interfaces business have been using the term multi-touch. Here is an example from 1999:
http://www.ee.udel.edu/~westerma/main.pdf [udel.edu]
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Exactly! If someone tried to get a trademark on tyrosine kinase inhibitor it would be shot down because it is too descriptive, not because it is in general use. It's almost the perfect analogy, except for the obvious lack of being a car analogy :)
But someone could easily get a trademark for "Tyro-Kin", even though it's a place in Kazakhstan.
The point of trademark is commercial use, not whether a word existed or not. Singer is a person who sings, a sewing machine brand, and a big food service company. Even i
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This is like Ford trying to trademark 'Four-wheel drive' or Sony trying to trade mark 'Entertainment Center'.
Well, Volkswagen managed to trademark "turbocharged diesel injection".
I guess the difference here is whether multitouch per se was Apple innovation or not. So far as I know, it was not - the concept itself was well-understood before Apple picked it up, they were just the first to build their UI around it, and particularly to implement some gestures now in common use (such as pinch-to-zoom).
So they need a less descriptive name (Score:3)
It should be easy to come up with a less-descriptive name. They could call it "Squidly", "Octie", "Starfish", or "Tentacular", something that makes people think of multi-touch creatures.
Or they could do it like companies did in the mid 20th century, by deliberately misspelling parts of the name: "Multy-Tuuch", "Mani-Fyngers", or "Repeat-O-Poke". Or maybe something more 90's, like "Apple Bob". In the 2000's Apple did a great job marketing the iFixing of nouns, so they could use something like "iSteve" or "iMultitouch" or "iShocker" (rule 34 dictated I had to place that one in here.) They could stick with the Apple theme and call it something like a "Granny Smith" or "Honey Crisp".
Anyway, there are lots of names they could trademark. They just have to pick one.
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Squid Girl [wikipedia.org] approves of squidly technology.
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Or names of open-source apps :-P
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Been done. [wikipedia.org]
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"iMultiTouch Jr"... which may get you arrested
Not as quickly as iBall Jr
Google Patent lists "multitouch" since 1972... (Score:4, Interesting)
Google Patent gave me 991 hits for "multitouch". The oldest was from 1972 and used as:
"In an example of practice of the invention, a foil electret for use in a multitouch selector was prepared from a 1 mil (25.4 micrometer) thin film of polyfluoroethylene-propylene plastic material, marketed commercially under the tradename TEFLON FEP, with a 1,000 A. metallic layer on one of its surfaces."
Sure sounds like people understood the concept of multitouch years before Apple was even founded.
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yes its not really a ground breaking idea, and even those crappy touchpads on laptops years before apple started doing it supported "multitouch" 1 finger for left click, 2 for right or 2 in the special places to scroll around ... first saw those back when apple was still sending out trackballs on their lappies
Now just because they found a new gimmick for that idea they feel the need to own it, no matter who invented it.
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Google Patent gave me 991 hits for "multitouch"
Yes, but how is that relevant for a Trademark request?
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It shows it was the common term in the field and well understood in the field
Everyone in the field who was working on it commonly referred to it as Multi-Touch or Multitouch as a technical term that they assumed would be understood,usage outside the field is not important ...
Try and trademark a widely used technical term from any field and see how far you get
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Multitouch would even be possible with those ancient infrared-grid touchscreens. I'd be shocked if there was no patent for multitouch on those.
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I would imagine that wide knowledge and use of the term prior to application for a trademark would have some effect, especially when trademark in question is descriptive.
Next Up, Revoke Their Multi-Touch Patents (Score:4, Interesting)
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Therefore, Apple patented the concept of using someone else's new technology for one of it's primary intended purposes.
This isn't about patents, it's about the combination of two words, "multi-touch" and whether you can trademark them. Prior art has nothing to do with it. Even if the phrase 'multi-touch' was used in connection with touch screen technology in 1972, 1984 or whenever in some obscure articles or CS papers, isn't really that important. I'm pretty sure the phrase "encrypted streaming media" was in general use for describing "encrypted streaming media" way before Google successfully trademarked it. What is import
Oh, Apple... (Score:2)
A Whisper (Score:3)
If you quietly glance out the corner of your eye, you might glimpse the most successful company in the nation floundering, losing its guts, for want of the vision of a charismatic individual.
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Yes, I can see how a trademark application that was applied for in 2007 when the original iPhone launched finally being decided on in 2011 as a clear indication that Apple is "floundering" now that Steve Jobs has moved from CEO to chairman of the board.
I mean, really?
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In other news, it takes FOUR YEARS just to get a simple trademark application approved/denied.
Denied? (Score:3)
OMG! The USPTO actually denied something? Maybe Apple should have tried patenting multi-touch "with a computer," seeing as that phrase is the secret pass code for getting a patent on otherwise unpatentable trivialities.
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OMG! The USPTO actually denied something? Maybe Apple should have tried patenting multi-touch "with a computer," seeing as that phrase is the secret pass code for getting a patent on otherwise unpatentable trivialities.
Apple is smarter than that. They would add multitouch with "a portable multifunction device with one or more processors, memory, and a touch screen display."
Fingerworks (Score:2)
Just to be absolutely clear, for everyone who doesn't know, Apple's multi-touch technology was bought from a company called Fingerworks, which sold a multi-touch gesture keyboard a decade ago. I bought one then, and still have it. We all called that thing a multi-touch keyboard, and I'm not sure but if Fingerworks didn't trademark "multi-touch", then it seems to me that Apple officially missed the boat.
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They didn't trademark it ... because the term was in common usage then, by all the people working on Multi-Touch, many of whom were referenced in their founder Wayne Westerman's doctoral dissertation
Re:Thankfully (Score:5, Informative)
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox, et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Strangely enough, this story had nothing to do with patents at all. The only thing "patent" about it is the P in the USPTO acronym, but that's not what this is about. This is about the T, which is the Trademark portion of their office.
Not only did the summary say "trademark" but the article title even used the word "trademark." Feel free to yell about patents in context, but for now, this isn't it.
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Yes. But you can't take a pre-existing word in use by multiple people to describe a particular technology, trademark it, and then prevent those same people using the word they've been using for longer than you to describe the stuff they invented. (Here [billbuxton.com]'s some of that UToronto work the OP was talking about, if you're unsure as to whether they were using the same term to describe it).
Re:Thankfully (Score:5, Informative)
Considering a near three-decade long history of Multi touch RnD (starting with University of Toronto, followed by Bell Labs and Xerox [google.com], et al...) a patent awarded to apple would be quite a spit in the face of everyone who made the technology possible in the first place.
Not only is TFA (and even TFS) clearly about trademarks and not patents but Apple do have a patent on multitouch.
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Not only is TFA (and even TFS) clearly about trademarks and not patents but Apple do have a patent on multitouch.
Sadly, since they added "A method, comprising: at a portable multifunction device with one or more processors, memory, and a touch screen display" to the front of every description of technology that already exists.
But yes, this is about Trademarking the term "multitouch," not any more absurd patents.
Re:"Windows" ... but not "Multi-Touch" ? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you are really serious about reform, and you applaud USPTO's rejection of this term, you must also support revoking the Microsoft trademark on "Windows".
Is it really still not obvious to some people why Windows is a valid trademark? Same as Apple? Yes they are generic words but they aren't generic words describing the entity/product. Windows (the Microsoft trademarked name) is not a windows, it is an Operating System. Apple (the Apple Inc. trademarked name) is not an apple, it is a Company. MultiTouch would be just describing the invention multitouch, just as App Store is just describing an application (or commonly termed 'app') store.
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Except that Windows was a windowing system in its original incarnation, leaving us with another descriptive trademark.
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Windows is trademarked as the name of an operating system, for which it is not a descriptive term. Perhaps you'd also like to bitch about GM trademarking the name "Volt"?
You can describe an operating system without calling the whole thing Windows. It is very difficult to describe a touch interface that tracks multiple fingers at a time without calling it Multi-Touch.
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Perhaps you'd also like to bitch about GM trademarking the name "Volt"?
I would. WTF? GM gives their electric car the most generic name possible next to "GM electric" and then wants to trademark it? And gets it? Wow.
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If you are really serious about reform, and you applaud USPTO's rejection of this term, you must also support revoking the Microsoft trademark on "Windows".
The trademark term is "Microsoft Windows", and that's obviously permitted. Had Apple tried to get "Apple Multi-Touch" then they'd have had no problem (but it wouldn't have had the squatting-on-a-term effect that they wanted).
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The Apple trademark lawyers in this instance were either very stupid, very lazy, or very self-interested. ;)
Would you settle for "very rich"?
Actually, that's what sets you apart from them. They wouldn't settle for merely "very rich", which is why they're now "filthy rich".
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How about TouchMi? http://touchmi.jp/ [touchmi.jp]
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Perhaps because it's not a patent, but a trademark?
Did you read the summary?
Either way, trademarks are designed to differentiate company products from competitors (so Burger King can't sell you a Big Mac, for example), but in the case of multi touch being descriptive the decision was correct - it is a generic term, so the trademark was rejected. It has taken them since 2007 to come to the decision though.
YEAH!!! How do you like them apples? (Score:3)
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Not a patent, but thanks for playing ;)