cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/5636484
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Apparently the whole concept of a touchscreen only device, including the UI, according to Apple at the time.
Like the computers in Star Trek TNG?
Can fictional products be used as prior art against real world patents though? The entire idea of patents is to protect something someone made work in the real world.
"The whole concept of a touchscreen device..." is something that prior fictional examples prove false. They did not come up with the concept, but they did implement a prior concept.
"Nobody thought of it" and "nobody made it before" are two different things. Apple even pretended the second was true when they weren't even first to market on several of their products.
But that didn't come from a patent filing, that was my commentary on how they behaved. Patent filing language is much more precise for this reason.
Patents are about implementation, not concepts.
exactly! That tablet you saw in Star Trek TNG is not an implementation, as it's not a real device.
But is is a concept, which was what you appeared to be disagreeing with.
Not exactly, patents have to be specific, not generic, and Apple purchased the company that invented multi-touch.
My understanding is that patents are to protect novel new ideas. If something's already bean described in fiction, what innovation is protected by the patent?
So, I'd think "it's a tablet" wouldn't be patentable because that was described in Star Trek. But, "screen technology blah that makes tablets practical "would be patentable.
Neat post on related topic: https://fia.umd.edu/answer-can-science-fiction-stories-be-used-to-demonstrate-prior-art-in-patent-cases/
Patents protect the details of achieving an invention, not the idea for an invention itself (thereby allowing multiple different approaches to serving a market). Most courts are likely to rule that an electronic tablet is a market segment, rather than an invention. But listing out all the electronics and software needed to build one and or the industrial processes and machinery to build one at scale might be granted a patent. Fiction virtually never produces any such detail.
The implementation in the real world. Fiction does not tend to go into how these machines work beyond that which is needed for the narrative. You won't get enough information from such a book or TV show to be able to build something similar yourself, which is usually what you need for a patent.
The iPhone was a novel concept as a whole. I think that’s undeniable. There was nothing like it at the time.
This is blatant HTC and Palm erasure.
Just as novel as the whole graphical desktop concept which they claim to be the ones who invented it but always forget to state that Steve Jobs stole it from Xerox? By Steve's words, everything Apple does today is a "stolen product".
Windows mobile and palm had existed for years before iphone.
There were a bunch of products that had elements of the iPhone in them, but the iPhone was the first to bring a lot of them together into a technology that made the world shit it's pants.
The problem for Apple is, you cannot really patent nor copyright bringing together existing elements like that. Hence they had to rely on stupid sounding lawsuits on the tiniest things they actually had the patents for.