

Apple granted Patent for their Page Turn Animation - Mitt
http://goodereader.com/blog/tablet-slates/apple-granted-patent-for-their-page-turn-animation/

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ljd
Wouldn't there be some significant issues with patenting a skeuomorphic
design? Couldn't a physical book be used as a form of prior art? If this is
not the case and anything that exists outside of the realm of computing can
now be patented by being modeled digitally, wouldn't that have wide sweeping
ramifications?

For example, what stops someone from taking a pharmaceutical that they do not
own the patent to and getting a patent for that same drug but the patent is
for a digital model of the molecular structure? Then litigate against the
pharmaceutical company if the pharmaceutical company chooses to store the
structure digitally.

I'm generally curious about this. If anyone can help me understand what I'm
missing here, I would appreciate it.

~~~
gilgoomesh
You're actually discussing two different points.

1) Is is possible to take a known, existing invention and simply change the
context a little and repatent?

The answer is yes, if the original existing invention had never been
documented to be used in this new context.

This is a highly contentious area of patent law and I personally disagree with
it.

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/patently-
obvious...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/patently-obvious/0)

2) Design patents are not the same as regular patents.

This Apple patent is a design patent, not a normal patent. It protects a very
specific visual design in a specific use case. Design patents are very narrow
in scope. The same design in a different context is not protected by this
patent nor does it affect the patentability (it might affect the obviousness
but obviousness is a frustratingly rare objection in patent reviews).

~~~
1337biz
I have re-read this argument "design patents have a very limited scope" a few
times over the latest Apple patent craze. What I am wondering is what the
reasoning behind all these questionable patents is and if they are indeed
hardly enforceable. Or is Apple, maybe as a consequence of the Samsung
disaster, going into "patent whatever is remotely patentable" mode?

~~~
gilgoomesh
Lots of companies "patent whatever is remotely patentable". If your business
is intellectual property, it's common practice. My experience with patents
comes from working at a number of engineering companies whose approach truly
was: patent everything you do. It's as crazy as you'd think: your daily work
is not that novel but you're asked to describe it as though it is.

It is ferociously hard to read patents (for everyone: lawyers and inventors
included) and people get confused by the patent titles (which are deliberately
vague and have no legal meaning). Since these titles are ridiculously broad,
people think the patent is trying to clamp down on everything the title
describes (which is never the case).

However, non-design patents play a game of making the claims as broad as
possible (even when the described embodiments are quite narrow). The claims
often become a game of starting unenforceably broad and only subsequently
narrowing to something reasonable. Of course, it is the broadest claims that
get tested in court.

Why are design patents different? They don't really have claims in the same
way. A design patent can be flawed (by having prior art or by failing the
novelty test) but can't greedily try to expand its claims to cover everything
in the world.

Of course, many patent lawyers think design patents aren't worth the paper
they're printed on precisely because they can't expand to cover everything in
the whole field.

As for Apple's situation... they write software. The questions: how novel is
it? How much protection does that novelty earn? These are subjective
questions. Of course, Apple will always think the answers are "Very novel and
lots of protection". Their competitors will always disagree. And there is no
way of saying who's correct expect dragging the whole affair through the court
system for years.

I don't think Apple's patents are of worse quality than most patents. But the
patent system never has a clear "this is protected and this isn't". It's
always contentious because everything has a precedent of some kind -- but does
that count as prior art? Who the fuck knows.

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danmaz74
This is the claim[1]:

CLAIM The ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with
animated-graphical user interface, as shown and described.

Reading this, I wonder: How did "design patents" even come to be? I'm tired of
saying it, but this is a real aberration.

[1] [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-
bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=D670,713.PN.&OS=PN/D670,713&RS=PN/D670,713)

~~~
czr80
Think of a "design patent" as being a subclass of "trademark", rather than a
subclass of "patent". Do you think companies should be able to get trademarks?
If so, then you believe most of the case for design patents.

~~~
zalew
> Do you think companies should be able to get trademarks? If so, then you
> believe most of the case for design patents.

BS. see fashion - strongly enforced trademarks, no design patents.

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calciphus
Years and years ago I was a flash developer. I had a client who wanted a
catalog that looked like it flipped pages. Even back then (this would have
been pre-2000) there were a lot of ways to solve for this, and numerous
examples.

In fact, here's a post from 2003 describing exactly this.
[http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-
Brandon...](http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Animation/Book_wit-
Brandon_-982/index.php)

~~~
calciphus
[http://www.flashkit.com/movies/launcher.php?url=/imagesvr_ce...](http://www.flashkit.com/movies/launcher.php?url=/imagesvr_ce/flashkit/movies/3D/Pseudo/Realisti-
Triqui-10710/Realisti-Triqui-10710.swf&width=792&height=594&bg=ffffff)

A nice live demo of one of the other tutorials. That one dating from 2006.

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nrinaudo
Did BeOS not have a _very_ similar animation in one of its 3d demonstration
widgets? The one you could drop images or videos on, flip pages and have them
deformed and rendered in real time? That was, what, in the mid-90s? 15 years
before Apple's patent was even filled?

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neya
Well, then it's just a matter of time until some random company 'X' gets sued
for having page-turn animation that they had implemented decades ago, I guess.

~~~
JonnieCache
Microsoft had it on encarta back in the 90s. I'm sure there are many other
glaringly obvious examples.

~~~
Zenst
Yes a small company called that were working on a CPU that would become the
ARM cpu was happily demoing there new computer the archimedies and to
demonstrate the new CPU they did something that had not been done in realtime.
Yes the page turn effect, was also a waving flag surface and few other
demonstrations of this great processing power.

Now If I watch a film on TV on a digital screen and in that film somebody
turns a page of a book, then would I also technicaly be violating this digital
patent.

Patents like this are fine, as long as there are in a common-sence pool of
free use for all, anything else is well, just wrong.

------
kaolinite
Quite a few people are mentioning prior art and then going on to give examples
where it's just an animation. I'm not saying that there isn't prior art
however it does specify that the animation is initiated with a finger:

 _"The animation responds to a simple swiping motion with the finger, which
turns the page over just as it happens on a paper book. A different swiping
motion will flip the pages quickly, and a vertical finger movement will flip
the page just enough to reveal what’s on the next page."_

Talking of which - does anyone find the iBooks animation to be slow and
annoying? On my iPad 3 it lags for a split second and generally feels a bit
rough. It sounds picky but it's quite annoying and judging by a quick search
on Google, others are annoyed by it too. Has it always been this way or is
this a bug that will be fixed?

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adaml_623
Filed July 2010.

I don't understand. I saw this effect on dozens of web pages over the last
decade. Do patent examiners just live in a little box?

~~~
nudded
Patent examiners just provide advice. Even if the advice is negative, you can
still be granted the patent.

The validity of any patent then has to be established by a judge in court.

~~~
hayksaakian
I understand 'innocent until proven guilty,' but 'patentable until proven
otherwise' makes no damn sense.

~~~
nudded
I agree with you. But it's important to understand that 'Patent granted' has
no meaning at all.

~~~
dpark
This is entirely untrue. A patent that has been granted by the USPTO is deemed
valid and binding unless decided otherwise in court or by a re-evaluation by
the USPTO.

By your standard, patents are never meaningful, because a higher court (or the
same court) could always invalidate the patent.

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chris_wot
GOOD - I absolutely _loathe_ that page turning animation... Skeumorphics gone
crazy.

P.S. I've seen plenty of page turning effects like there's in advertising
catalogs built in Flash. But in this case, let Apple have their way.

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olgeni
This could be easily circumvented by animating a page ripped out of the book,
made into a ball, and tossed in the general direction of an Apple-looking
product.

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zeru
There's no chance it will hold up in any court if they try to use it to sue
because of the vast amount of previous art. Not a chance at all.

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3amOpsGuy
There's too much prior art for this. Back around 97-99 there were plenty of
shareware apps shipped on magazine cover CDs for reading ebooks.

They mostly adopted a quasi-skeuomorphic presentation, complete with (crappy)
page turn animations in response to the user clicking next. It was often
labelled along the lines of "Now With 3D Page Turning!"

------
yogeshkhatri
I don't know much about the patents but is grammer of the claim is considered
or not as in the claim it is referring to finger and if i implement the same
animation which is done by using two or more fingers, am i infringing the
patent.

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stbullard
I'd like to see Apple's cost-benefit analysis on something like this. Patents
aren't cheap; if this is as unlikely to be defensible as some people are
claiming, Apple must expect a huge upside. (Decreased risk? Licensing fees?)

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zerostar07
Look at the bright side: there are a number of pretty text-scrolling effects
that have been not been appreciated enough. Scrolls unwinding, tablets thrown
back and forth etc.

------
goodereader
I think this is a huge win for Apple with all the major companies like Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, Google Books and others all using page turn animations, much
like iBooks uses. I could see easily in the next few months more licensing
deals being made.

~~~
calciphus
A win for Apple, a loss for the rest of us. Do we really honestly think that
if Apple hadn't created page turn animations, they wouldn't have existed?

~~~
raganwald
Do you believe that if the Wright Brothers hadn't flown--and patented their
discoveries--that we wouldn't have fixed-wing flight?

~~~
Natsu
Funny you should use them as an example, because there's a lot of interesting
history surrounding that, which you can read about here. I'll give you the
highlights for a quick skim, but there's a lot more to it:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wright_brothers_patent_war>

The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of
controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is
described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of
wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's
wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral roll
control.

The concept of lateral control was basic to all aircraft designs; without it
they could not be easily or safely controlled in flight.[7]

The broad protection intended by this patent succeeded when the Wrights won
patent infringement lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators
who devised ailerons to emulate lateral control described in the patent and
demonstrated by the Wrights in their 1908 public flights. U.S. courts decided
that ailerons were also covered by the patent.

[...]

The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of
new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made
by other firms in Europe.[10] Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was
suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no
acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were
compelled to use French machines.

In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in favor
of the Wrights against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties
through legal tactics.

[...]

The patent pool solution

In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss
Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were
desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S.
government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin
D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to
form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the
Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.[11][12][13]

~~~
raganwald
This was exactly my point. The patents were overly broad and designed to
hinder competition. The overall result was negative for society, not positive.
While the Wrights were "first in flight," I have zero confidence that flight
wouldn't have been invented without the incentive of a monopoly on flight
control.

~~~
Natsu
Writing a double-negative like that forces me to do a double-take when trying
to understand you. Or is it a triple-negative?

I'm going to go with, "there were so many inventors, its invention was
inevitable" as my interpretation, which I believe is the most correct
rendition of the story of flight as I know it.

