
Apple's New Pinch-To-Zoom Monopoly is Bad News - bookwormAT
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/08/25/apple_v_samsung_verdict_creates_new_pinch_to_zoon_monopoly_that_s_bad_for_consumers.html
======
babarock
To me the real bad news is that I'm scared shitless to develop and
commercialize anything now.

No invention is truely innovative, not a single product on the market today is
truely original. We're all influenced by the same factors and we're all trying
to push the same limits in technology.

I don't have nearly the means to go to court against a company like Apple (or
any company at all for that matter). If I launch my product today, I would be
afraid of being successful, because I know I'll be bullied by others.

And when patent lawsuits can win you a Billion dollars, patent bullies are
happy and waiting for me.

But yeah, I agree patents are a driving force behind innovation...

~~~
nostrademons
"I would be afraid of being successful, because I know I'll be bullied by
others."

Getting sued for patent infringement is one of those first-world problems I'd
love to have, because it means you're big & threatening enough to be worth
suing.

Your strategy there, if you're still a startup and don't have a huge legal
team, is to get bought by a big company with a huge legal team that would be
hurt if the aggressor wins in court. See: Google, YouTube, and the Viacom
lawsuit.

~~~
coopdog
Great problem except there goes your leverage for the negotiation

Also shows the effect of patents on the market, the little guys either get
bought for cheap or destroyed as soon as they have any sort of success

~~~
nostrademons
The point is that the lawsuit _is_ your leverage for the negotiation. The
acquirer doesn't want to see you lose the lawsuit any more than you want to
lose it, because it would set a precedent that would make their own products
infringing. And since they're bigger than you, they have more to lose, and
hence more of an incentive to win.

I've long suspected that Google bought YouTube _for_ the lawsuit. If Viacom
had won, it would set a legal precedent that would basically make Google's
business model illegal. And Viacom would likely have won, suing a tiny
14-person startup. So Google's only option was to buy the lawsuit (and the
company along with it), so they could use their own legal defense team to win
in court.

~~~
talmand
I think you're out on a limb a bit with this one. For most people and
companies a lawsuit would most likely be considered a liability. Granted that
there are exceptions like the YouTube example you propose, but you can't
assume the same for every little startup that gets sued.

------
brudgers
The analogy with cars is misleading. Patents (unlike copyright) offer
protection for a fairly limited duration. The steering wheel and other
standard controls would long since have been unprotected.

Likewise, our children will be free to incorporate pinch to zoom in a few
years...if of course patent protection doesn't lead to innovating a prefered
alternative.

On the one hand I think IP laws have significant problems, but on the other,
Android's interface shows little evidence of a meaningful effort at innovation
and even less effort to respect the IP of others in the industry.

~~~
dasil003
The timespan is utterly ridiculous though. With the modern pace of innovation
in mobile and software development, a 20-year patent term would be like if the
steering wheel patent were valid for 200 years.

~~~
brudgers
To push the analogy further...

In the first 30 years of the automobile, tiller, steering wheel, or pedals
were largely irrelevant. Until the proliferation of better roads, none of that
mattered. Likewise, what is holding back mobile computing is bandwidth
infrastructure and device power efficiency, not interface design features.

If you think that the pace of change is so radically different, consider that
in the twenty years following patent 37435 the world got aircraft, motion
pictures and Einstein's _Annus Mirabilis._

The iPhone of Automobiles:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent_Motorwagen>

------
RivieraKid
Google should distribute two Android versions - one for the U.S. (with
features like pinch-to-zoom removed) and one for the rest of the world. This
would hopefully create some pressure to change the obsolete patent system.

~~~
sangaya
I think that's the wrong approach. They should continue to distribute one
Android version, and that version should retain pinch-to-zoom, while they
fight the absurdity in court.

------
badclient
Question about patents - is the act of pinch-to-zoom patented or the
_implementation_ (the algorithms, type of hardware needed etc.) patented?

If it is the act that is patented, then as others have mentioned, its not
necessarily original. If the implementation is patented, could there be
alternative implementations? Did Samsung even actually copy Apple's
implementation(at an algorithm level)?

~~~
panacea
It's both the first and second, and neither at the same time. It's
Schrödinger's Pinch.

... Making this comment pains me slightly. It's a comment I wouldn't have made
on HN a year ago, pithy (I think) and slightly humorous, but I'm not bringing
specific domain knowledge into the discussion to answer a question.

It's the sort of comment I would have refrained from making on reddit many
years ago when I first visited, when I encountered great commentary from
knowledgeable participants on the topic at had, and lurked.

~~~
efraim
Then why are you doing it?

------
andybak
Compare this with the culture prevalent in web development.

People sharing every improvement or advance by blogging about it, open-
sourcing code, writing tutorials etc.

~~~
buro9
Although the age of open web dev may be passing.

I worry about the future of web development when I see things that used to be
shared openly (logging technology, databases, languages, search indexing
tools, etc) one-by-one become startups with a price tag.

Only this morning did I see the job advert for Swiftype:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4442562>

By default I wish startups success, but I fear for the long-term implications
when each piece of the puzzle (of web development) migrates towards being a
business that needs to make money. And that is before you factor in patents
and proprietary knowledge and how companies tend to act aggressively when
their financial back is up against the wall.

Web dev will only stay open so long as web devs fight to keep it that way.

~~~
nathan_long
>> I worry about the future of web development when I see things that used to
be shared openly... one-by-one become startups with a price tag

I'm not worried. I develop for the web, and nearly every piece of my tech
stack - language, editor, database, server, browser rendering engine - is open
source. My skills are in such high demand that my team can't find people to
join it. I feel zero pressure to use anything closed-source.

>> Web dev will only stay open so long as web devs fight to keep it that way.

I do agree with this. I think it's unwise to develop for platforms like iOS,
however popular they may be. It's a form of sharecropping.

Let's keep working on the web, where every computer and mobile device is on
equal footing, and we don't have to rewrite our app to reach new customers.

------
mtgx
This is what I've been thinking from the moment Apple started going after
Android manufacturers with patents like these, and it's why the patent system
is _so very flawed_ , because it doesn't account for how competition actually
works in a market.

Let's say you have one company "create" a new product category - a new type of
product. So they are the first ones doing that, but this is usually done
through some combination and improvement of old things.

But then you _have to_ get other companies to do the _same_ or _very similar_
, because that's how competition works, and that's _exactly_ what competition
is. Making 90% of the same product - so to be in the _same_ product category -
but having that 10% as a competitive advantage over the others in that
specific market.

Competition is not overhauling the product 90%. That's just not how it works,
and you don't have to take my word for it. Just look around you at any product
category you want. They are all 90% similar and 10% different, not just in how
they look, but how they function. The only major "overhaul" happens once a
decade or so when that specific market gets disrupted, but then that new
market is populated by competitors doing the same, too, and the cycle repeats
itself.

If you wouldn't have that, you'd have exactly what the article is saying -
random "innovations" just for the sake of being different so you don't get
sued, less competition from the point of view of the users, because the vast
majority of them will prefer a certain way of doing things, and since only one
company can own that, it means monopolies will be much easier to form - and it
will also be much harder for new entrants.

------
MichaelApproved
I think pinch to zoom is pretty innovative and someone should get credit for
coming up with that idea. Without it, I bet we'd see the classic magnifying
glass in the bottom corner of every screen to zoom.

Simple does not mean obvious. UX designers need to protect their work and
creativity.

~~~
fingerprinter
I'm waiting for the producers of Minority Report (2002) to start suing
everyone since that movie clearly demonstrated swipe, pinch-to-zoom and other
"innovative" UI elements. </sarcasm>

Nothing is ever truly innovative. Nearly everything, quite literally
everything, is built on something else.

Apple, at its core, is actually the BEST IN THE WORLD at not innovating, but
perfecting someone else's design. And that is my problem with this whole
farce. Apple isn't an innovative company, at all. Apple is, however, excellent
at seeing what others are doing and out doing them at their own game. They
don't 'invent', they never have. They tweak, they massage and they simplify
(some could argue that this is innovative, but I'm going to use the term like
it is being used in court...is they are actually inventing a concept that
didn't exist before).

~~~
kamjam
You know, I was just thinking the same thing about Minority Report. How does
that not serve as prior art? I'm sure there are plenty of others before this
as well.

Someone commented on that blog about the TED talk that did a demo on "the
pinch":
[http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html)

~~~
twoodfin
Uhh, because fictional representations of devices without sufficient
information on how to actually construct them isn't prior art?

I guarantee you, if you invent a matter/energy transporter you will be able to
patent it despite _Star Trek_ having put it on screen almost 50 years ago.

~~~
kamjam
Did you see the video I linked to? This was actually real and that video is
dated 1 year before the iPhone was even announced, let alone released.

Besides, as far as I've read (and I haven't read the details of the patents
themselves) they are patenting the concept of the pinch-to-zoom, not the
actual implementation, otherwise Samsung would just have a slightly different
technical implementation of it right...

~~~
twoodfin
You can't get utility patents for "concepts". They patented a specific way to
do pinch-to-zoom _on mobile devices with capacitive touch screens_ (and
interacting with an event loop). Which is a similar, but not identical,
problem to doing multitouch pinch-to-zoom on a projector-based system as in
the demo.

~~~
kamjam
Which is as silly as those patents which essentially took existing ideas and
added "on the web" to the end of them. Not saying you're wrong, just what
everyone else has been screaming - the patent system is broken!

------
thewileyone
I think Android should implement a clock-wise single finger "circle around an
object" to zoom and counter-clock-wise to unzoom. Just like the "undo" option
in Paper. That's pretty cool.

~~~
hfsktr
Strangely when someone asked how else zooming could be done the first thing I
thought of was a circle clockwise and anti clockwise.

~~~
cloverich
Follow to the logical conclusion. Did you think of it quickly? Then someone
patented it. You know, so you don't go and "steal" their "innovation".

------
philbarr
Personally I think pinch-to-zoom doesn't work very well anyway. It always
seems to zoom in too quickly or too slowly; the amount of zoom seems
arbitrary.

What I've always wanted was to be able to put two fingers to mark the top left
and bottom right of a bounding box which would mark how much to zoom in and
hold for, say, half a second. To zoom out use two fingers to mark the top
right and bottom left of the bounding box you want the current screen to zoom
out to (again hold for half a second). This would be much more accurate. The
time delay is to allow for mis-taps and to give the user time to get the
bounding box the right size.

A variation would be similar but would be something like:

\- hold two fingers on the screen until you get a bounding box like above.

\- move the bounding box to the correct size.

\- let go and the zoom happens.

With this method you could cancel the zoom action by collapsing the bounding
box on itself vertically or horizontally.

~~~
sp332
Interesting, how would you differentiate between zooming in and zooming out
though?

~~~
philbarr
Zooming in is with fingers at top left and bottom right, zooming out is with
fingers at top right and bottom left.

------
no_gravity
So far this only applies to the USA, right? Will companies ship their products
with pinch-to-zoom to the rest of the world?

------
saturdaysaint
I think it's instructive to look away from the world of operating systems,
which have been under legal threat since the 80's and thus have always been
under an anti-competitive, anti-innovative shadow. The fact that so few
companies tried what Apple did with UI speaks as much to the intimidation
inherent in the industry than to Steve Job's genius.

Whenever I ask myself if patents are necessary to promote innovation, I think
of music software, where copying is a fact of life yet highly original ideas
emerge year after year. Whenever something useful emerges (like Ableton Live's
once innovative "session view" where you launch repeating music clips) it's
usually copied by half the industry within a few versions and nobody even
blinks.

In the mean time, the biggest incumbents (Avid's Pro Tools, Steinberg's
Cubase) have remained seemingly profitable businesses, and consumers have
benefited from abundant choice. The competition has also encouraged the
software makers to add a lot of value in the form of lots of included content
(soft synths, effects, loops, etc.). And funny enough, the more innovative
companies (Ableton, Propellerhead, Cycling 74 spring to mind) keep coming up
with interesting ideas.

------
brandoncapecci
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas..." - Steve Jobs
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU>

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny
of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy
Android because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on
this." - Steve Jobs

------
netcan
IP laws have to do an impossible task.

They need to separate innovation into two piles based on whether an innovation
would have/could have happened without that party and (though this seems to be
easy to forget).

That's what these laws are supposed to be doing. The problem is that this is a
job that legal systems (laws, lawmaker, courts, etc) are not well suited for.
Even if you leave aside problems like big patentholders in existing industries
& companies out-lobbying potential future beneficiaries of reduced patent
protection (future businesses & consumers) it would be hard to make laws that
woud do this job effectively. Laws that will do the job effectively for
generations are virtually impossible.

I think that Apple _did_ do something with iphones that may not have happened
without them. That said, I don't think that any of these specific patents
capture that.

~~~
001sky
RE: _it would be hard to make laws that woud do this job effectively_

\- Playing devil's advocate, doesn't law ultimately assign this task to
humans? ie, the patent office? And reviewers?

\- Clearly, the reviewers are outgunned. Both intellectually, and tactically.
For example, the trend of making overly broad claims. This can effectively
mask the prior art. It makes a "needle in a haystack" problem for the
reviewer. By generalizing the case, when the prior art is specific examples.

~~~
netcan
I think the task has to be shared which is how it is set up to work. Patent
office employees & judges are people.

But, laws don't just lay out their goal and let people get to work. They break
it down into much smaller judgments. Things like novelty, non-obviousness,
subject matter & applicability.

"Would have probably been invented regardless of patent law" is to vague to be
a law and too difficult to ask bureaucrats to ascertain.

~~~
001sky
Ideas of "principle" vs "rules" based decisionmaking have a long history of
debate. As you note, writing perfect rules to cover all scenarios ex-ante is
nearly impossible.

That leaves us the task to debate virtue of new and existing principles, and
find a way to incorporate discretion and expertise. The issue is making sure
that discretion doe not get manipulated/gamed as well.

How do we do that?

Society today is very much every man/special interest for himself.

~~~
netcan
It could also be that the system of laws, lawmakers, courts & bureaucrats is
just not very good at this sort of thing. Imagine that for some reason we
needed this system to make decisions based on niceness or sexiness.

~~~
001sky
"Obviousness" is in the eyes of the beholder

The irony of bureaucrats judging (lack of) inventiveness

------
biturd
Question: Can I start a small dev company in some other country thereby
bypassing any patent trolls? Perhaps somewhere like Sweeden where they are
much more sane about these issues?

If this is the case, all we are ending up doing is driving technology away
from the USA, and continuing to kill our economy.

~~~
acdha
If the company does any business with people in the US, patent trolls can
attack it - perhaps the most famous recent example being the Uniloc vs. Mojang
case: <http://notch.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/mojang.pdf>

------
CulturalNgineer
Patents are important protections designed to protect the hard work of
individuals from the onslaught of more powerful forces... I've got one myself
(a utility patent)

THIS IS NOT THE CASE HERE!

This is more akin to privatizing the alphabet...

Not exactly a great way to stimulate civilization's advance.

------
wtvanhest
(This comes from an S2 user with Pinch-To-Zoom.)

First, Pinch-To-Zoom is the best idea anyone has come up with yet, but it
certainly won't be the last.

If anything, this decision forces Google/Samsung etc. to innovate a better
solution. If you don’t think one exists, I think you are sorely mistaken.
Pinch-To-Zoom needs to be used by 2 hands (one to pinch, one to hold the
phone) which inherently is annoying.

If the patents are trivial, obvious, etc. other companies will find
workarounds and some of those workarounds will be better than what is
currently available.

In 12 months, this lawsuit will be meaningless because technology will keep
advancing forward.

------
jjara
Samsung can:

1\. Negotiate a license with Apple to use patented gestures. => Reduces profit
margins on Samsung phones. Bad news.

2\. Invent/use other gestures. => Forces users to learn new gestures. Should
be fine.

3\. Challenge the patent system claiming User Interface patents should not be.
=> Re-initiates the debate on the use of patents to protect inventions/stop
innovation, in particular when it comes to UIs. The real question.

Let's refocus. This question requires a deeper analysis than a simple analogy
with car manufacturers, but fortunately does not require hackers to turn IP
experts.

------
nachteilig
Please stop blaming Apple and start blaming the patent system itself. Samsung
would have done the exact same thing if they had those patents or came out
with iPhone first.

~~~
Blara
And you know this for a fact how?

~~~
nachteilig
Because almost all companies (and people) inherently behave in a way that is
in their own best interests. Owning critical smartphone patents is clearly in
the interest of people in the smartphone business.

------
thomasjoulin
Any reason/proof Pinch-To-Zoom (and the other Apple patents in the Samsung
case) will not be licensed under FRAND ?

~~~
_djo_
FRAND only applies as a legal principle of the patent in question is part of
an industry standard. So a Samsung patent that got incorporated into the UMTS
should become a FRAND patent. The rules do vary from standards body to
standards body.

Google has argued that industry-common patents, not just industry-standard
patents, should fall under FRAND terms as well. In other words a patent that
enables multitouch gestures is so essential to modern smartphones that you
can't compete without it.

I'm still ambivalent on the whole patent question, though I'm intrigued by the
idea of making _all_ patents licensable under FRAND terms.

~~~
nitrogen
FRAND terms in this case can only be "reasonable" and "nondiscriminatory" if
they also account for copyleft, ceative commons, and open source
implementations.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Another article that doesn't get patents right.

"Apple did first in iOS now _only_ iOS can use them"

No, everyone can use, as long as they pay Apple whatever they ask for the
royalties, or get sued by ridiculously sums of money.

The monopoly is not on the invention - the monopoly is on the legal right to
ask _any_ value from, or sue, whoever implements similar idea.

 _That_ is what's f __* up about patents, because otherwise, it would be a
great idea since you can build upon other's inventions and the inventor still
gets financial return for R &D.

------
pschlump
I can imagine what he is saying. In a Cherokee 180 4 person airplane you do
steer on the ground with your feet and control the throttle with your hand. In
a Gulfstar 50 you steer on the ground with a dial for your left hand placed
off on the left. You need training to use each machine. The world has not come
to a screeching halt just because not all airplanes have the same controls.

~~~
mrich
But what is your point? Is a majority of the world population going to fly one
of those airplanes as part of their daily routine soon?

------
jawr
What I don't understand, is how Apple market these gestures as being very
"human". If they are so natural, how can they be patented?

~~~
Tycho
Because the method of translating the gesture into digital signals is
ingenious - like how the Kinnect and Wii capture natural gestures and
movements (note how they were able to innovate round each others patents).

------
anandpdoshi
Has anyone used Aldiko ebook reader on android? It uses the right edge of the
mobile's screen to change its brightness. With your thumb, trace the right
edge towards the top and brightness increases, down and it decreases. I wonder
if something similar could be used for zooming. You don't need two fingers to
zoom!

------
sbuk
I don't think we need anymore of these threads. It's getting repetitive. There
are too many emotional individuals on all sides of the fence that are adding
nothing of value to the debate. If you want to flame that's fine, go do it on
Reddit or try the Ars Technia battlefront forum.

------
dharmarth
US patent business is really sad. Looks patents are given without doing enough
investigation. I remember turmeric and neem get patented by some university of
US, where India is using these herb from ancient time. Is it really given to
protect someone's innovation?

------
glenntzke
Does this mean Metro apps need new guidelines? Here is the documentation for
optical zooming in Metro: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/apps/hh46530...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/windows/apps/hh465307.aspx)

------
ryanwanger
It blew my mind when I learned about d-pad patents for video game consoles.
Ever wonder why Playstation had to use that awkward combination of 4 arrow-
like things pointing towards each other? Patents.

------
mikecane
Submarine patent <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent>

Well, I guess it's better than having to deal with that.

------
emehrkay
I asked in another thread, but the first few versions of android didn't have
these features, what changed?

------
ajaimk
Not much worse than Amazon's Monopoly on 1 click ordering.

------
cin_
Great artists steal... good artists get caught?

------
ktizo
All the cited apple patents on multitouch gestures appear to be filed since
Jeff Han's TED talk - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ> \- which
clearly demonstrates many of the patented techniques. I find it really hard to
understand how any of these patents were awarded.

[edit] Some of the quotes from his 2006 presentation are quite relevant to
this...

... _"Now, multi-touch sensing isn't anything- isn't completely new, I mean,
people like Bill Buxton have been playing around with it in the '80s."_ ...

... _"Now this is a photographer's light box application. Again, I can use
both of my hands to kind of interact and move photos around. But, what's even
cooler-_

 _(uses fingers to 'grab' two corners of one of the photos and 'pulls' it to
full screen size)_

 _is that, if I have two fingers, I can actually grab a photo and then stretch
it out like that really easily. I can pan, zoom, and rotate it effortlessly._

 _(slides piles of photos around)_

 _I can do that grossly with both of my hands,_

 _(pulls photo out of stack & enlarges it)_

 _or if I can do it just with two fingers on each of my hands together._

 _(grabs empty space around photos & zooms in and out of canvas)_

 _If I grab the canvas I can kind of do the same thing- stretch it out- I can
do it simultaneously, where I'm holding this down-_

 _(holds pile of photos down while pulling out another)_

 _-and gripping on another one, stretching this out like this._

 _Again, the interface just disappears here. There's no manual. This is
exactly what you kind of expect, especially if you haven't interacted with a
computer before."_ ...

Which sort of begs the question that if an expert in the field thinks the
gesture is exactly what you would expect, even if you had no expertise
whatsoever, then how does that not qualify as obvious?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_“All the cited apple patents on multitouch gestures appear to be filed since
Jeff Han's TED talk”_

FingerWorks, a pioneer in multitouch gestures, filed for (and received)
boatloads of patents. Apple bought FingerWorks in 2005, inheriting its
intellectual property. The scientists came to work for Apple and continued to
file patents for the research that they had done since the nineties.

“In June 2005, FingerWorks officially announced they were no longer in
business. The founders continued to file and process patents for their work
through late 2007. And as of August 2008 they still filed patents for Apple,
Inc.” [1]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks>

~~~
ktizo
Just had a look at their patents, and found this line in their gesture patent
-

 _Identification and classification of intuitive hand configurations and
motions_ \- [http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Se...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-
bool.html&r=9&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=Fingerworks.AS.&OS=AN/Fingerworks&RS=AN/Fingerworks)

How is the use of intuitive gestures not obvious, entirely by definition?

~~~
coliveira
There is a big difference between dreaming about something and actually doing
it. For example, everyone knew what a flying machine was, centuries before it
was invented. Clearly this doesn't mean that creating that machine was
actually obvious. With computing it is similar, there are lots of "inventions"
dreamed about by science fiction writers that are simply not possible today.
When such innovations become possible, they will need to be protected.

~~~
jxcole
And yet the wright brothers were not granted a patent on "things that fly".
They were granted patents on some specific machines they invented that could
fly. But the patents were about the mechanical machines themselves. If someone
else had come along and invented a totally different means of flying (like a
helicopter) they would not have been infringing on their patents. This is a
patent on "things that fly".

~~~
gnaffle
Apples patents are clearly not patents on "smartphones with a rectangular
touchscreen and no external UI buttons", but they cover many inventions that
make such a phone usable.

Likewise, apart from a totally different kind of flying machine like a
helicopter, there probably isn't any better method of controlling an airplane
than the method covered by Wrights patents (since it specifically does not
exclude non-wing warping control designs), which is why the basic mode of
control is still in use today. So Wrights patents at the time might as well be
called a patents on "things that fly". It was very difficult to make a
controllable plane without violating the patent.

Likewise, unless you equip a phone with dedicated zoom controls, there
probably isn't a better or more intuitive way of zooming than using pinch-to-
zoom or double tapping.

~~~
dllthomas
> Apples patents are clearly not patents on "smartphones with a rectangular
> touchscreen and no external UI buttons", but they cover many inventions that
> make such a phone usable.

Actually, per my understanding, Apple's _design_ patents are exactly that (if
you throw in beveled corners). It's true, though, that those aren't the
patents at issue in this thread.

~~~
gnaffle
Yes, but design patents are a different animal, and AFAIK much easier to work
around. So if they changed just one aspect of the design (making it less
likely to be confused), Apple would have a harder time enforcing it.

