There’s lots of chatter this morning about the affects of the recently awarded Apple multi-touch patent on other cellphones, such as the forthcoming Palm Pre. Folks, I don’t think it means anything substantial.
First, let me be clear, I haven’t read the patent. As an engineer I’ve long been counciled to stay clear of reading and thinking in terms of other people’s patented work. That’s better left for the lawyers and business strategists to focus on.
Anyway, from what I gather from reading a couple blogs, it looks like people are beginning to wonder if this patent is going to put a damper on multi-touch across the board. After all, Windows 7 is going to include touch/multi-touch support. Isn’t this technology going to now have to be licensed from Apple? I don’t think so.
Here’s the thing. Touch and multi-touch go way back. Turns out, in fact, that one of the pioneers in this field, Bill Buxton, works at Microsoft. And he has a pretty good overview of the development of various touch technologies, which stretch back to the 60s, here:
http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
It’s worth a read.
On a personal front, I have a friend that worked on some multi-touch gestures in the 90s too. I remember discussing with him pinch gestures, sliding gestures, etc. He wasn’t controlling a web browser, but in his case some interactions far more complex. The principles are the same however.
Now I admit I don’t get software patents. I’m biased that way. So read this part with skepticism. To me patenting multi-touch gestures to say let’s scroll the screen is akin to patenting the simultaneous press of the keys U-P and D-N to do the same. It’s trivial. In this case, it’s silly, but trivial.
Now patenting the hardware behind let’s say using capacitive touch for touch I understand. Although, don’t get too ahead of yourselves here, a quick read of Bill Buxton’s paper above will show you that capacitive touch screens have also been around awhile. That’s not new either.
What is new for Apple, is that for the first time a company made a mass market product with touch and multi-touch and did it well. It brought the technology to the market. That’s great. Apple wins here. No doubt about it in my mind. But bringing a good implementation to market does not necessarily make it patent worthy.
Maybe there is something so specific to Apple’s implementation that’s patent worthy. I don’t know. But from what I’ve seen in using the iPhone, I doubt it. Pinch to zoom, touch scrolling, and more are all things I’ve seen before.
Now granted in some legalistic way Apple may have now gained the rights to multi-touch here, but I’m guessing it’s applicability is much narrower than the blogosphere is making it out this morning. I just can’t imagine that it would be otherwise. Too many people paved this road for them.
The success of the iPhone’s multi-touch says more about technological market timing than fundamental patentability. The reason that the implementation is as good as it is, is in part due to the work others have put into touch and multi-touch over the years. Apple brought a good implementation to the table, not fundamental technology that deserves a broad patent sufficient to prevent others from using multi-touch. That’s my take.