This week I was discussing with a colleague Apple’s patent on pinch-to-zoom. I remarked on how surprised I was that Apple was able to successfully sue Google for the Android operating system infringing that patent, given that pinch-to-zoom was invented by Myron Krueger around 1972.<\/p>\n
My colleague pointed out that Apple’s patent was more clever than that. They knew they couldn’t patent pinch-to-zoom itself, so instead they patented the use of any data structure within a computer program that supports multitouch gestures like pinch-to-zoom.<\/p>\n
Since Google’s software (which the court could examine) used such a data structure, Apple was able to successfully claim that it fell under that patent. If Google had implemented pinch-to-zoom without the use of a specific data structure to support it, Apple couldn’t have successfully sued them.<\/p>\n
This highlights the differences between inventing and patenting. An invention creates new possible intellectual property, whereas a patent is a claim of ownership of intellectual property — not the same thing at all.<\/p>\n
To use an analogy with land, invention is discovering new territory, whereas patenting is claiming where the property lines should go. If you’re a really talented lawyer, you can carve up the property lines in previously discovered intellectual territory in ways that nobody ever thought of before.<\/p>\n
You’re not actually discovering new territory, you’re just putting fences in clever places. You are creating new property for yourself right smack in the middle of a parcel of land that somebody else thought was theirs.<\/p>\n
It’s kind of like the way Gerrymandering works in politics. Even if your opponent has more votes, you can still win simply by redrawing the boundaries between districts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week I was discussing with a colleague Apple’s patent on pinch-to-zoom. I remarked on how surprised I was that Apple was able to successfully sue Google for the Android operating system infringing that patent, given that pinch-to-zoom was invented by Myron Krueger around 1972. My colleague pointed out that Apple’s patent was more clever … Continue reading “IP Gerrymandering”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19386"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19387,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19386\/revisions\/19387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}