Apple patent’s everything intuitive to humans

Is that what you call Apple’s “touch”?

The patent war blog post is a collage of many surprise quotients, precisely about Apple and it’s way of doing business. I am definitely not trying to project a negative perspective on Apple’s way of doing business, here. But these facts give me a sense-of-awe, looking at various opportunities that businesses exploit and monetize.

Who would think one can patent your insanely intuitive and natural actions, claim billions out of these patents and continue to earn/own them for life?

Apple does. Samsung, Google and the likes also do.

Here is the list of patents Apple own, for which Samsung has been sued at:

1. Slide to unlock
2. Links within SMSes
3. Auto-correct by hitting space bar
4. Universal search
5. Background data sync

Web-users, or let us even confidently proclaim computer-users, who used to right click on URL links to open articles in a browser window, or who hit a search in google and expect to get relevant information, or who would expect cloud to work like cloud by storing data in remote servers, would naturally wonder how Apple even managed to patent these actions that have been integral to people like us, since very long before we even “touched” Apple screens.

Limitless limits

The best part of this lawsuit is the patent for “Slide to Unlock”, which Samsung is directly targeted for. When using a touch phone, with most probable action being a ‘Touch’, and that being an annoyance to be used as an action for Unlock with high chances of the screen getting unlocked for unintentional hits, what other action is left for end users to perform (let’s not even think why Samsung and Google incorporated such features here). I would say Slide is the next most intuitive action related to touch before we could imagine getting a finger imprint technology or anything for that matter.

What’s in store

There is a lot of emerging technology related to vision (Google Glass), wearables (Samsung, Moto X), speech and hand movements. I would not be surprised to hear someone patenting the following actions, which are the natural and intuitive actions you can imagine, associated with our senses:

1. Blink to take a picture,
2. Twist and/or tap your arm to lock or unlock your wearable,
3. Recognize your hum or gesture to perform an action,
4. Write on air to auto suggest, to name a few.

It is understandable that it is hard for patent administrators to differentiate a complex technological discovery and a simple intuitive action that is not pervasively used in a particular scenario and grant a patent. Even in Apple and Samsung’s case something that seems like a sensible discovery in the USA seems silly to a German legislator. This means we need a universally logical demarcation that would help decide the course of patents.

In my personal confession, I would not have personally patented or allowed to patent the above actions, even if I was told I can, and monetize later when things conspire.

It makes immense sense to remember here the greats like Dennis Ritchie and Tim Berners-Lee, who have left their inventions in C programming language and world wide web, un-protected and open for the world to consume without limits.

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