The most basic one is the "one-click" Amazon patent. Most of Apple's patents on forms of interaction with touchscreens or other touch-sensitive devices are little more than reflections of physical interaction with objects.
The most basic one is the "one-click" Amazon patent.
I'm unclear on how that relates, aside from being a patent.
Most of Apple's patents on forms of interaction with touchscreens or other touch-sensitive devices are little more than reflections of physical interaction with objects.
What objects? This is software. Just because an interface element behaves in a way that feels, to your senses, realistic, does not mean that there exists in the real world an obvious and patent-invalidating object of prior art. If a menu scrolls one way but not another, you might have an intuitive grasp of what it is doing, but that does not mean it is a copy of a real thing. (Or if it is, where is the real object? Where is the prior art? Where is the obviousness?) If a menu bounces, it isn't a actual thing that is actually bouncing: it's a conscious decision by the programmer or designer to make it behave in a way that happens to be read by your senses as a "bounce".
And why is that, in your view, not patentable? If Apple had made physical objects that behaved the same way but via mechanical means instead of electronic, that would be patentable, too. Should that not be the case?
Yes. Before Amazon, if you asked any software developer of average competence to create a one click order process, they'd have it for you in a few days. Yes it was a clever idea, but ideas by themselves are not supposed to be patentable.
This is the key point. Many inventions are 'obvious in retrospect'. The Amazon 1-click patent is one of those annoying things where it seems obvious, but no one had ever done it and it's a huge boon to businesses (it makes impulse buying almost automatic).
For many of these patents, people will say it's obvious, but it's only obvious now that we've seen it all. No one else had ever done it before, so what's obvious about it?
