Apple awarded important multi-touch patent
Apple has been awarded a number of significant technology patents over the years. One more can be added to that group, this one for multi-touch navigation and control functionality.
The patent would appear to cover important multi-touch gestural functionality such as pinch, object rotation, and swipe. The award actually was actually granted on Jan. 20, but news just surfaced today in Pcmag.com. The application was made on April 18, 2008. The patent number is 7,479,949 and is titled, “Touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics.”
The patent begins as follows: “A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.”
The main question in all of this, apparently, is whether or not all of the gestures covered will be seen as legally patentable in court. Other manufacturers also use similar gestures to perform various functions. Some have patents on them. The primary concerned party would appear to be Palm, a who has multiple gestures which appear to be covered by the new Apple patent.
This seems to be acknowledged in the patent, a portion of which reads “In some embodiments, a multi-finger de-pinching gesture magnifies the image 1606 by a variable amount in accordance with the position of the multi-finger de-pinching gesture and the amount of finger movement in the multi-finger de-pinching gesture. … In some embodiments, a multi-finger pinching gesture demagnifies the image 1606 by a variable amount in accordance with the position of the multi-finger pinching gesture and the amount of finger movement in the multi-finger pinching gesture.”
Although this could be seen as a major problem, especially for Palm, it must be remembered that there are a number of multi-touch gestural patents out there. Undoubtedly, all of this will need to be sorted out via the legal process, whether in or out of court. There is a lot of legal wrangling ahead of us on this issue.
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