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Friday, June 24, 2011

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

Apple Wins Patent, Owns the Intellectual Property For Touch Screens & Gesture Control

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 02:53 PM PDT

After Apple’s recent court battle loss, Nokia may have proven that it invented the smartphone, but a recent patent awarded to Apple’s developers establishes that Apple Inc. officially owns the rights to multi touch surfaces on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. In patent terms, Apple’s winning of U.S. patent number 7,966,578 is not merely a limited-scope piece of technology, but rather a wide-ranging achnowledgement of all the technology and innovation that goes into making touchscreen functionality on all smartphones a reality.

The abstract of Apple’s new patent describes the invention as: “[a] computer-implemented method, for use in conjunction with a portable multifunction device with a touch screen display, [that] comprises displaying a portion of page content, including a frame displaying a portion of frame content and also including other content of the page, on the touch screen display.” As always is the case, the wording and terminology seems convoluted and redundant, but tech analysts claim that the crux of the patent covers any mobile device where fingers and gesture control is used for navigation and interaction.

PCMag.com reports that: “Apple’s patent essentially gives it ownership of the capacitive multitouch interface the company pioneered with its iPhone, said one source who has been involved in intellectual property litigation on similar matters. That’s likely to produce a new round of lawsuits over the now-ubiquitous multitouch interfaces used in smartphones made by the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Research in Motion, Nokia, and others that run operating systems similar in nature to Apple’s iOS, like Google’s Android, said the source, who asked not to be named.”

Just as Nokia was able to prove that Apple copierd some of its in-house smartphone design, and is making Cupertino pay for it like a licensee of the technology, so too could Apple choose to file lawsuits against virtual any tech manufacturer who uses touch screens and gesture control on their devices.

In this way, Apple could legally lay waste to all of Android, from its smartphones to its up-start tablet devices. Apple could use the court system to restrict competitors from selling multi-touch mobile devices in the U.S. Analysts, however, believe that scorched each approach to leveraging the new patent is probably not how Apple will proceed in the end, as it could have disastrous consequences:

“If Apple does decide to play hardball and squeeze out rivals rather than set up cross-licenses, the source said, it’s entirely possible that a court could find it in the public interest to scrap the patent rather than allow a monopoly on what has become a defining interface for an entire category of consumer devices.” Instead, “More likely is that Apple would reach a settlement with such competitors and start licensing its patented technology for a tidy new income stream.”