Patents aren't like copying someone's homework - that's copyright.
It's important to remember, there's no suggestion in any of these cases that anyone stole Apple's source code. There isn't even an allegation that they did any nontrivial reverse-engineering of an iPhone (it clearly wasn't necessary). Instead, at most, people saw a behavior and independently re-implemented it (and often might not have even seen the behavior first - many of these patents date far back before the iPhone - to the point where "infringing" implementations existed well before the iPhone), without studying the implementation at all.
That's like... getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject (when they might not have even known the subject of your paper and even if they did it wasn't cheating).
>getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject
No, what actually happened would be more like writing a brilliant paper on Roman Empire exploring it in a way that no one had before, and suddenly this guy who's been stuck for years suddenly "comes up with" a paper that appears to borrow heavily from yours.
Good point, thank you. I guess my thought is that the slide to unlock implementation and idea is being copied. Calling it obvious (legal definition notwithstanding) is something I do not agree with, there are many ways that one could think to unlock such a device.
This is one of the better explanations I have seen for this patent game. I remember the same thing came up with Google vs. Oracle. In that Google did a near clean implementation (albeit those 9 lines and few test files) of JAVA. I think clean implementations should be made part of Patent proceeding. This won't be applicable to this case but still would go a long long way in stupid idea patents like these.
It's important to remember, there's no suggestion in any of these cases that anyone stole Apple's source code. There isn't even an allegation that they did any nontrivial reverse-engineering of an iPhone (it clearly wasn't necessary). Instead, at most, people saw a behavior and independently re-implemented it (and often might not have even seen the behavior first - many of these patents date far back before the iPhone - to the point where "infringing" implementations existed well before the iPhone), without studying the implementation at all.
That's like... getting a good grade because you wrote a paper on the Roman Empire and then accusing someone of cheating because they decided to write their own paper on the same subject (when they might not have even known the subject of your paper and even if they did it wasn't cheating).