Apple just won its lawsuit against Samsung in which its patent on the ubiquitous “pinch to zoom” method of zooming in on something with your touch screen was upheld. The upshot of this is that if you have a non-apple device, you won’t be pinching much longer. This seems right to me:
Think about cars and you’ll see that, of course, lots of different companies make cars. But they all have some very similar user interface elements. In particular, there’s a steering wheel that you turn left and right to shift the wheels and there’s a gas pedal and breaks that you hit with your right foot. Imagine if the way the automobile industry worked was that each car maker had to devise a unique user interface. So maybe GM cars would have a steering wheel, but Toyotas would have a joystick, and Honda you would steer with your feel and use your hands to control the gas and breaks. In some sense there’d be “more innovation” in this world since there’d be this kind of arbitrary proliferation of user interfaces. But in a more important sense there’d be less competition, since there are only so many viable ways for a person to interact with a car and a lot of those ways suck. You’d have few new entrants, and those entrants would be hobbled from the get-go. Meanwhile, UI proliferation would make it much harder for people to switch car brands or launch car rental companies since with each brand reinventing the steering wheel you’d constantly need to be learning to drive again.
It’s about time we stop this kind of thing from happening. The idea behind the patent system was to encourage people to innovate, but it has devolved into a way to stifle competition. It’s become a corporate weapon, with companies increasingly laser focused on litigating patent suits. It’s a great day to be a patent attorney, but its a crappy day to be someone that uses a smart phone. If you were looking to add a new reason to hate Apple to your list, there ya go.
520 Chestnut 
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