Back in 2011 August, a preliminary injunction was granted by a Dutch court against some products by Samsung. An interesting piece of information regarding obviousness of Apple's patent appeared in the case.
Apple claimed a patent with its well known "slide to unlock" screen, which specifies an unlock icon will slide with the gesture . Apple was suing HTC and Motorola over this patent in different courts. Then the Dutch judge decided that the slide-to-unlock patent is obvious, as a result rending the patent invalid.
Samsung provided further information proving the obviousness of the patent. Just not long before Apple filed slide-to-unlock patent, a small Swedish mobile manufacturer Neonode released a smartphone running Windows CE, with slide-to-unlock functionality. The only difference is this Windows CE phone doesn't have the unlock icon but everything else the same.
I personally don't think this patent is proving any novelty simply because it is too obvious to try. Neonode already thought of such way to unlock a device. Thus making a strong case for invalidating the patent. This would be a very good simple example to understand non-obviousness requirement, and why is it an important requirement for a patent.
2014/04/27 updated with video
No comments:
Post a Comment