Among the Apple patents that Samsung was found to be so grievously breaching was the one about bounce back in list scrolling. That's patent 7469381 for those who like to keep score at home. Not only is it one that Samsung has been breaching it's one that's going to be very hard indeed to design around.
Which is what makes this from LawPundit so interesting I think:
The essential principle of bounce-back scrolling becomes obvious if you play the famed Atari game PONG which was virtually "the first game" in the early days of the computer and you can still play it online here.
Whenever the ball hits the paddle, that is a "bounce-back" and if it does not hit the paddle, there is no "bounce-back". Apple has essentially stolen this PONG bounce-back invention for the basics of its scrolling patent 7469381, as we see from the court decision in Cupertino, to the tune of $1 Billion.
Now, THAT is professional theft.
Now, of course I do not endorse this accusation of professional theft. I also don't quite agree that bounce back is quite that simple. For of course we have the entire patent system of the United States of America telling us that the two are absolutely not the same thing. Bounce back in Pong is completely different from bounce back in list scrolling. Must be, otherwise no one could have a patent valid in 2012 for something that has been around since 1972. Well, unless the US patent system was definitively and entirely broken and it's impossible to conceive of all those bright people in government using all our money to achieve something as ridiculous as that, isn't it?
But let us just step over to that alternative world where this assertion is true, where bounce back is bounce back. How could Apple have got hold of it?
Hmm, so, where did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak first work together? Oh, yes, that's right, isn't it? When they adapted Pong from a multi-user game into a single user one called "Breakout". That was work they did for Atari, wasn't it?
Hmm. How different that alternative reality is from the one that we live in. How much smaller the world of ideas about smartphones is. How much more prior art there is over there than there is here.
And where was it Steve Jobs was working when this bounce back patent was granted to Apple? He wasn't at Atari any more, was he?
