Contested iOS features apparently existed before Apple marketed them

Aug 14, 2012 08:30 GMT  ·  By

Another episode has elapsed in the legal drama that is the Apple vs. Samsung patent war, and Samsung has taken the reins for once, providing a good argument for why Apple's patent infringement claims have no grounds.

One of the patents that Apple accused Samsung of having infringed is the one that describes the bounce-back effect in menus.

This effect allows one to drag a menu bar lower or higher than the “limit” (showing “empty space” beyond) but bounces it back into place when the finger is removed.

In its quest to prove that Apple's “innovations” are invalid, Samsung brought to attention the DiamondTouch Table, a projection-based touchscreen surface developed in 2001.

Fractal Zoom is one of its major software features, allowing more than one finger to manipulate images.

Tablecloth is the other one. It allows users to pull an image down in a window, revealing a duplicate right above it. Letting go snaps the image back to where it was, much the same way the Apple bounce-back effect does.

Adam Bogue, president of Circle 12, was Samsung's witness here. While showing the images, he mentioned that DiamondTouch was easy to access in the MERL lobby, so anyone from Apple could have seen it. He even says that he gave a demonstration to Apple in 2003.

The only dent in Samsung's argument came when Apple's counsel Michael Jacobs questioned Bogue and got him to reveal that the device had been taken to Apple before Fractal Zoom was developed.

That an early model of DiamondTouch was sold to Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan (Samsung legal representative firm) was just ordinary attorney posturing. It is not as though a law firm needs more of an incentive to represent its client to the best of its ability, so we aren't sure where Jacobs was going with that remark.

There was a second technology that Samsung brought to the fore: Benjamin Bederson's LaunchTile system, which divided a screen into a tile-based UI and allowed swiping from screen to screen. If the user didn't “pull” a window enough, it bounced back into place, much like Apple's menus “snap” back.

The jury may or may not share the opinion of Apple's counsel, who said that the function was the opposite of Apple's technology and that, since the LaunchTile didn't show empty space, it wasn't the same thing.