The US Patent Office announces that Key Apple Patent against Samsung is Valid, Reversing their Initial Decision
Late last year Samsung fans and their respective fan sites went ballistic claiming that Apple's key patents found in their case against Samsung were found to be invalid. Many in the mainstream press ate it all up and it made headlines everywhere. Even many Apple fans began to shout that patents seemed to be worthless. At that point Patently Apple decided to step in with a report titled Cries of Apple's Patents Being Found Invalid a Nice Pipe Dream." We provided historical statistics proving that reversals of patents deemed invalid were common. Today, the US Patent and Trademark Office announced their official reversal, with Apple's patents being valid. Samsung may have maneuvered the press to give them a momentary victory over Apple, but in the end, Samsung is the loser, plain and simple, and the patent system has validated Apple's Intellectual Property.
The U.S. Patent Office has confirmed four claims of Apple's overscroll bounce patent, including claim 19, according to a document filed with a federal court on Thursday. That claim played a crucial part in Apple's $1.05 billion lawsuit against Samsung.
Apple's "list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touchscreen display" patent describes a way to scroll past a document's border. When a user reaches the edge and stops scrolling, the screen bounces back to the nearest display area.
The most important claim in the patent is claim 19. During the Apple/Samsung billion-dollar patent trial, the jury found that 21 products infringed claim 19, and the jury awarded damages regarding 18 of these products. The Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab, Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Wi-Fi), the Droid Charge and the Nexus S 4G were among the infringing devices.
While the patent office rejected claim 19 of the patent in a decision called a "Final Office Action" in April, it has informed Apple that it intends to reverse that decision, a document filed by Apple with the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division, showed.
"In short, claims 14, 17, 18 and 19 are confirmed," the patent office's primary examiner Dennis G. Bonshock stated in the document. Claims 14, 17 and 18 were also confirmed in the Final Office Action in April.
In April, the USPTO found that several claims in Apple's overscroll bounce patent, including claim 19, were anticipated by a patent that describes how to control content in a display invented by Luigi Lira.
Today we learn from the US Patent and Trademark Office that "Claim 19 is Confirmed, as there is no prior art disclosure of a similar device with 'programs including instructions for translating the electronic document in a second direction until the area beyond the edge of the electronic document is no longer displayed to display a fourth portion of the electronic document, wherein the fourth portion is different from the first portion, in response to detecting that the object is no longer on or near the touch screen display."
Samsung fans got a brief moment to cheer on their company but now must face the music that it was all a pipe dream in the end.
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