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Apple Granted “iPhone Patent” for Multitouch Gestures on Touchscreen Device
iPodObserver — Apple has been granted a patent covering multitouch gestures on a touchscreen device. This patent, number 7,479,949 , has long been watched, and as noted by our friends at MacRumors.com , it has often been called "The iPhone Patent," due to the fact that it governs much of what makes the iPhone an iPhone. The patent was awarded on January 20th, 2009, and filed for on April 11th, 2008. The abstract for the patent notes that it is a method for, "detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command." Apple COO and acting CEO Tim Cook recently put iPhone competitors on notice that Apple would vigorously ...

Apple awarded key "multi-touch" patent covering the iPhone
AppleInsider — ... Published: 09:00 PM EST Apple last week was awarded a monstrous 358-page patent covering the touch screen, graphical user interface, and methods that combine to define the iPhone user experience. Dating back to September of 2007 and granted last Tuesday, U.S. Patent No. 7479949  lists many inventors; notably, Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs, iPhone software director Scott Forstall, and FingerWorks co-founder Wayne Westerman.  (FingerWorks was responsible for gadgets with an opaque surface that could respond to gesture controls before being acquired by Apple to ...

Apple win the patent for the MultiTouch
HardMac.com — ... competitors make something that looks like its telephone. We have never appreciated the principle of software patent, and we do not this time even though Apple is the winner. This patent is likely to slow down considerably all the remainder of the electronics industry concerning this technology. Thus, new mobiles coupled to touch screen computers or the concept Surfaces of Microsoft will suffer. If you have the desire to explore these pages of sketches and text: http://patft.uspto.gov [translation by crispin] ...

Apple Awarded Patent on Palm Pre Gesture Area?
Digital Daily — We like competition, as long as they don’t rip off our IP, and if they do, we’re going to go after anybody that does….We will not stand for having our IP ripped off and we’ll use whatever weapons we have at our disposal [to make sure that doesn't happen]. I don’t know that I can be more clear than that.” — Apple COO Tim Cook’s on the company’s iPhone intellectual property Turns out that when Apple COO Tim Cook said the company would use “whatever weapons we have at our disposal” to pursue anyone who “rips off” Apple’s iPhone intellectual property, he had a very specific weapon in mind: United States Patent #7,479,949. Awarded just days before Cook made that ...

Apple Gets Multi-Touch Patent, Palm Screwed? (PALM)
Silicon Alley Insider — ... Specifically, the U.S. Patent Office approved Apple's patent number 7,479,949 on Jan. 20, which seems to include many of the multi-touch controls present in Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. ...

Apple Gives iLife, Gets Papermaster
Apple Watch — ... The company also updated the iLife Media Browser. These are date-stamped Jan. 26, but I (and pretty much everybody else) saw them today, Jan. 27. Apple also released the 2.2.1 update for the iPhone, which I will install and test later today. I'm using a Nokia N96 as my day-to-day mobile phone, but I've got an iPhone 3G for testing, particularly of the App Store. They say people who give, receive back. As widely reported today, Apple received a patent for multitouch screens. Apple received a little something else, today, too: a victory ...

Apple wins comprehensive patent for iPhone, bares teeth at Palm
The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) — Filed under: Apple Corporate, Odds and ends, iPhone The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Apple patent number 7,479,949 covering key aspects of the iPhone's multi-touch user interface. The filing, with 358 pages of drawings and Steve Jobs as its first author, comprehensively describes the iPhone operating system's interface, and how hardware on the phone interprets finger movements and taps as instructions for the software. The filing makes liberal use of the word "heuristics" -- a trial-and-error-based engineering technique that reduces the calculations necessary to arrive at a solution to a problem. Heuristics may not always be correct, but good heuristics result in something at least close to the right ...

One Multi-Touch Screen to Rule Them All
Mac|Life all RSS Feed — touch This week Apple was awarded patent U.S No. 7479949. The patent for the mult-touch screen was originally filed back in September of 2007. The patent lists a number of inventors on it, the most famous being, Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall (iPhone software director), and Wayne Westerman (co-founder of FingerWorks, the Company responsible for the inspiration of the iPhone's multi touch.) The patent is an overview of all the fancy Apple tech that has gone into the iPhone. In the patent, Apple has claimed coverage of the entire way you navigate with it; including gestures that are used for pinch-zoom, and the software the devices runs on. Things such as finger swipe and the two-thumb twist are also mentioned on the patent. Apple being awarded the patent will ...

Dissecting Apple's "Multitouch" Patent: Can It Stop Palm? [Patent Wars]
Gizmodo — ... The patent we're referring to is #7,479,949, awarded on January 20 of this year. It has a list of 20 claims but as Prof. Wagner showed us, out of the 20, 17 are "dependent," which means they drill down more specifically into features of the invention/interface/device described in their parent claim. In our quick Patent Law 101 with Professor Wagner, we learned that to legally infringe upon a patent, you need to violate an entire independent claim, which means, if you rip off one of its dependents, you're OK, you just can't rip off all of them all together. ...