I remember working at an office building and the company on the floor above us won a big patent suit against Microsoft. We didn't see them at the office after that. I assumed they just stopped working and lived off the money.
The thing that is patentable isn't "a vibration". It's the exact, specific means through which you produce that vibration.
We've gone from completely dumb eccentric rotating mass vibration to trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking, or the Ice Cubes demo in in Nintendo's 1-2-Switch[0], both of which use linear resonant actuators. Those actuators are themselves a complex enough piece of technology to warrant a patent, and the techniques to simulate the feel or real physical objects using those actuators are pretty damn non-trivial as well.
As a general rule, I find that the patent system is problematic but, within the scope of the system as it exists today, these are perfectly reasonable things to patent.
It's literally a voice coil with a mass on it. Literally anyone who has ever played with a solenoid, and hooked it up to a speaker, has made one. I did it when I was a kid, decades ago, and watched it vibrate on the table and in my hand. When I tried the first haptic thing I knew exactly how they did it. It's so incredibly obvious I don't understand how it's even patentable, with all the prior "make thing vibrate with electromagnet" work.
It's not really "high tech", it's just tuned well, with some high power for the size.
> trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking
Like my Mac's trackpad ? Can someone ELI5 how it works ? It's gotta be magic-adjacent cos when the machine locks up, the trackpad is deader than a doornail.
It's the same technique of the "3D touch" the iPhone 6S had, though that was discontinued. Capacitive sensors measure microscopic changes in the glass, as it slightly flexes when you press it. Then a haptic motor does a little kick to simulate the feel of it being pressed down.
They've been doing this since 2015 or so. Prior Macs didn't click on the top 1/4 of the trackpad, because there was basically a "hinge" there and the glass would actually press on a physical button.
no, it sends a large “click” across the whole surface which your finger registers as a local click, they have two large and two small haptic motors in a line iirc and they do some software magic to cancel out the click so it feels extremely localised.
Fun fact, the other thing that can cause this is a Bluetooth mouse in a backpack that is being clicked continuously. Confused me to no end for fifteen minutes.
That little buzz feels like a click on my Air's trackpad and like a tap on my iPhone's keyboard. Any other vibration thingy I came across feels like a vibration thingy, not like a click, not a tap.
As nobody else seems to care or is able to build the same, maybe it is worth a dollar or two. Though 5.7B is a bit much.
Apple has sold over 3 billion iPhones and 4.5 billion iPhones, iPads, and iPods together.
$5.7B seems low if every one of those devices infringes.
If it’s iPhone 6s and later and all watches (for taptic input), that’s around 2 1/3 billion phones and 1/3 billion watches, so even just $2/device gets you into that range.
Why do people cry foul like they've lost a limb when OpenAI steals Apple IP, but then shirk away from condemning Apple stealing Taction or Masimo's IP?
The community has to pick a lane. Either IP theft is good and promotes competition, or IP theft is bad and we have to apply the law equally.
A civil dispute over patent details (which is basically business as usual in technology) is not the same thing as orchestrating a criminal corporate espionage ring to exfiltrate inside information.
One is arguing over the legal application of publicly filed information, the other is literal espionage, which not only impacts non-public trade secrets and insider (i.e. stock implications) information, but also raises questions about external agents secretly making actions that could undermine operations.
Nobody goes to prison for patent infringement, but you absolutely can for the latter.
I need more details which the article doesn't provide but I'm pretty sure vibration is common knowledge and what could the design possibly done that was so patentable
That’s like saying light is common knowledge, creating a device that emits light couldn’t possibly be patentable. Or heat is common knowledge, induction stoves shouldn’t be patentable. Like if that’s your threshold then nothing is patentable
Like the parent wrote: one “patent” is a miniature vibrator, something like those found in cheap sex toys, the other consists of poaching people working on the frontiers of knowledge, corrupting them to steal such unique ideas for money.
Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source, the right to have someone change/fix it for you, and the right to share your changes/fixes under a right-to-repair umbrella. Maybe retain a limited (e.g. ~5 year) distribution monopoly on the original (so you could distribute patches but not the full thing).
Source is less important with LLMs now, but it's wasteful and destructive to the planet to have everyone need to use them to reverse engineer things for no reason.
An economy built around not making knowledge prolific is obviously a bad, inefficient idea, and in the end will be our downfall.
> Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source,
That would infringe upon my freedom as a creator of software. No thanks.
FWIW, I think it was determined that the patent violation here was not 'willful'.
That said, we are talking about patents here, which are sometimes their own minefield of bullshit.
For example, Having to deal with a jury that may or may not be able to discern (Especially how a patent is written nowadays) versus an alternative but non-infringing design that accomplishes the same thing, and/or being able to properly discern similarly alternative 'prior art' from before the patent existed.
I don't know how guilty Apple is, or isn't, to be clear, but I remember how close to 25-ish years ago, a paintball company named Smart Parts managed to snatch up certain patents and then bully most of the industry into either paying them royalties or ceasing manufacture of electronic paintball markers, even despite the presence of prior art [0] and in many cases a very different fundamental design [1].
Or, as another curiosity, the whole thing where Doom 3 only got EAX support to keep Creative Labs happy, about them holding a patent on Z-Fail that Carmack didn't know about when he independently discovered it. And hell, the irony is, the technique is still instead known as 'Carmack's Reverse'.
Or, I remember the time I was at a company and I got to sign patent rights away for a dollar. The overall concept was so vague, I had to cringe in every meeting around describing the so-called 'novelty'.
tl;dr - patent 'infringement' is a murky field, and certainly different from hoovering up material protected by copyright, regardless of your opinions on current copyright laws (I do think they are way way way too long, also I think patent law has changed for the worse in the last 20-ish years.)
[0] - Specifically, there was a patent for a US Navy 'Pneumatic machine gun with photo cell interrupted circuit' that was actually listed as a prior art citation on the Smart Parts Patent, but most of the companies that were truly non-infringing were also too small to have the cash to fight in court.
[1] - The original Smart Parts markers used a mechanical/electrical switch, board controlled air valve to move bolts and hammers back and forth, but they would even go after manufacturers that used a mechanical solenoid and hall effect sensor to do the trigger pull. i.e. Smart Parts markers were designed for electronic valves from the start, whereas many of the other manufacturers pursued, the 'electronic' upgrade was just a different Grip and trigger setup.
Can I get a patent? On faster than light drive or blood Pulse_oximetry an idea first conceived in the (1840’s). The first useful invention that you could hold in your hand was created by a German scientist in the 1930s.
Apple still lost the American lawsuit however, but because of all the prior work in Japan, Germany and Britain from the early 1900’s the American patents have no standing in the rest of the world.
I'm interested in reading more information as it comes out, but a lot of the comments claiming it's "just vibrations" are being a bit reductionist. These devices are controlled by complex algorithms, and they take a lot of time and money to create. Why shouldn't this company enjoy the same IP protections that Apple enjoys on their work?
> Why shouldn't this company enjoy the same IP protections that Apple enjoys on their work?
I think they do, but the company themselves found Apple didn't infringe, and then the court agreed. somehow it got appealed and then the appeals jury said they did not willfully infringe, so ... $5.7 billion?
My issue with stuff like this is their work is not worth $6 billion dollars. Yes it takes time to develop this stuff but it isn't ground-breaking work and isn't especially novel. A room of experienced engineers, given the same constraints, would likely be able to come to the same design conclusions without much time or expense. Patents in general have this problem. A lot of it is a race to patent as much obvious and fringe-not-immediately-useful-today stuff as possible and it unfortunately works a lot of the time.
Such a ridiculous take. Of course a room full of engineers can probably come up with a solution.
But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
What got them in the same room in the first place was them being the only group of people (most likely) working on a specific piece of enabling technology that they believed would be rewarded by the market and adoption AND they needed to make a living in the mean time (getting paid to do that work.)
A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with to allow said group / company to invest the time and money in advance to making that technology and wants to risk/trade 20 future years to collect profit on the work they do now.
> But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
The interest in a shared problem and the passion to solve it?
> A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with
I think that’s a bold claim in the face of the numerous contributions from e.g. universities, open source communities, single-person projects, etc that have pushed the world forward. We simply do not know a world free of the oppression of patents, the institution sustains itself.
> If you don’t like the game, get better at it.
I don’t think people will be playing this game much longer in the face of generative AI, unless ofc the ruling classes succeed in locking down access to that tech, gobally.
But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
If whoever happens to need the technology first is almost certain to invent it, it's not worth $6B. The idea behind patents is supposed to be disclosing things that people wouldn't otherwise come up with on their own.
Not saying that's true here, but it's certainly true for a lot of patents. (Variable-speed windshield wipers deserved a government-enforced monopoly? Really?)
from the article, Taction themselves agreed Apple's tech was different :
"Apple's Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction's technology, which Taction's own testing of Apple's products confirmed during trial," Apple said in response
Yeah it's a weird case. First time, Taction agrees Apple didn't infringe. Apple found not infringing. Then why appeal? Taction's lawyer not happy? Hard to tell from teh article.
The patent claims the jury found were infringed:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10659885B2/en?oq=us10659... claims 17 and 19
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10820117B2/en?oq=us10820... claim 16
I remember working at an office building and the company on the floor above us won a big patent suit against Microsoft. We didn't see them at the office after that. I assumed they just stopped working and lived off the money.
Wow, that's a lot of money for a little buzz. I mean what could possibly be such sacred knowledge that a vibration could even be patentable.
You spin a unbalanced thing in a circle and it creates a vibration. Make it less unbalanced and you get a smoother vibration.
The thing that is patentable isn't "a vibration". It's the exact, specific means through which you produce that vibration.
We've gone from completely dumb eccentric rotating mass vibration to trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking, or the Ice Cubes demo in in Nintendo's 1-2-Switch[0], both of which use linear resonant actuators. Those actuators are themselves a complex enough piece of technology to warrant a patent, and the techniques to simulate the feel or real physical objects using those actuators are pretty damn non-trivial as well.
As a general rule, I find that the patent system is problematic but, within the scope of the system as it exists today, these are perfectly reasonable things to patent.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtlqvVfk1-Q
It's literally a voice coil with a mass on it. Literally anyone who has ever played with a solenoid, and hooked it up to a speaker, has made one. I did it when I was a kid, decades ago, and watched it vibrate on the table and in my hand. When I tried the first haptic thing I knew exactly how they did it. It's so incredibly obvious I don't understand how it's even patentable, with all the prior "make thing vibrate with electromagnet" work.
It's not really "high tech", it's just tuned well, with some high power for the size.
> trackpads that you'd swear are actually physically clicking
Like my Mac's trackpad ? Can someone ELI5 how it works ? It's gotta be magic-adjacent cos when the machine locks up, the trackpad is deader than a doornail.
It's the same technique of the "3D touch" the iPhone 6S had, though that was discontinued. Capacitive sensors measure microscopic changes in the glass, as it slightly flexes when you press it. Then a haptic motor does a little kick to simulate the feel of it being pressed down.
They've been doing this since 2015 or so. Prior Macs didn't click on the top 1/4 of the trackpad, because there was basically a "hinge" there and the glass would actually press on a physical button.
So there's a big big matrix of tiny tiny motors under the trackpad ?
no, it sends a large “click” across the whole surface which your finger registers as a local click, they have two large and two small haptic motors in a line iirc and they do some software magic to cancel out the click so it feels extremely localised.
Fun fact, the other thing that can cause this is a Bluetooth mouse in a backpack that is being clicked continuously. Confused me to no end for fifteen minutes.
Have noticed exactly this behavior as well, it's one of the better indicators actually the system ain't coming back.
That little buzz feels like a click on my Air's trackpad and like a tap on my iPhone's keyboard. Any other vibration thingy I came across feels like a vibration thingy, not like a click, not a tap.
As nobody else seems to care or is able to build the same, maybe it is worth a dollar or two. Though 5.7B is a bit much.
A dollar or two? Per device that infringes?
Apple has sold over 3 billion iPhones and 4.5 billion iPhones, iPads, and iPods together.
$5.7B seems low if every one of those devices infringes.
If it’s iPhone 6s and later and all watches (for taptic input), that’s around 2 1/3 billion phones and 1/3 billion watches, so even just $2/device gets you into that range.
Also the pencils, magic keyboards, magic trackpads…
iPads and iPods don’t infringe because they’ve never had any kind of haptic feedback.
i assume this matter was discussed
Why do people cry foul like they've lost a limb when OpenAI steals Apple IP, but then shirk away from condemning Apple stealing Taction or Masimo's IP?
The community has to pick a lane. Either IP theft is good and promotes competition, or IP theft is bad and we have to apply the law equally.
A civil dispute over patent details (which is basically business as usual in technology) is not the same thing as orchestrating a criminal corporate espionage ring to exfiltrate inside information.
One is arguing over the legal application of publicly filed information, the other is literal espionage, which not only impacts non-public trade secrets and insider (i.e. stock implications) information, but also raises questions about external agents secretly making actions that could undermine operations.
Nobody goes to prison for patent infringement, but you absolutely can for the latter.
> The community has to pick a lane.
There isn’t one mind. We are unique individuals with different opinions. Opinions of an individual can even be contradictory!
I need more details which the article doesn't provide but I'm pretty sure vibration is common knowledge and what could the design possibly done that was so patentable
That’s like saying light is common knowledge, creating a device that emits light couldn’t possibly be patentable. Or heat is common knowledge, induction stoves shouldn’t be patentable. Like if that’s your threshold then nothing is patentable
Vibration might be, but the Taptic Engine is differentiated and trademarked as Apple's own unique feature: https://uspto.report/TM/86543432
Like the parent wrote: one “patent” is a miniature vibrator, something like those found in cheap sex toys, the other consists of poaching people working on the frontiers of knowledge, corrupting them to steal such unique ideas for money.
Tell me you’re not so thick
> one “patent” is a miniature vibrator, something like those found in cheap sex toys
I'm no expert but they use completely different technologies. Apple's Taptic Engine is not just a motor spinning an off balance weight like massagers.
Goomba fallacy, they're not the same people
The whole patent system sucks. It has nothing to do with reality.
The aspect of "you are granted a monopoly on a technology for a period of time" is something that is especially bad.
Before patents, scientists wouldn't share their findings. Patents are an excellent way of making things public domain 20 years later.
We should have the same with software.
Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source, the right to have someone change/fix it for you, and the right to share your changes/fixes under a right-to-repair umbrella. Maybe retain a limited (e.g. ~5 year) distribution monopoly on the original (so you could distribute patches but not the full thing).
Source is less important with LLMs now, but it's wasteful and destructive to the planet to have everyone need to use them to reverse engineer things for no reason.
An economy built around not making knowledge prolific is obviously a bad, inefficient idea, and in the end will be our downfall.
> Or just don't protect trade secrets (the entire point of patents is that trade secrets are harmful to society), and require all software to come with source,
That would infringe upon my freedom as a creator of software. No thanks.
So you're saying you strongly support software patents?
Why? Open source is doing fine.
Instead of patents, the government could just pay scientists who make useful things. Sure it costs government money, but so do the lawsuits.
FWIW, I think it was determined that the patent violation here was not 'willful'.
That said, we are talking about patents here, which are sometimes their own minefield of bullshit.
For example, Having to deal with a jury that may or may not be able to discern (Especially how a patent is written nowadays) versus an alternative but non-infringing design that accomplishes the same thing, and/or being able to properly discern similarly alternative 'prior art' from before the patent existed.
I don't know how guilty Apple is, or isn't, to be clear, but I remember how close to 25-ish years ago, a paintball company named Smart Parts managed to snatch up certain patents and then bully most of the industry into either paying them royalties or ceasing manufacture of electronic paintball markers, even despite the presence of prior art [0] and in many cases a very different fundamental design [1].
Or, as another curiosity, the whole thing where Doom 3 only got EAX support to keep Creative Labs happy, about them holding a patent on Z-Fail that Carmack didn't know about when he independently discovered it. And hell, the irony is, the technique is still instead known as 'Carmack's Reverse'.
Or, I remember the time I was at a company and I got to sign patent rights away for a dollar. The overall concept was so vague, I had to cringe in every meeting around describing the so-called 'novelty'.
tl;dr - patent 'infringement' is a murky field, and certainly different from hoovering up material protected by copyright, regardless of your opinions on current copyright laws (I do think they are way way way too long, also I think patent law has changed for the worse in the last 20-ish years.)
[0] - Specifically, there was a patent for a US Navy 'Pneumatic machine gun with photo cell interrupted circuit' that was actually listed as a prior art citation on the Smart Parts Patent, but most of the companies that were truly non-infringing were also too small to have the cash to fight in court.
[1] - The original Smart Parts markers used a mechanical/electrical switch, board controlled air valve to move bolts and hammers back and forth, but they would even go after manufacturers that used a mechanical solenoid and hall effect sensor to do the trigger pull. i.e. Smart Parts markers were designed for electronic valves from the start, whereas many of the other manufacturers pursued, the 'electronic' upgrade was just a different Grip and trigger setup.
Can I get a patent? On faster than light drive or blood Pulse_oximetry an idea first conceived in the (1840’s). The first useful invention that you could hold in your hand was created by a German scientist in the 1930s.
Apple still lost the American lawsuit however, but because of all the prior work in Japan, Germany and Britain from the early 1900’s the American patents have no standing in the rest of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry
I'm interested in reading more information as it comes out, but a lot of the comments claiming it's "just vibrations" are being a bit reductionist. These devices are controlled by complex algorithms, and they take a lot of time and money to create. Why shouldn't this company enjoy the same IP protections that Apple enjoys on their work?
> Why shouldn't this company enjoy the same IP protections that Apple enjoys on their work?
I think they do, but the company themselves found Apple didn't infringe, and then the court agreed. somehow it got appealed and then the appeals jury said they did not willfully infringe, so ... $5.7 billion?
Something is way weirder than usual in this case
My issue with stuff like this is their work is not worth $6 billion dollars. Yes it takes time to develop this stuff but it isn't ground-breaking work and isn't especially novel. A room of experienced engineers, given the same constraints, would likely be able to come to the same design conclusions without much time or expense. Patents in general have this problem. A lot of it is a race to patent as much obvious and fringe-not-immediately-useful-today stuff as possible and it unfortunately works a lot of the time.
Such a ridiculous take. Of course a room full of engineers can probably come up with a solution.
But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
What got them in the same room in the first place was them being the only group of people (most likely) working on a specific piece of enabling technology that they believed would be rewarded by the market and adoption AND they needed to make a living in the mean time (getting paid to do that work.)
A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with to allow said group / company to invest the time and money in advance to making that technology and wants to risk/trade 20 future years to collect profit on the work they do now.
If you don’t like the game, get better at it.
> But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
The interest in a shared problem and the passion to solve it?
> A patent is the best thing we’ve collectively come up with
I think that’s a bold claim in the face of the numerous contributions from e.g. universities, open source communities, single-person projects, etc that have pushed the world forward. We simply do not know a world free of the oppression of patents, the institution sustains itself.
> If you don’t like the game, get better at it.
I don’t think people will be playing this game much longer in the face of generative AI, unless ofc the ruling classes succeed in locking down access to that tech, gobally.
But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?
If whoever happens to need the technology first is almost certain to invent it, it's not worth $6B. The idea behind patents is supposed to be disclosing things that people wouldn't otherwise come up with on their own.
Not saying that's true here, but it's certainly true for a lot of patents. (Variable-speed windshield wipers deserved a government-enforced monopoly? Really?)
from the article, Taction themselves agreed Apple's tech was different :
"Apple's Taptic Engine is fundamentally different from Taction's technology, which Taction's own testing of Apple's products confirmed during trial," Apple said in response
Yeah but they claim it still infringes on the patent and the jury accepted Taction’s infringement case. Im curious of the outcome in the end.
Yeah it's a weird case. First time, Taction agrees Apple didn't infringe. Apple found not infringing. Then why appeal? Taction's lawyer not happy? Hard to tell from teh article.
Just because apple provides a (likely) self-serving statement, doesn't mean it is accurate. Evidently the jury found it to not be convincing
The jury found Apple innocent the first time, when Taction agreed not the same technology.
So the article doesn't explain why it was appealed, then found shady on appeal.
it's a weird article, worth reading.
Chatbot says (so take it for what it’s worth) the first time the judge threw it out.
Appeals said that was inappropriately based on narrowing the claim too far and excluding expert testimony.
Second time a jury heard the whole thing, and found Apple infringed.
Also, “The jury did not find the infringement willful. Apple said it will appeal.”
useful info though. i guess we'll see eventually.
While consumer related payouts are way lower.
https://www.enzuzo.com/blog/data-privacy-lawsuits
https://openclassactions.com/news/apple-siri-settlement-paym...
That’s not chump change, even if it’s ~1.5% of Apple’s yearly revenue…
I wonder what it’ll be like after appeal.