I think this is a huge win for Apple with all the major companies like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Books and others all using page turn animations, much like iBooks uses. I could see easily in the next few months more licensing deals being made.
Funny you should use them as an example, because there's a lot of interesting history surrounding that, which you can read about here. I'll give you the highlights for a quick skim, but there's a lot more to it:
The patent's importance lies in its claim of a new and useful method of controlling a flying machine, powered or not. The technique of wing-warping is described, but the patent explicitly states that other methods instead of wing-warping could be used for adjusting the outer portions of a machine's wings to different angles on the right and left sides to achieve lateral roll control.
The concept of lateral control was basic to all aircraft designs; without it they could not be easily or safely controlled in flight.[7]
The broad protection intended by this patent succeeded when the Wrights won patent infringement lawsuits against Glenn Curtiss and other early aviators who devised ailerons to emulate lateral control described in the patent and demonstrated by the Wrights in their 1908 public flights. U.S. courts decided that ailerons were also covered by the patent.
[...]
The Wrights' preoccupation with the legal issue hindered their development of new aircraft designs, and by 1911 Wright aircraft were inferior to those made by other firms in Europe.[10] Indeed, aviation development in the U.S. was suppressed to such an extent that when the country entered World War I no acceptable American-designed aircraft were available, and U.S. forces were compelled to use French machines.
In January 1914, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in favor of the Wrights against the Curtiss company, which continued to avoid penalties through legal tactics.
[...]
The patent pool solution
In 1917, the two major patent holders, the Wright Company and the Curtiss Company, had effectively blocked the building of new airplanes, which were desperately needed as the United States was entering World War I. The U.S. government, as a result of a recommendation of a committee formed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, pressured the industry to form a cross-licensing organization (in other terms a Patent pool), the Manufacturer's Aircraft Association.[11][12][13]
This was exactly my point. The patents were overly broad and designed to hinder competition. The overall result was negative for society, not positive. While the Wrights were "first in flight," I have zero confidence that flight wouldn't have been invented without the incentive of a monopoly on flight control.
Writing a double-negative like that forces me to do a double-take when trying to understand you. Or is it a triple-negative?
I'm going to go with, "there were so many inventors, its invention was inevitable" as my interpretation, which I believe is the most correct rendition of the story of flight as I know it.
The point of a patent isn't that it wouldn't have been invented eventually (because that's impossibly hard to demonstrate) but that someone was first to come up with it and it is novel.
> Is there any teaching in the prior art, as a whole, that would, not simply could, have prompted the skilled person, faced with the objective technical problem formulated when considering the technical features not disclosed by the closest prior art, to modify or adapt said closest prior art while taking account of that teaching [the teaching of the prior art, not just the teaching of the closest prior art], thereby arriving at something falling within the terms of the claims, and thus achieving what the invention achieves?
> If the skilled person would have been prompted to modify the closest prior art in such a way as to arrive at something falling within the terms of the claims, then the invention does not involve an inventive step.
It needs to be more than novel, it needs to be a reasonable leap over the existing state of the art. You shouldn't grant someone a 20+ year monopoly over an idea just because they were first to encounter a particular problem and come up with an obvious solution.
Huge win? It will just make them change it. And we'll all be better off for it, frankly - there's few things I loathe more in e-readers than page turn animations that often can't be turned off.
