- It's a good thing that Apple acquires smaller companies for their technology/patents instead of building around them, sure. This is an economic calculation that Apple made that turned out well for those companies.
- It's not a good thing that any companies possess patents sufficiently broad to cover most of an idea, instead of a specific implementation.
- It's not a good thing that companies possess patents for which apparent prior art exists, or which are obvious, as seems to be shown by Buxton's page. (The patent office's definition of "obvious" is that the implementation can be created by combining two or more existing patents or pieces of prior art - which are demonstrated on the page.)
- It's not a good thing that companies possessing such patents sue other companies for infringing them, in the sense that it sets off a patent war and makes everyone more concerned about protecting themselves by trying to acquire patents on anything possible. I think this can lead to a chilling effect on competition and innovation in the software market.
I don't know what Samsung would have done if the technology it wanted was under patent by small acquirable companies, but that's a hypothetical, because the point of this page is that the patent in question should perhaps not have been granted in the first place.
If researchers were making multi-touch interfaces on touchscreens a decade or two earlier, and even displaying scaling functionality in their demos, then clearly an idea was 'plundered' from the public domain and privatised with the issuing of this patent.
- It's a good thing that Apple acquires smaller companies for their technology/patents instead of building around them, sure. This is an economic calculation that Apple made that turned out well for those companies.
- It's not a good thing that any companies possess patents sufficiently broad to cover most of an idea, instead of a specific implementation.
- It's not a good thing that companies possess patents for which apparent prior art exists, or which are obvious, as seems to be shown by Buxton's page. (The patent office's definition of "obvious" is that the implementation can be created by combining two or more existing patents or pieces of prior art - which are demonstrated on the page.)
- It's not a good thing that companies possessing such patents sue other companies for infringing them, in the sense that it sets off a patent war and makes everyone more concerned about protecting themselves by trying to acquire patents on anything possible. I think this can lead to a chilling effect on competition and innovation in the software market.
I don't know what Samsung would have done if the technology it wanted was under patent by small acquirable companies, but that's a hypothetical, because the point of this page is that the patent in question should perhaps not have been granted in the first place.
If researchers were making multi-touch interfaces on touchscreens a decade or two earlier, and even displaying scaling functionality in their demos, then clearly an idea was 'plundered' from the public domain and privatised with the issuing of this patent.