Now’s a pretty good time to be a lawyer representing a major smartphone manufacturer. The patent applications and lawsuits are flying fast and furiously between companies, and it certainly doesn’t seem as though it’s going to stop any time soon.
Check out the latest patent awarded to Apple. Here’s one that certainly has the potential to stir things up in the industry. In 2006, the company filed for a patent on pinch-to-zoom for multi-touch screens–a nearly ubiquitous feature in today’s touchscreen smartphones.
So, what does the awarding of patent #7,812,826 mean for, say Android or Palm? Well, it’s not great, of course, but it’s not as concrete as Apple owning pinch-to-zoom outright. Engadget’s Nilay Patel, as usual, has a pretty good breakdown of the what this whole thing means,
Apple doesn’t have a patent on “pinch-to-zoom” generally, but rather pinching to zoom, and then pinching to zoom again within some fixed period of time. How long that period lasts is totally up in the air, but it has to be defined somewhere — this patent doesn’t really apply unless there’s a clock running and a second gesture takes place.
That said, this could be a sign of bigger patents to come.
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