The United States Patent Office has approved a design patent giving Apple the exclusive right to display page turns digitally. This specifically refers to the mimicking of an actual page turn in iBooks that is triggered when a user swipes or taps near the edge of a page in an e-book.
In case anyone wasn’t sure what turning a page looks like, Apple included three handy illustrations in its patent. The images represent the three stages of virtually turning a page: the first shows the corner of the page being turned slightly, the second shows the page halfway turned, and the last shows the page almost entirely turned over.
Apple filed the page turn patent back in December 2011, but it wasn’t approved until this week. This isn’t the first time Apple has filed a patent to claim ownership over seemingly obvious things. The company has been granted a patent for the musical note icon that symbolizes iTunes and the glass staircase found in its stores, according to the New York Times.
The page turn trademark is just one of many patents Apple has been granted this week alone. The United States Patent Office granted 38 other patents to the Cupertino, Calif.-based company, including a “Skin tone aware color boost for cameras, “Location-based categorical information services,” and a “Consistent backup of electronic information.”
What’s more interesting is that neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble have previously patented a page turn feature for their e-readers. The Kindle and Nook played a huge role in making e-readers a commercial commodity, giving users a way to read content electronically on-the-go before the age of tablets.
Apple has been locked in a seemingly endless debacle with one of its biggest rivals, Samsung, concerning patens and ownership rights. A judge in San Jose, Calif. just granted Apple permission to target Samsung’s Galaxy Note, Galaxy S3, and the Jelly Bean operating system in the lawsuit, while also approving Samsung to cite allegations against Apple’s iPhone 5.
Simply pathetic. Us, for allowing this garbage, and Apple for thinking they must patent existence. Page turns in software has been around LONG before they filed for a patent. This is simply a pathetic company seeking to eek every penny and ounce of control out of those around them. If Jobs was around, I’m sure he would claim to have innovated page turns and his Faniots would tout him the Savior of the computing world.
The first company to do a digital page turn was Ampex back in 1981. The Ampex Digital Optics (ADO) video effects system preformed many slick transform and was used in broadcast television. And by the way, Apple sucked back then too!
Quite agee with the other comments on Apple, but for me at least half the problem lies with the US Patent Office, since it is granting patents for these ridiculous claims. It would be interesting to see exactly what is being patented, since on face value most of these grants seem to go against the very principles of patents, which require the ‘invention’ to be non-obvious and there being ‘no prior art’.
Unless the filings are so specific as to be useless, those filters would immediately rule out almost all of the examples cited in the article (and also the ridiculous ‘rectangle with rounded corners’!), but instead the US Patent Office seems to be granting them because (a) no-one else has filed for the bleeding obvious, and (b) they’re scared of Apple.
We need more level-headed judges (eg UK’s Colin Birss) to start publicly exposing these idiots for what they are!
Apple certainly is going rotten. Why the hell would the US grant a patent like this? It’s not doing anything else but hindering innovation by other companies. Apple needs to die a quick death and the best way to do this is stop buying their crap, kill the markets, stop them making money of stuff they don’t even invent for gods sake …
It sure is a mad mad world.. when patents like these are approved.
Without a doubt, there is prior art. I remember this digital animation feature in old DOS games. Kyrandia, King’s Quest and Zork just to name a few