Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Apple have a huge number of such design style patents because, to be fair, they spend a huge amount of time and money on little design touches.
The way you can drag a page so it scrolls too far, exposing the grey background, and then bounces back? Apple have a patent on that.
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I've no problem with praising Apple for their styling and the brilliance of their aesthetics, but patenting elements of it?
It takes an artist to put disparate elements together and come up with a pleasing whole, but the palette shouldn't be patentable.
As your example illustrates, by allowing patents in this area you can't know where to draw a reasonable line. The bounce-back is clever, built of multiple elements, and an innovative way of providing feedback when you've gone too far, but hiding a position marker when you no longer need it? At the most that should just engender a polite round of applause. It's too restrictive otherwise. Patent law is intended to foster, rather than stifle innovation.
Graham