Apple has filed a patent and smartphone and tablet manufacturers might start paying: multitouch technology could become “Apple’s thing”.
Apple has filed a patent related to multitouch: the news should not cause an uproar, as many patents are filed every day worldwide.
It is not even about something new and revolutionary (at least, no longer revolutionary) since it concerns a patent on the now widespread technology multitouch.
Yet for a few hours there has been a lot of excitement around this formality between the bureaucratic and industrial because Apple – if everything is confirmed – could earn a real fortune without doing much.
The Cupertino company has indeed filed a definition of multitouch so vague and generic that, in fact, it would encompass and include practically all types of screens currently used by any manufacturer of smartphones, tablets and the like.
The weapon is double-edged: if the patent were accepted as filed, any company in the sector would find itself in a position to pay royalties to Apple.
However, a second scenario could open up: the patent could be rejected precisely because it is excessively generic.
Here is in brief what has been filed, obviously translated from the original language: the patent relates to “an invention designed to combine a multifunction portable device with a touch screen, comprising the display of an area of the screen, the edges of the casing and the touchscreen itself“. There is then a description of how this mechanism works: exactly what happens when we use a touchscreen device, “pinching” portions of the display to resize the image, tapping on the screen and so on.
Here is the content of patent number 7,966,578.
What will happen now? The patent is currently already valid in the United States, although at the moment there is no news of royalty requests by Apple towards US manufacturers.
Could the issue go on? And if so, in what forms?
All is silent in Cupertino but the anxiety outside is palpable.
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