Post #20: German Court Denied Apple’s Slide-to-Unlock Patent

On Thursday, April 4^th, Mueller posted on Foss Patents blog that the Germany’s Federal Patent Court “ruled that all claims of EP1964022 on ‘unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image’ are invalid as granted.” Apparently the slide-to-unlock gesture has “a visual representation was not deemed to constitute a technical innovation” in Europe. It is very different from the U.S. patent law, where “everything under the Sun Made by Man is patentable as long as it is new and inventive. It makes me wonder that a lot of innovations are biased from subjective point of view. What exactly is the universal standard for new technology?  It seems like the European judge the innovation based on very technical point of view, rather than considering broad aspect of designs to be patentable. I feel like the day where when there is a unified universal patent court is still very far away. People will have different standard on whether the innovation is really patentable or not.  

For more information, visit: http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/04/apples-slide-to-unlock-patent.html