IEEE Spectrum October, 2007 - 50

THE iPOD'S KEY PARTS were known
when Apple patented them as a
combo. Will the patent stand up?

filter patent from being unobvious. reason:
if you turned the fuel filter upside down so
that it resembled the blood filter, aspects of
its internal construction would have kept it
from working. that was difference enough.
that's not to minimize the importance of
the court's latest ruling. let's take a look again
at the case of an Mp3 player. Imagine a company came along and tried to patent a media
player with three key components-a housing
that encloses various electrical components
that perform computations, a touch pad based
on polar coordinates "including angular input
areas for providing input from a swirling finger
motion," and "a button disposed at a central
portion of the touch pad" that provides another
kind of input.

Of course, we're talking
about Apple's ipod.
Separately, all three of
these components were
known when Apple filed its
patent application in 2001,
but Apple convinced the
patent office that the three
components had never
before been combined in
one pr o duc t. bu t d on't
each of the components
function as expected? And
ar en't polar coor dinate
touch pads designed to
process swirling motion
input? And aren't buttons
to be pressed so as to provide an input? would the
notion of a central button surrounded by a polar
coordinate touch pad have
surprised any consumer
elec tr onic s de sig ner ? I
doubt it.
w hat happens if the
Apple patent is re-examined under the
court's new standard? time will tell. At
the end of the day, what is obvious is still
highly subjective. Following the KSr ruling,
for better or worse, obviousness is also a
legal question decided by a judge rather
than a jury. And that has some patent owners truly worried.
n

AbOut thE AuthOr
KIrK tESKA is an adjunct law professor at
Suffolk university law School, in boston,
and the managing partner of Iandiorio &
teska, an intellectual-property law firm
in waltham, Mass. his book, Patent Savvy,
has just been published by Nolo press of
berkeley, Calif.

rObYN twOMEY

As a new Ph.D. graduate in physics,
The HP 35s is well made, the two-line
I l i ned up, to o, but for a cheap er, LCD is clear, with adjustable contrast, and
four-function calculator from Texas the keys have an inviting feel. It comes
Instruments that appeared soon after- with a well-produced 359-page user's
ward. I treasured my calculator deeply and guide, supplemented by extensive online
briefly: someone stole it from my office a training modules.
few weeks after it arrived.
Although the company's marketing
The HP 35, named for its 35 keys, was pitch takes a loving backward glance,
discontinued after three years, replaced by it also portrays the retro model as the
more advanced models. Now, 35 years after "ultimate scientific calculator," crammed
its introduction, it's back in a commemo- with far more power and complexity than
rative edition called the HP 35s. The color the original. Its more than 100 math and
and case design are reminiscent of the programming functions include numerioriginal, although this one has eight more cal integration, two-variable statistics,
keys and is a bit thinner and lighter.
and regression. There are 800 storage

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2007