What was once but an administrative possibility has become the most sublime of legal certainties: Apple has been granted the multi-touch patents.

Credited to the one, Steve Jobs, and the many, Scott Forstall and the iPhone team, the news patents are simultaneously as wide ranging as they are specifically crafted towards the implementation of one or many fingers interacting on the screen in a mobile device, with the most subtle of heuristic interpretations.

Apropos the heretofore mentioned anomaly; ergo Palm Pre’s exacting duplication of the iPhone’s multi-touch gestures and behavioral interactions and Apple’s deliberately obscure threats in their direction, these new patents provide a single, potentially catastrophic result of a singular equation: Apple has grounds to sue.

Vis a vis Palm’s own far-reaching patent portfolio in the mobile space: these remain a perplexing, perhaps equation changing variable. Through one door, a cross licensing agreement. Through the other, years if not decades of litigation.

In sum, the situation remains predictably uncertain.

(Thanks to David, Chad, and everyone who sent this in!)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Multi-Touch Patents, You Belong to Apple Now

Another day, another Apple patent. This one’s a biggie, the whole iPhone enchilada. Current functionality and future potentials (web clips? blogging app?) all rolled into one monstrous document, and all sitting beneath the top-tiered name of Steve Jobs. Yup. According the US Patent Office, El Jobso was the architect of the iPhone. And you know what that means!

[Carrier signal intercept...]

Upon first inspection, while preposterous, it remains equally irrefutable that recent filings, previously unrevealed but now extricated from the plethora of Apple applied patents, demonstrate undeniably, if indefensibly, that no mere hardware engineer, software programmer, or industrial designer envisioned the integral experience of multiple touch-based interface melded to gloss-black glass and immaculate aluminum. No. Only the One, Steven P. Jobs, through systematic application of unparalleled will, was and remains sole and primary architect of the harmonious singularity that is iPhone.

[Signal terminated...]

Hit the read link for the usual diagrams and verbiage.

Read

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Patent-Watch: Steven Jobs, Architect of the iPhone