Who cares? Another trivial patent... and another example of how our legal systems allow companies to abuse the original (wonderful) idea of patents.

Remeber: The idea of a "patent" was created to encourage entrepreneurs to share their ideas and inventions. Instead of keeping them secret in their closed factory buidings, they should be given the opportunity to describe in detail how their machines work. This would allow other to copy their work, provided they pay a license fee to the patent holder.

Of course, this hardly applies to mechanisms and ideas that are so obvious for anybody to see that sharing them couldn't have been avoided in the first place.

Multitouch is a concept that dates back to the early 80s, 2 years before the launch of the Macintosh. How it works and what it is is very obvious to anybody who operates a multitouch enabled device. Hard not to make it public.

I really wonder when politicians will put an end to this patent mania.