Case: Patents/Obviousness (P.T.A.B.)

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board said that challenged claims of Smith Interface Technologies LLC’s patent that relates to devices, methods, and graphical user interfaces for manipulating user interface objects with visual and/or haptic feedback aren’t unpatentable as obvious over prior art, in an inter partes review by Apple Inc. The board determined that the challenged claims aren’t obvious over various combinations of prior art, including prior art that describes an interface widget for zooming via pressure input and providing a high accuracy zoom and select task, and that relates to portable devices that adaptively determine a cursor position from ...