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This patent, first submitted to the US Patent Office on December 19th 2007, gives Apple the ability to sue any of its competitors who sell mobile devices with multi-touch hardware.
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Interesting how it's a narrow patent applying only to mobile devices.
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multi-touch refers to a touch sensing surface's (trackpad or touchscreen) ability to recognize the presence of two or more points of contact with the surface. This plural-point awareness is often used to implement advanced functionality such as pinch to zoom or activating predefined programs.
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Here's where it will get interesting in terms of it being able to be held up in a court of law.
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One of the early implementations of mutual capacitance touchscreen technology was developed at CERN in 1977 based on their capacitance touch screens developed in 1972 by Danish electronics engineer Bent Stumpe.
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Multi-touch technology began in 1982, when the University of Toronto's Input Research Group developed the first human-input multi-touch system.
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In 1983, Bell Labs at Murray Hill published a comprehensive discussion of touch-screen based interfaces. In 1984, Bell Labs engineered a touch screen that could change images with more than one hand. In 1985, the University of Toronto group including Bill Buxton developed a multi-touch tablet that used capacitance rather than bulky camera-based optical sensing systems.
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A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch "Digital Desk", which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.
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And here's why Apple thinks they own it...
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The company Fingerworks developed various multi-touch technologies between 1999 and 2005, including Touchstream keyboards and the iGesture Pad. Several studies of this technology were published in the early 2000s by Alan Hedge, professor of human factors and ergonomics at Cornell University. Apple acquired Fingerworks and its multi-touch technology in 2005. Mainstream exposure to multi-touch technology occurred in 2007 when the iPhone gained popularity, with Apple stating they 'invented multi touch' as part of the iPhone announcement, however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology
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