I don't see evidence that Apple is resting on their laurels, but I do remember what happened with Mac OS and Windows back in the 80s/early 90s.

> "A means of searching multiple databases and sources for data." Last I checked federated search has had a wikipedia article since 2005. Hardly seems like innovation pioneered by Apple and stolen by evil Google.

It's a one-line description of a patent. I have no idea what it actually covers, do you? It might be as obvious as slide-to-unlock, but I have no idea.

> Slide to unlock... have you used an airplane bathroom?

An airplane bathroom isn't solving the problem of how to prevent accidental unlock in your pocket without making unlocking unduly difficult.

I think slide-to-unlock is pretty obvious once you go down the road of touch interfaces, but it's worth remembering why we're down that road at all now.

Yeah that Star Trek was a great show.

This argument frequently pops up in discussions of some patent troll action.

While patents are always more specific than a one sentence description, when you read the patent claims, the extra bits that make the patent more specific are not the interesting part of the patents. That's why one-sentence descriptions exist; they distill the interesting novel parts of the patent and leave all the other crud out.

More importantly, how are we to know that it's impossible to develop devices with equivalent functionality not covered by patent, functionality that users will accept and will not result in lower marketshare? Companies expose themselves to 3 times the damages if they go looking for patents covering devices they want to make, and find one. "Then they shouldn't release the product then." Really? In the break-neck development cycle of modern handheld devices, it is not possible to challenge a patent that looks invalid before developing the product.

How can such a system hope to function properly?

The entire patent system is broken, and arguing that patents are more complex or specific than the summaries ("one click checkout", "slide to unlock") is true, but irrelevant.

I see prior art for slide to unlock: A door bolt. Apple would argue, and the USPTO and courts would probably agree, that translating the idea from a physical moving bolt to a virtual bar on a touchscreen device is novel and not obvious and therefore it's patentable, but distinctions like that don't seem important to me.