Multitouch screens are now off-limits to innovators

Via Slashdot, I have come to find out that Apple has been granted a U.S. patent for certain uses of touchscreen devices:

1. a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command,
   This is the axis scroll detection.  It's hard to explain how it works, but when you use it, it's obvious -- once you have started a fast motion in a particular direction, the other direction is ignored.  Without it, scrolling vertically is impossible without also scrolling horizontally, even if for just a few pixels.
   
2. a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command,
   Well, this is the famed two-finger zoom flick.  It's hard to imagine a multitouch interface without it.
   
3. and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.
   And this is the sideways flick to change Springboard icon sets, one screenful at a time.

Naturally, Apple won't be licensing the technology to anybody, which basically means that the story behind the steam engine repeats itself, the competition does not get to innovate, and therefore the rest of us are fucked.

Thanks to Apple, multitouch devices just got twenty years in the innovation penalty box.