The United States Patent and Trademark Office, or USPTO, has just ruled Apple’s famous pinch-to-zoom patent invalid. The USPTO ruled patent No. 7,844,915, which covers the scaling of content using the popular “pinch-to-zoom” gesture, invalid. It’s worth noting that this patent doesn’t cover all pinch-to-zoom technologies as it only covers a type of pinch-to-zoom technology that is adapted to one-finger scrolling on multi-touch screens. This isn’t the first time this year that the USPTO has invalidated a major Apple patent either. In September the USPTO temporarily invalidated Apple’s “rubberband” effect, which takes place when a user scrolls to the bottom of a page.
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