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Looking for yet more reasons to feel an all-consuming contempt for software patents and the POS companies that try to enforce them? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Apple Computer’s jihad against the rest of the world’s smartphone makers:

The case decided Monday involves the technology that lets you tap your finger once on the touchscreen to call a phone number that is written inside an e-mail or text message. It also involves the technology that allows you to schedule a calendar appointment, again with a single tap of the finger, for a date mentioned in an e-mail.

There you go. A single tap is clearly such a singularly brilliant innovation that no one else on the planet should be able to use it. So instead HTC and others will have to use a double tap. Or a swipe. Or a tap and a popup menu. Or one of the other dozens of butt obvious ways to do something like this.

The field of finger gestures on touch screens is a microcosm of the entire farcical realm of software patents: obvious ideas getting tied up forever by whoever happens to be the first guy to write them down. If we had any brains at all, software patents would be consigned to the ash heap of history, where they belong.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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