Depending on how you look at it, the iPhone is either an marvel of inspired innovative or the standard for any future touch-screen phone; in either case, the iPhone has proven greatly influential and Apple has been suing anyone who tries to adopt its innovation as its own (these days, especially Samsung)

Well, they’ve recently been given a new patent that covers multi-touch – a feature that most Android phones make good use of, for example, when: zooming, panning and scrolling. It’s all legal jargon and lots of this is grey; we know from Apple’s legal activity that all of this will go through a filter and patent suits feel inevitable right now.

So, it seems like it’s time for Android phone makers to come up with a new way of doing basic functions on a touch screen, negotiate a licensing fee or suffer the inevitable legal blowback. However, language is imperfect, so it’s unclear exactly how much or how little this will mean in the long run but if the internet’s reaction to this is anything to go on, it’s not looking good; I hate to use vulgar language, especially on such a public forum but, it looks like Apple has got ‘em by the balls.

[Via MacRumors]
[For more specific info check PatentlyApple]