What concerns me is there seems to be a claim not to patent presence detection, and not to patent face recognition, but to patent connecting detection with proceeding to attempt recognition.  Now that’s downright obvious to me, and hardly a “process” or “device”.

But if Amazon can defend the idea of patenting not clicking, and not buying, but of letting a click buy something, then Apple will probably prevail.

Your Dell can keep its feature, implemented its way.  Dell cannot use the same group of tricks to do it better that Apple has detailed in the application, if the patent is granted.

United States Patent Application: 0110317872

One patents a thing when it has been developed.  Has nothing to do with manufacture, use, release or any of that.  There is no requirement to even ever use it.  It’s not about staking out territory by being first to market.Patent protection actually has nothing to do with products at all, or the right to sell certain kinds of products.  It has to do with the patented device.  Only.

There is a culture wide dumbing down of everything and the deconstruction of all of civilization going on, epitomized by the flame wars.  Nobody bothers to understand structure or formal concepts; it’s all just about pop culture and whose “side” we are on.  The reader will note that this is basically just primitive tribalism with only instinctive actions.There are tons of things wrong with the patent system.  But letting Apple patent a method it invented that does the same thing as something someone else also does is not one of them.Personally, I think it began when government abrogated its responsibility to examine patents.  Also, Congress needs to limit patents to a concrete method or process, not a visualization of a result.  Apple will not be able to patent the idea of doing face recognition (and here is where the system has pretty much completely jumped the rails — but blame the idiot mostly Democrat congress, not Apple).  A patent was supposed to apply to one particular way of doing something, and that way should need to be distinctive.  The rules about prior art and obvious engineering have been pretty well gutted so now it’s more of a gold rush to stake out claims than any real contribution of solutions, which is what patents were supposed to encourage and protect.But once you can patent the idea of using a click on a web site to buy something, we are in deep, deep trouble.  That is one owned by Amazon which Apple licenses for iTunes and other uses.If there is only one way of doing something, obviously that is the obvious way, so it should hardly qualify for a patent.Research labs have been doing face recognition for security purposes long, long before either Apple or Google started messing with it.Apple sells many products which include others’ patented technology.

http://www.android-htc.it/3511/samsung/samsung-continua-a-stuzzicare-la-apple/