Actually it is not. It is how does the hardware interpret what is a justified touch and not just an inadvertent touch. When and where is the actual touch point of a large surface of a finger tip intended to touch on a highly reactive highly sensitive high definition capacitance touch grid, so the accuracy does not keep jumping around. It is a system between hardware and software. . . and is patentable. How does the hardware distinguish the correct signal from a multitude of inputs over false signals? How far did the touch have to move before it was a scroll, and not a random micromotion? And which direction? How does it find the intended target point? These were not trivial issues on a multi-touch capacitance screen.
I read the patent when it was first issued, something I frequently do, and it is ~50 pages long and full of hardware diagrams showing how such circuitry makes either/or and exclusion decisions to prevent false signals. It was quite a piece of engineering and innovation. The single-touch systems were child's play in comparison because they did not have to take a second set of coordinates and secondary motions into consideration. . . now add in third and fourth touches and sensing those and their positions and motions.
Sorry, you are just plain wrong because you don't understand what you are talking about.
Diogenes, a copyright would be entirely inappropriate for this. A copyright has a life of 75 years beyond the death of the creator. Do you REALLY want to copyright on this stuff? A Patent has a limited 20 year exclusivity with an option to renew for 17. . . and then it is public domain. I think that for some inventions 20 is too long these days. . . and too short for others such as prescription drugs.
I outlined what my recommendations for patent reform were in another thread. Basically I recommended a shorter exclusivity on some tech inventions with mandatory licensing on a Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRaND) rate system after a the period of exclusivity, I'd even extend the renewals perpetually so long as the originator or his assignees were still using the patent and licensing it under FRAND rates so that his heirs could benefit. The key is the FRAND system. I would set declining FRAND rates for a number of years and then a fixed rate from then on.
And all of that would appear to be a function of the software, not the hardware.
Sorry, you are just plain wrong because you don't understand what you are talking about.
You seem quite insistent on this. :)
The single-touch systems were child's play in comparison because they did not have to take a second set of coordinates and secondary motions into consideration. . . now add in third and fourth touches and sensing those and their positions and motions.
You are familiar with this phenomena in computer science known as "multi-tasking"? * Again, processing multiple simultaneous inputs is done with software. Once you get the process down for doing it once, you make it a subroutine, and you call the same subroutine for the other inputs.
I am pretty sure the hardware just registers contacts, and it is the software which plots the individual movement over time, and thereby renders them into the various control functions.
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* In actuality computers are really not multi-tasking, i.e. doing multiple functions simultaneously. They generally are processing functions sequentially, but at such a high rate of speed as to create the appearance of concurrence.