So Amazon would be the ultimate underdog since despite huge revenues they make relatively little profit ? That makes no sense. These are both huge companies, used to getting their way. There are no underdogs here.

That's the bad part: it did.

"But if things weren’t quite clear to the detectives at the start, they certainly were by the time they wrote up the case file. It states: "There is no evidence at this stage that this is anything other than a foolish comment posted on Twitter as a joke for only his close friends to see."

But they didn't want to appear to be soft on terrorism or whatever and so rather than make the judgement they knew to be correct they threw an innocent man into the legal system. Gutless.

Nobody thought it was a threat until the media got interested and then suddenly nobody dared to let the poor guy go. This despite the fact they were all professionals who should be able to distinguish between a threat and a bad joke. If you're not ready to make those calls you shouldn't be in a job where you have to think at all.

- The airport manager "reported it to his superior, who rated it "non credible" as a threat"
- Airport police then "waited two days before passing on the investigation to their colleagues at Doncaster police station" (bet they were worried, huh ?)
- The police thought it was a joke : "[the case file ] states: "There is no evidence at this stage that this is anything other than a foolish comment posted on Twitter as a joke for only his close friends to see.""
- But of course by then the media were interested so : "With Paul Chambers out on bail and "huge public and media interest" (as a further statement put it) no doubt causing jitters higher up the pecking order, South Yorkshire police turned to the CPS for a "decision on disposal""

Once in legal system the guy's goose was cooked.

No, scroll with one, or gesture with two, where gesture is any operation that follows 2 or more simultaneous inputs.

I don't care about patents. We could throw away the whole patent system tomorrow and it's be no skin off my back. It wouldn't change the fact Samsung is copying Apple here. But as long as we are operating within this system you have to apply its rules consistently and that means you can't just throw out cases because you don't like the claimant because that's just arbitrary. That's what I'm doing: arguing within the logic of an illogical system.

Yeah I confused myself there. This one is the scrolling patent, then there are separate bounce and pinch patents.

The saddest part of this story is that it could've been stopped before it began: the manager who discovered the tweet, the airport police, the police, none of them thought there was a credible threat but rather than assume responsibility they decided to pass the buck to someone else effectively pushing the case further and further up the chain.

For those following along at home, this is what happens when a lawyer does describe a pinch to zoom gesture :

"1. A method, comprising: detecting at least two first contacts on a display surface of a multi-touch-sensitive display device; detecting a first motion associated with the at least two first contacts, wherein the first motion corresponds to a multi-touch gesture; adjusting a parameter of a graphical object in accordance with the first motion; detecting a breaking of the at least two first contacts; after detecting the breaking of the at least two first contacts, detecting at least two second contacts on the display surface; detecting a second motion associated with the at least two second contacts, wherein the second motion corresponds to the multi-touch gesture and the at least two second contacts are detected within a pre-determined time interval after the breaking of the at least two first contacts is detected; and continuing to adjust the parameter of the graphical object in accordance with the second motion.
2. The method of claim 1, wherein adjusting the parameter is a non-linear function of a displacement of the first contacts during the multi-touch gesture.
3. The method of claim 1, wherein the parameter comprises a magnification of the graphical object.
[...]"

Simple, right ?!

Well aren't you fancy with all your latin :). It means "for example" of course, I also know that in a legal text if you don't define something exactly lawyers will find a way around it. You brought it up, I don't think the directionality of the scrolling matters only the difference between the scroll action and the resultant end-of-screen bounce (what this patent is really all about) and how that's different from a not further defined gesture action resulting in scaling.

No, "scaling" is what the interface does as the result of a gesture, pinching is what the fingers do which again is not defined in the document. There's a reason the patent is called "Application programming interfaces for scrolling operations": it focusses on scrolling and how that operation is distinguished from a gesture. And a gesture is just defined as having 2 ore more input points without further elaborating on the state of those input points.

Scrolling is defined in the full patent text as :

"Scrolling is the act of sliding a directional (e.g., horizontal or vertical) presentation of content, such as text, drawings, or images, across a screen or display window. In a typical graphical user interface, scrolling is done with the help of a scrollbar or using keyboard shortcuts often the arrow keys. Gesturing is a type of user input with two or more input points. Animating operations include changing content within a given time period."

So, they only mention the 2 axis.

Look around on trains and subways or coffee shops: personal computers are going mainstream in a way they haven't before, crucially even among those we would consider to be tech-illiterate. Like the Mac (or Lisa) decades ago(*), we're defining a new way of interacting with our computers that'll probably be with us for a good long time and it'll impact more people than ever before.

(*) Because I know someone will bring this up, yes there was Xerox but the Mac, with all the changes it made to the Xerox model, was the one who went out into the world, got copied by everyone and became the archetypal GUI.

Ah, but it doesn't mention pinching, what it is is a method to determine an action based on the fact if 1 (resulting scrolling) or 2 fingers (resulting in a gesture) are on the screen. It doesn't define the gesture, whence the workaround mentioned in the article of having 2 finger scrolling so this patent is circumvented because there is no differentiation being done based on the 1 finger -> scroll, 2 fingers -> gesture method. Or so I gather, I am no lawyer.

Meh, maybe someone will actually read the article and take away a new insight or learn something they didn't before, I know I did. I'd call that a win. The comments here will be ... well like they always are, good or bad that's Slashdot.
I don't think this court case is a defining moment, but the rise of smartphones and tablets is and at te very least all these court actions expose what the main players are thinking, where they come from and where they want to go. At the same time there's the entire discussion that keeps raging about patents and what should and shouldn't be patentable. I think it's definitely interesting and worth following closely. Also: huge arguments about tiny details, it's what geeks do best.

Nilay Patel of the verge, an actual honest-to-god copyright lawyer not just someone who plays an expert on the web, disagrees in his aptly named "The myth of pinch-to-zoom: how a confused media gave Apple something it doesn't own":

"So let's just be extremely clear about this: the jury ruled that 21 of 24 accused Samsung phones infringed claim 8 of Apple patent 7,844,915, which specifically covers a programming interface which detects if one finger on a screen is scrolling or two or more fingers are doing something else. It is one possible step along the road to pinch-to-zoom, but it is definitely not pinch-to-zoom itself. And — crucially — it may not be that hard to design around."

Maybe read up there too ?

I submitted this article because firstly this has been such a huge story in the mainstream press that it's good opportunity to investigate how reliable the information coming from them about tech matters is and secondly because there is a lot of confusion even among geeks about what was at stake in this trial resulting in a low signal to noise ratio in the discussions. Personally I do also believe we are at a defining moment in the modern computing industry so even if this lawsuit may end up being of little to no importance the close attention is warranted.

You've got the floor here. Offer any kind of proof or even a plausible argument instead of baseless allegations. I've never seen anyone do that instead of just insinuating things.