When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, in 2007, he strode across the stage in his black turtleneck, praising the device’s interface and announcing, poignantly, “boy, have we patented it.” In the Samsung case, Apple asserts that its Korean competitor blatantly copied the iPhone—and Apple is probably right. The highlight of the recent trial was the release of a hundred-and-thirty-two page document, from 2010, in which Samsung employees laid out, in great detail, Apple’s superiority. The document is like a primer on phone-interface design. (See, for example, the discussion of why Apple’s system for entering long telephone numbers is clearer than Samsung’s). Gradually some of Samsung’s phones began to look like cousins of an iPhone; then they began to look like brothers. The Galaxy S could now pass as the iPhone’s unshaven twin. (...)
In general, we should want good ideas to be copied. If you’ve got a Samsung phone, be grateful that the engineers at Apple helped design the dialer. Yes, inventors need incentives to invent. They need to know that their ideas can make them money and that building something brilliant can make them rich. And in some industries—particularly ones, like pharma, with huge research costs—you do need strong patent protection. But technology doesn’t work like drug development. The industry evolves quickly, and you need to try to be first, whether you get patent protection or not. Enforcing patents can help you lock in profits; but patents won’t change your approach to research.
The prime example of this phenomenon is, of course, Apple. It invented the iPhone and the iPad, and locked in huge profits and brand loyalty before anyone could catch up. Apple, on Monday, became the most valuable company in the history of mankind—and its most valuable product is the iPhone. The company is worth six hundred and twenty-five billion dollars, roughly four times as much as Samsung.
Furthermore, software patents (and even some hardware patents) are notoriously confusing. Last summer, “This American Life” ran an extraordinary segment on the muck of software patents, which included one engineer admitting that he didn’t understand even the patents he himself had filed. They were just “mungo mumbo jumbo.” It’s hard for the patent office to evaluate code; it’s even harder for juries. Given the complexity and confusion, a good general principle would be to first do no harm. This summer, Judge Richard Posner dismissed a case between Motorola and Apple, and then proclaimed in an interview that the fighting between technology companies shouldn’t be surprising. “As in any jungle, the animals will use all the means at their disposal, all their teeth and claws that are permitted by the ecosystem.” He then added, “It’s not clear that we really need patents in most industries.”
by Nicholas Thompson, New Yorker | Read more:
Photograph by Vicki Behringer/Reuters
