I am not particularly proud of Apple right now.
I will switch, immediately, to any mobile phone produced by a company that announces and follows this policy:
- They make a searchable catalogue of all their own patents, including information on where they believe the patented concepts are pertinent.
- They declare the techniques in the patents free for the taking, royalty free, in exchange for a line in the product acknowledgements.
- They declare the previous agreement void as soon as any legal action regarding alleged patent infringement is brought against the company.
- They truly only use the patents to protect themselves against other patent suits.
I was under the impression that Apple was more interested in continuing to think up new interfaces, new approaches and new implementations that might better serve us in the age of multi-touch and ubiquitous high-speed Internet access. That the value in Apple’s products is a cohesive and speedy experience that is easy to navigate, learn and use, and not the various isolated nuts and bolts or building blocks that mindlessly ported in isolation mean nothing but carefully assembled in aggregate mean everything. That the best way for Apple to counter, say, Chinese iPhone ripoffs was to move full speed ahead.
You’re established in a country with really fucked up patent laws, and I can understand that. You get hounded by a company that abuses those laws, and I can sympathize with defending yourself, even with unsavory attitude. But what I can’t forgive is using these same laws as a completely unwarranted bludgeon against someone who isn’t the worst offender while you sit on a 40 billion dollar war chest.
You can’t write your own laws, but being an asshole by abusing them is clearly your choice. I guess I wish you’d have thought differently.
So any company protecting its patents would incur your wrath? I guess I don’t understand the vitriol I’m reading. If there are legitimate infringements, they must defend against them, no?
By JR · 2010.03.02 22:02
My central premise is that the patent system is broken. It was introduced to keep problems from appearing that are now appearing anyway. It is prohibitively expensive to actually defend any of the patents you do get yourself unless you’re a massive corporation, and it’s also possible in some jurisdictions to patent ideas, including ones that you didn’t think up yourself (see various attempts to patent animal genome just because they sequenced it). The whole system has become a beast; you’re stepping on thousands of “intellectual property” patents in any given application you may be writing, and even the few parties that are benefitting from it are saying that it’s so much trouble it’s hardly worth it.
Because of these things, I hold that anyone actually taking advantage of the patent system in this way, though they may have regional law on their side, are acting in bad faith.
As far as I can tell, you can choose yourself when to take offense without completely revoking your right to infringement prosecution. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems that the royalty-free attribution license I propose would qualify handily as “reasonable and non-discriminatory“, and thus certainly not block use of the patents as defense. Obviously, there are many less severe terms than these for licensing patents.
Even if the practice is such, and I’m pretty sure it’s not but I’m not a lawyer, that after even a brief lapse in belligerence, that you can’t turn around and use a patent against someone because you blinked once before (not to be confused with estoppel, which is telling someone in particular that you won’t sue, and that statement invalidating any such legal action against that subject), not even Apple with their armies of lawyers can claim to have the resources in terms of time and money to survey every single emerging product for every single patent in their portfolio. My point is not that doing so is impossible, but that not doing so and then using such a patent for later defense would probably find legal support. If it didn’t, it would then in effect prescribe everyone to file patent suits against their competitors, which, I hope you will agree, sounds ridiculous.
It may be Apple’s right to “defend their intellectual property”, and it may be my right to claim that “intellectual property” is bullshit, and that defending it in terms of duking it out in patent court cases wastes money, holds up creativity and progress and worsens the state of the world.
By Jesper · 2010.03.02 23:27
Totally agree with your writeup. The claims of Apple are truly ridiculous.
Apple is the new Microsoft.
By Sidharth · 2010.03.04 17:42