Last week a U.S. jury sided with Apple in its patent case against Samsung and awarded Apple $1.05 billion. Robin Feldman, an intellectual property law professor at the University of California Hastings Law School, said this just before the verdict:
The trial is evidence of a patent system that is out of control. No matter what happens in this trial, I think people will need to step back and ask whether we've gone too far in the intellectual property system.
As a scholar of creativity and innovation, I believe it's too easy to get a patent and too easy to defend a patent. This blocks innovation because patent holders are allowed to prevent others from building on and improving their patents. That's a problem because 'innovation is incremental; every new step forward always builds on a long chain of prior innovations.' If any one link in the chain is allowed to block all future enhancements, then innovation stops.
I've had iPhones for about three years and I love them. But my first iPhone replaced my Palm Treo 650, and I loved my Treo, too. My Treo did just about everything the iPhone did, so I never really thought the iPhone was particularly innovative. If you never had a Treo, check out this list of iPhone/Treo features:
See what I mean? Really, the only truly new thing in my first iPhone was the WiFi ability and the GPS feature. And the iPhone wasn't the first phone to have WiFi, and it wasn't the first portable GPS device either. I agree with this Google spokesperson, responding to the jury verdict:
The mobile industry is moving fast and all players, including newcomers, are building upon ideas that have been around for decades.
Samsung wanted to show jurors evidence that the iPhone was inspired by older products, including those by Sony, but U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh refused to allow the evidence. (For a technical reason: Samsung failed to disclose these examples of prior art during the fact discovery period. I wonder if the verdict might have been different if the jury had seen this evidence?)
Let's look closely at the six patents Samsung was judged to have infringed. You can find an interactive graphic with the following information on The Wall Street Journal website here and a detailed summary of the six patents here.
The jury threw out the seventh Apple patent infringement claim: Apple had a patent for the iPad shape, a rectangular shape with rounded corners, and the jury decided that no company could patent a geometric shape. (A victory for common sense.)
Take a look at the detailed, side-by-side comparisons of the iPhone and the Samsung products judged to infringe, on all six patents, at this website. Yes, I have to agree, those Samsung phones look a lot like those iPhones. But come on, they look the same because they're both black rectangles with rounded edges!
After I spent some time "under the hood" of the details, I'm left with a couple of reactions. First: Apple spent a lot of money to apply for all of those patents over the years. I think it's scary when any company really thinks they should have the right to patent a rectangle with rounded corners. Or the right to patent the ability to scroll a screen using your finger. Remember my old Palm Treo? Yes, I scrolled it with a stylus. So changing it from a stylus to a finger entitles you to a patent?
Second: It's scary that a jury voted against Samsung. I don't blame the jury, they were simply following the court's instructions and the law as it currently stands. The problem is with the law. So now every company is going to be filing patents for triangles, parallelograms, three-finger touches, scrolling with two fingers moves slower than scrolling with one, you name it. Come to think of it, I'll bet most of those ideas already are patented. No doubt some company already has a patent for a trapezoidal phone shape. Coming soon to a court near you, and you heard it here first!
Whatever happened to the "nonobviousness" doctrine? Under patent law, an idea is supposed to be nonobvious before a patent can be valid.
Apple's official statement says that "stealing isn't right." That is embarrassingly simplistic. I prefer Samsung's official statement:
Today's verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer. It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices. It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.
There will be one or two more rounds in this fight: Samsung will appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and then possibly to the Supreme Court. Stay tuned.
Bill George: Innovation Is the Real Winner in Apple v. Samsung
So lemme get this straight. Samsung using for "free" technology that Apple "paid" for is NOT absurd?
Wow, robots, clones and droids are programmed with strange logic indeed.
Certainly, but never saw the words,"Apple should never have gotten the patent".
I saw an author arguing that Treo already had most of the features of the iPhone. Perhaps, but no one "EVER" confused the iPhone with a Treo, the way my Mom confused Samsung with an iPhone. Why did every Treo owner TRASH their phones the moment the iPhone launched?
1. Because the Treo was an ugly piece of crap..
2. Treo technology was based on one thing. "The stylus".
And what's the first thing Jobs threw out when crafting the iPhone? You guessed it, the "stylus". We knew the iPhone was new & innovative, because everyone in the industry said it would "never" work. You simply "MUST" have buttons and a stylus!
Apple paid engineers to spend countless hours of sweat to prove that it indeed "could" work, and patented the results.
Still when the iPhone was released, the industry laughed. "Where's the stylus??" You gotta have a stylus! They laughed until they figured out how Apple made the device work without a stylus.
As a vinyl toy designer, I could easily clone the curves of hot selling toys, like "Hello Kitty". Some designers DO! (After all Hello Kitty didn't "invent" simple curves) But originality forces me to "think different" enough to develop designs that don't look or feel like other top-selling toys. It ain't easy, but perhaps that's what Samsung should have attempted.
This is how Apple is patenting icons with rounded corners and other technologies and ideas that they took from others without compensation. These laws need reformed and must be reformed or we are surely lost to a future where corporation own all ideas, thoughts, shapes, and colors and where the common man is NOTHING but a consumer.
" Everyone will copy, but everyone doesn't know how to use them, and how to grad the market. Apple is big player in this segment"
And features wise...Android powered and iOS device. We can open any type of application (text, pdf and some) default, but it's not possible in Andriod. How many apps can we use for all our needs. That's where apple leads.
If you read today's tech news you will see Samsung is already announcing a windows phone. They will pay a license fee and develop a phone. Or do you think Samsung should just rip off Microsoft as well and just get it for free?
With Android, Samsung didn't need to pay Google for a copyright license to redistribute their code mostly verbatim (with some TouchWiz modifications), because Android is open-source software.
Samsung didn't use any of Apple's code. They clearly didn't need a copyright license from Apple. But patents are another story. Samsung could implement scrolling in a completely different way than Apple did but still infringe their patents if their scrolling implementation shared similar features.
Software patents are being asserted as a means of prohibiting any feature overlap between competing products. But without overlapping feature sets, there can be no real competition. If two products don't share any features, then they are not competing in the same market category.
Suppose I want to implement a patented feature. The patent owner can demand any price for a license or refuse to license it at all. The owner can license the patent to one company for $1 and then turn around and demand $1 billion for my company to buy the same license. I can't buy a license from anyone else. There's no supply-side competition in the patent licensing market.
The patent system is absurd on all but the most superficial levels, and this is particularly true for software, which is already protected by copyright.
The primary incentive to innovate is that if I don't innovate, then some other company will, and they'll take my market share. Competition is the incentive to innovate. The patent system attempts to promote innovation by actively suppressing competition. It doesn't make any sense.
http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/good-writers-borrow-great-writers-steal/
All Apple does is take existing ideas and improves on them, which is what Samsung was doing also.
I suppose now that there is an itv player people will claim Apple invented the television too.
It looks like as if Apple does not dare to have the Note barred from the market, either... they probably sense that this would result in a loss for them.