What do patents think they are, eh? Coming in here, hoarding all our perfectly shareable technologies, talking in a barely understandable language of their own, eh? It’s terrible! They’re holding this fine country of ours back 20 years! What next? Shall we patent the act of purchasing a product using money so they can take over our retail establishments too? Even better, let us patent the act of drawing air into meaty sacks using a diaphragm! That’s sure to be a money-spinner. I’m not a filthy patentist, of course. No. I think they should be allowed to live. They just ought to keep quiet and stay in the patent office where they belong.
These patent / immigrant jokes doing it for you? Thought not.
In among the nonsense, I’m making a vaguely serious point: patents and the stupid legal squabbling that goes with them are holding technology back like a playground bully stunts the emotional growth of an awkward nerd. Look at Apple’s public and obviously duplicitous fight with HTC. To the cynical outsider it seems to have nothing to do with patents at all. Apple is barking and growling, its attitude based solely on professional malice, baring its teeth against any other manufacturer that dares sniff around the territory urine-marked as Apple’s own. It picks on HTC because a fight with bull mastiff Google might not end altogether pleasantly. I could understand a measure of stroppiness if the iPhone UI were being ripped off wholesale, but interface elements like multitouch control simply should not be reserved for a single company. They’re fundamentals. They are base functions that will help carry computing into the next decade. They’re the glue that holds mobile devices together. If these things have been put together from scratch, with none of the originating code, the fact that they do a similar job is irrelevant to me. It’s just healthy competition, isn’t it?
What if someone litigious held the patent for the keyboard? Or how about the ‘finger-based input device’? I would hope that a court would bash their unreasonable claims for dominance down, but I can’t be sure that they would.
I note with interest that snarling Apple isn’t yet spitting venom at Microsoft over the patents which are no doubt infringed upon in Windows Mobile 7, perhaps because WM7 isn’t yet on the shelves. An early pre-release battle will lead to a subtle change in technology, not a hefty and embarrassing payout, which I’m not sure is the desired result of all this.
Lest you accuse me of unfairly picking on Apple (again), let me remind you that this sort of thing has happened before. In 2002 BT exhumed from its vault a crumbling, dusty patent for the hyperlink, the fundamental building block of the internet. It then loaded its cannon and fired a lawyer at the broadside of ailing ISP Prodigy, presumably as a test case prior to levying a hyperlink tax on the entire internet. The case was dismissed, luckily, on the grounds that the exact text of BT’s patent didn’t match the exact use of the hyperlink in the field, but the antisocial and anti-competitive precedent set has carried forward, and it’s not likely to die out.
I am aware that my opinion makes something of a mockery of the patent system. Yes, there’s a very strong case to be made for protecting intellectual property in this day and age, and I do think the inventors of excellent things deserve a shred of market advantage. But let’s all just play nice, shall we?
