Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 22nd Oct 2009 15:17 UTC
Remember when Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and proclaimed, to much applause, that they patented the hell out of it? Well, apparently Apple likes to boast about its own patents, but when it comes to dealing with other's they're not so willing. That is, if you believe Nokia: the largest phone manufacturer in the world has sued Apple for patent infringement.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Actually, patents do have an intended purpose in a capitalistic society. If you spend 10,000 hours in your garage, and spend $10,000,000, and marvelously discover the magic "energy for cheap" device, the patent system affords you a time-limited monopoly to recoup your investment. The intention is to foster innovation, since if there were no patent system, your invention could be quickly copied and you would be out of luck (and probably money).
So what's the problem? Put simply, patents aren't meant to cover "stupid" stuff - i.e., the obvious stuff, such as dragging a mouse down to select items in a list (an IBM patent). Unfortunately, this is becoming increasingly difficult to define. Is a network protocol patentable? How about a file format?
Most people agree that software patents are foolish, but common sense does not always prevail. Even when software patents are eliminated (which I predict will happen), that may not help in the case of phones. There is a lot of hardware, electricity, brodcasting, etc. going on. Patent landmines are everywhere.
So what is the real solution to the patent problem? There problably isn't one. Instead, hopefully there will be more common sense allowed, and things like software patents, business process patents, and many obvious hardware patents will go away. But as long as a society is based on captialism, this problem will remain in some form. The current balance highly favors squashing innovation, which defeats the original intent. Only a strong injection of common sense can swing the balance back to fostering innovation. Unfortunately, common sense is not common, and it is often not lawful.