“Though the smartphone legal wars have lately assumed a flavor of everybody vs. everybody, including Apple, Google, Microsoft and RIM, as well as handset makers Motorola, HTC and Samsung—and even Oracle, owner of the Java software language—it helps to keep the focus on Apple vs. Google,” Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“In Google, you have an industry disruptor without many patents to bring to the table. Google has been disruptive because it’s giving away its Android software free. Free is a problem for the incumbents, who don’t have Google’s search advertising revenues as a way to monetize their software inventions,” Jenkins reports. “Secondly, and we mean this in the nicest possible way, Google is a patent violator. In a complicated software-hardware business, especially when so many functions are converging in a single device like a smartphone, patent violation is expected, routine and unavoidable.”
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“The ITC can… hear patent disputes, and while it can’t award damages, it can drop the nuclear bomb of blocking infringing devices from being imported. But another peculiarity of the ITC is that its rulings can be waived by the president,” Jenkins reports. “Verizon thinks it would be great if President Obama, in a blanket statement, made clear he would not let stand any decision blocking importation of consumer wireless devices. The parties then would have to recur to normal patent litigation, and whatever rights and wrongs are discovered could be settled by exchanges of cash.”
Jenkins writes, “Apple, as a patent holder, has every right to seek to preserve exclusive use of its inventions. In its eBay decision, the Supreme Court allowed that the possibility of ‘irreparable harm’ might justify banning an infringing product outright, equivalent to an ITC import exclusion. Those given to hyperbole might wonder what could be a clearer example of ‘irreparable harm’ than Google stealing an industry. We hasten to add this shouldn’t stop the president from intervening to prevent an ITC train wreck. But he should also make it absolutely and unequivocally clear he’s not trying to deny any company its day in court, nor prejudging any company’s right to seek a judicial ruling that would have exactly the same result as an ITC exclusion order.”
There’s much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s patented intellectual property should be respected or the patent system is completely worthless. Why invest in innovation if anyone can just take what they want, or if you can be forced to sell that which you do not wish to sell? Obviously, there would be no incentive to innovate. IP isn’t a commune’s garden.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jim Mol” for the heads up.]
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