“In attempting to fend off Apple and Microsoft’s suits against Motorola Mobility and advancing its own patent litigation against both companies, Google, which is facing a lot of regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and abroad over what some allege is abuse of SEPs [standards-essential patents], has been arguing that proprietary non-standardized technologies that become ubiquitous due to their popularity with consumers should be considered de facto standards,” John Paczkowski reports for AllThingsD.
“Google’s view is that just as there are patents that are standards essential, there are also patents that are commercially essential — patents that cover features that are so popular as to have become ubiquitous. The latter are just as ripe for abuse as the former, and withholding them is just as harmful to consumers and the competitive marketplace. Viewed through that lens, multitouch technology or slide-to-unlock might be treated the same way as an industry standard patent on, say, a smartphone radio,” Paczkowski reports. “This argument, of course, has massive implications for Apple, which has developed a treasure trove of what might be considered by some as commercially essential IP around the iPhone and iPad. And the company was quick to take severe exception to it. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Apple General Counsel Bruce Sewell rebutted Walker’s argument. ‘That a proprietary technology becomes quite popular does not transform it into a ‘standard’ subject to the same legal constraints as true standards,’ he wrote.”
Paczkowski reports, “Apple’s point is that if you remove the IP distinctions between the two, you remove a key incentive for innovators to innovate. Apple spent billions in research and development to create the iPhone. It didn’t spend that money to create the iPhone’s competition. And this is a point Apple and CEO Tim Cook have hammered home again and again, since the smartphone IP Hundred Years War began.”
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
(photo by Brigitte Lacombe)
MacDailyNews Take: You know, Google’s search algorithmns have proven to be quite popular. If Google really believes their bullshit, they should welcome Yahoo’s immediate implementation of those search algorithmns at the hands of new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who, as a former Googler (employee #20), must be quite familiar with the tech.
After all, Google’s search algorithmns seem to be commercially essential and withholding them is harmful to the competitive marketplace. Bing should be able to use them, too. Excite, even.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
The Apple-wannabes are advocating collectivist theft. They fail to realize that, if Apple’s inventions are stolen from them by the cheap copycats, one day Apple will choose to cease to innovate. Then who will the thieving copycats copy or steal from? Google continues to disgust me more and more!
Patent lawsuits in the U.S., especially within the tech sector, are nothing but a monotonous, troll-laden landscape of scorched earth. It just proves time and again how broken our patent system is.
Apple did not invent multi-touch. They just acquired a company that did and their patents. That’s all it is these days, big tech companies buying other smaller tech companies where the innovation is truly happening in order to acquire patents or personnel. Or we have situations where one guy holds a patent to some incredibly detailed but commonly used-by-millions-of-people everyday operation in some GUI for example, and he’s trolling it so when some big company with lots of money violates it, he can sue them for lots of money too.
As a result we companies, big and small, and individuals with patents (some very ridiculous) to almost every damn thing which they can use as cannon-fodder against each other; litigating rather than innovating.
Apple is no different than any of them. They’re all guilty of this, but it’s “the game” unfortunately and the players are playing by the “rules”, broken as those rules may be. The rules need changed as the U.S. desperately needs patent reform.
I believed Steve Jobs personally hated this sort of legal mumbo-jumbo and believed that Apple should continue do what they always do best, just out-innovate the other guys, stay one or two steps ahead, make great products and let the consumer decide. The only reason he took a moment to point out Apple’s patents on various things in some of his keynotes was to appease shareholders.
Agreed that Apple didn’t invent a lot of the core elements of the iPhone/iPad, but what they did do was have a vision for how the whole thing should work, paid for (or invented) the requisite pieces of technology and engineered something stunning.
Innovation is rarely as simple as just inventing the individual pieces of something new. In this case Apple’s innovation is in their vision for how a phone should work, their execution to legally purchase the necessary pieces to make it happen and their design and marketing to make it desirable enough that even Google argues it’s “commercially essential” and “so popular as to have become ubiquitous”.
Put another way, the tech obviously existed (as you’ve pointed out), so why didn’t Google or Microsoft or someone else buy up the necessary companies and do it on their own?
Wow Google just wow.
The thing I find most interesting about this is that it’s Google basically admitting they stole Apple’s ideas, but arguing that they were justified in doing so because they are “commercially essential” and “so popular as to have become ubiquitous”.
It is literally them trying to say “the iPhone/iPad is so popular we can’t compete unless we use their patented tech”.