Well, it is the end of an era that many thought had actually ended when Steve Jobs died. The us-against-the-world attitude is no longer a sufficiently profitable proposition to make either the pursuit of one's enemies or the extra-legal defiance of authority worthwhile.
That's a significant proposition, even if the Apple-Samsung case continues to wend its way through the courts, albeit in a battered and probably soon to be settled fashion. The conservative judicial establishment, usually willing to do business' bidding, has determined that there is greater benefit to be had from a less rather than more restrictive patent system and from the innovations that flow from it.
This also suggests a recognition that the rewards of sharing far exceed the futility of attempting to prove who did what first, especially when it comes to the technology du jour, the mobile phone. Things are moving too far and too fast for the legal system to keep up: Samsung may not even care if Apple eventually wins and Apple may not benefit if it does.
All of which implies that we need to more optimally explore the benefits of collaboration while keeping an eye out for whatever it is we want to fight about next. JL
Tim Worstall comments in Forbes:
We need the system to protect strong and original ideas, to allow some but not all derivative ideas and not to protect ideas that aren’t original. Our patent system gets a lot of stick currently because it’s not entirely clear that it manages to do all of these tasks.
Apple AAPL +1.27% and Google GOOGL +1.19% have agreed to settle their various patent suits against each other. This was all, of course, about whatever Android might have taken or not taken from Apple and whatever Apple’s iOS might have done to infringe on any of the patents that Google brought on board when it bought Motorola Mobility Motorola Mobility. This doesn’t affect the Apple and Samsung cases though. Florian Mueller is, as ever, good on the technical details of this. My interest is, also as ever, in the economics of this. It’s evidence that while horribly expensive and tortuous, the patent system does actually work.
As background the reason we have a patent system (and also copyright and trademark law) is that we agree that an all free market nothing but free market system doesn’t really work when it comes to invention and innovation. For they both are, to a large extent, public goods. No, this doesn’t mean something that is good for the public, nor goods consumed by the public, it means things that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Say, for example, the idea that if you combine an ARM chip with a touchscreen, the basic connecting chipsets for a mobile phone and some nifty software then you can create a smartphone. And a billion or two people would like to buy one of those. Once the idea has been had it’s not possible to stop other people from doing the same thing (non-excludability) and other people doing it doesn’t prevent you from doing it, we don’t exhaust the idea (non-rivalry). However, this makes it very difficult for people to make money out of having such nifty ideas as anyone can simply copy them. So, we artificially create intellectual property rights, in patents and copyrights, so that people who come up with nifty ideas are able to get paid for coming up with nifty ideas.
This isn’t because we’re concerned with social justice, that it is somehow just and righteous that they should get paid. Rather, it’s that if people see people getting paid lots of money for having had nifty ideas then perhaps they will go and spend some or all of their time trying to have nifty ideas: to the long term benefit of all of us as technological progress hurtles forward.For such a system to work we need the system to protect strong and original ideas, to allow some but not all derivative ideas and not to protect ideas that aren’t original. And our patent system gets a lot of stickcurrently because it’s not entirely clear that it manages to do all of these tasks. There’s definitely a feeling that too much derivative invention is prohibited for example. However, this case between Apple and Google leads to some hope that the system in law is actually pretty good.
Neither side had, as Mueller points out, anything like a killer patent (other than bouncing scrollback and there are those who still insist that came from Pong!, the game that the Steves Jobs and Wozniak worked on before founding Apple), nothing that could not be worked around (ie, a substantial amount of derivative innovation is being allowed). And from the beginning of this case that’s pretty much what the informed view has been ( certainly that’s been the view of those who have informed me) so we’ve ended up with an end point that seems about right. Each side agrees not to pursue the other any more.
That doesn’t mean that the system is perfect: only that the patent system seems to be about right in law. In that the correct outcome has indeed happened. The mechanism by which we got to that correct outcome is still of course a mess. The costs of fighting these things through the courts is horrendous (one estimate is that Apple has spent $200 million chasing Samsung). And everyone still needs to pay their own legal bills. And it also all takes too much time: the courts system works over a number of years which simply isn’t appropriate for a business area where the lifespan of a product might be only 9 to 18 months. Certainly the market leading lifespan of a mobile phone can be less than that these days.
My takeaway on this would be that this settlement shows that we’ve got the actual law about right. Perhaps not perfectly so but in the right sort of region. While we need to make the system of applying that law, the courts themselves, rather more efficient and speedy. But then people have been complaining about the snail’s pace of the lawyers since Chaucer’s day so that might not be the easiest problem to fix.
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