Apple v Samsung: What if they had Patented the Alphabet?
Friday, August 31, 2012 at 9:25PM | in Articles, CNN, Program or Be Programmed Imagine we were just developing spoken language for the first time. And someone came up with a new word to describe an action, thought, or feeling - like “magnify” or “dreadful.” But in this strange world, the person who came up with the word demanded anyone else who used it to pay him a dollar every time the word was uttered. That would make it pretty difficult for us to negotiate our way to a society that communicated through speech.
That’s the way the patent wars on smartphone and tablet advances are beginning to feel to me.
As a human being, I do not particularly care about Apple’s recent victory in the US version of its patent lawsuit against Samsung for copying its iPhone and iPad’s form and features. Now that Apple is demanding that Samsung pull eight of its products off the shelf, my only personal interest is whether the Samsung products, once banned, will become collectors’ items. Will I one day want to show my grandchild the phone that dared to mimic the iPhone?
But while the details of legalities and impact to share prices and even consumer choice don’t keep me or any of my friends up at night, there is nonetheless something creepy about Apple’s suit. It’s not so much that Apple - the biggest company in the world - has turned into a competitive monster; it’s the territory that Apple’s fighting over. It feels as if the technology innovation wars are no longer over one piece of technology or another, but over us humans.
It’s one thing for Apple to defend the look and feel of its phone - things like the little button on the bottom, which are apparently obvious but actually the result of a lengthy and painstaking design process. They may deserve a few years exclusive on stuff like that.
But when it comes to gestures, such as the now ubiquitous “pinch and zoom” technology through which users stretch or shrink pictures and text, well, that no longer feels quite the same. They are gestures that may have begun on the device, but which have become internalized, human movements. When my daughter was three I used to watch her attempt to enact those same swipes and stretches on the television screen - a phenomenon so prevalent that many television dealers now keep a supply of Windex handy to clean their giant flat screens of children’s fingerprints on a regular basis.
That’s because these gestures are not simply technological innovations, but the language through which we humans are coming to navigate our way through the emerging digital landscape. We take to gestures and movements that grow out of the ones we use here in the real world. To translate them into the digital realm well requires skill, but the gestures themselves are not the typical territories - like land masses - over which corporations have traditionally fought. They’re inside us.
Usually, advancements of this sort are developed through consortia of companies. The HTML standards through which the Web is rendered are not owned by a single company, but developed together and used by everyone. Imagine if one musical instrument company owned the patent on the piano keyboard, and another on the tuning of a violin. Or what if every typewriter company had to develop its own layout of letters? What if blowing one’s nose into soft disposable paper were owned by Kleenex?
While Apple deserves to be rewarded for the innovations it comes up with, there’s a limit to how far into our learned behaviors that the company should be awarded protection from competitors. Our transition toward a digitally functioning society is no less momentous than the shift from grunters to speakers, or from speakers to readers and writers. As such, it will require an equally cooperative spirit from the people and companies who take us there.
Reader Comments (6)
Perhaps, with the increasingly rapid pace of innovation, it is time to change the time horizon of patents. Perhaps the patent time could be shorter, but more easily defended. That way innovators would still be rewarded, but the rest of the world would not be held back from some obviously impending area of development because someone got there first.
It would also be nice if it became realistic for small time inventors and innovators to defend their IP from the highly capitalized infringers. As it is, these cases can on long enough to exhaust any small timer.
I assumed the logic that we already apply to deny patents for processes that are simply too commonplace to protect would have barred Apple's claims, particularly as to things like "pinch and zoom" - which we've seen futuristic movies like Paycheck and books as well, interacting with screens/imagery by fingertip, etc... I'm not sure whether this was just a ruling that misapplied existing standards or exposed systemic defects. If its an example of the latter, I'd rather see a tiered system of protections with short fuses on these general processes rather than shortening patents across the board. The system always bears examination in light of new technology but regrettably the subject doesn't have much political appeal.
My understanding is that, at various points in history, some literate people guarded knowledge of the alphabet from those who could not themselves afford to be educated (e.g., slaves) until some major social changes brought about public education which included a push toward universal literacy. In Germany, this push had a religious-moral foundation, and in the United States, there was more of an economic rationale. Perhaps these historical examples will prove analogous to the present topic, and those who hold info-tech patents will elect to share them for free or at cost on religious-moral grounds or in service of some long-term economic rationale--say, the cultivation of the labor force.
I have heard a similar story to the child trying to swipe or pinch gesture on a non-multitouch screen that it suggests a phenomenon like DR's observation about how his optimism about how the "Gen Y" folks would master or subver the biases of the digital (ie digital natives) was confounded by his subsequent observations that actually how people adopt and integrate with always-online technologies is pretty troubling.
... as discussed here for example if anyone needs it http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/etc/script.html
I concur with your view on patenting the hand gestures. It reminds me of the "spreadsheet wars" (dimly remembered) of some twenty years ago. They occurred when Microsoft's Excel was overtaking Lotus 1-2-3 in market share, Borland International (fondly remembered) had introduced Quattro, and some legal action or threats of same over basic features of spreadsheet programs ensued. I probably should research this to refresh my memory, but I'm too busy right now.
I believe Ashleigh Brilliant has made a few thousand off owning the copyright to Quotes. :-)