Gruber, almost alone in a sea of reporting, manages to mention Apple's action here may be related to Nokia's patent suit against Apple.<p>So rewind a bit, to put this in context:<p>- Apple accuses HTC of iPhone tech theft (2 March 2010)<p>- Kodak prompts ITC to consider iPhone ban (18 February 2010)<p>- Motorola seeks ban on US BlackBerries (26 January 2010)<p>- Nokia sues Apple, says iPhone infringes ten patents (22 October 2009)<p>One test for patents' validity is whether the company is enforcing them. With Kodak, Sony, Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and others suing one another as a business-as-usual step in licensing negotiations, the value of Apple's defensive patent portfolio at the licensing negotiation table depends in part on Apple's perceived willingness to stand behind the validity of their portfolio and enforce their patents.<p>I'd suppose this is a signal to the marketplace not that competitors should create their own original technology, but that if they want to copy, they should license or trade.
I have to admit; I find myself agreeing vehemently with Gruber, PG and everyone else Gruber cited. Patents are typically defense weaponry. Your attack weapons are moving fast, innovating and <i>implementing</i> something.<p>Software patents <i>are</i> broken, and Apple's decision to whip out it's massive portfolio and start smacking people with it stinks of the "We want no phone inspired by the iPhone's design to exist", which (in my mind) isn't what patents are for in the first place - not to mention doing this is just, well, wrong.<p>The iPhone's concept revolutionized the handheld industry - and sure, if someone blatantly ripped it off, Apple does have a right to go after that company - but the HTC phones are simply "inspired by" - they're not clones, and while they have a lot of "features" which smack of the iphone, they're not replicas.<p>I'm an avid Mac user, own an iPhone - and I'll probably buy an iPad (still), but I for one want to see this suit fail horribly, or for Apple to withdraw it.
<i>“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”</i><p>"Good artists copy. Great artists steal." said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.<p>You know this whole business of patents, and IP as a whole, is fundamentally flawed in that there is no objective way to decide what is influence and what is blatant copying/theft. The Justice route simply doesn't work. And because patents are public documents, you are basically inviting competitors to <i>modify</i> your inventions.<p>I can think of two better ways to protect your IP. One is to do what Google does and keep the knowledge of your best stuff to yourself. Up to now nobody can crack their search black box. And two, keep innovating. If you do those 2 things in conjunction, I doubt you'd have to worry about people "stealing" your IP.<p><i>I believe that it’s good business, in the long run, for a company’s acts of aggression to take place in the market, not in the courts. My concern regarding this litigation against HTC is that it looks like an act of competitive aggression, not defense.</i><p>I completely agree. The sad part is it maybe too late for them to reverse course.
Has Amazon's enforcing of their one click patent really affected them negatively? Certainly their customers have no idea about the whole ordeal. Have great hackers refused to work there because of it? Would some percentage of hackers refusing to work at a big company like Amazon really make a difference to them? Somehow I doubt it...<p>I think the same is true of this HTC suit. I'm not sure why everyone is making such a huge deal out of it. The patents probably won't hold up in court, or some of them will and HTC will have to pay Apple N million dollars (like Adobe vs. Macromedia). Everyone will forget about the suit within the year. The only affected people (as one of the Tim Bray quotes suggests) will be the lawyers, who collect their entropy-like tax.<p>Why would Apple do it if it's truly pointless, you ask? Well, Gruber has a few solid bits of speculation in his penultimate paragraph, any of which might be true, but only Apple knows the real reason.
<i>"Where I disagree with Jonathan is on what’s known as “business-method” patents: one-click ordering, per-employee pricing. I’m having trouble seeing the benefit to society in granting patents on something that could never possibly be done secretly."</i><p>That I think should always be the type of reasoning involved. It's not the whole story (some things that couldn't be done in private would still stay uninvited if patents didn't exist) I can't get my head around IP moralising. The bottom line is that patents are intended to be an instrument to encourage innovation to the benefit of society.<p>I really think there is no sane way out of all this. We tend to act as if there must be some hard definition that will include all novel innovations that wouldn't be worth developing in a patent-less world and exclude those obvious derivative things that would be invented anyway and really need to be freely built upon. There probably isn't such a definition. Even if we do find some complex and inelegant way of mostly accomplishing that it wont last forever.<p>Making a morality around <i>that</i> seems absurd.
<i>I’m not opposed to idea of the patent system on general principle (as Stallman, and many others, are).</i><p>I'm not aware of RMS claiming that the patent system should be abolished for all fields. I'd love to be corrected on this point, but it's my understanding that Stallman is against software patents only. You can actually read Stallman's own words on the subject in "Free Software, Free Society", Chapter 16. And yes, you can legally download the entire book for free.<p><a href="http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/" rel="nofollow">http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society/</a>
<i>"The iPhone introduced a new model. A true great leap forward in the state of the art. Not a small screen that shows you things which you manipulate indirectly using buttons and trackballs occupying half the device’s surface area, but instead a touchscreen that occupies almost the entirety of the surface area, showing things you manipulate directly."</i><p>Nokia's N770 was close to this in 2005, and the N800 even closer by 2007. It didn't have phone hardware, but it's not a great stretch for anyone to see that phone hardware would be a useful addition at that point.
Why can't Apple continue to out-innovate Nexus One and Android instead of suing them?<p>Reading from the overall situation and his quote, Steve Jobs might feel that the current iPhone UI is 'perfect' as a whole. Apart from nitty-gritty details, he does not see a way to drastically improve it. (That's why he chose it for the iPad UI as well.) So he might figure that the only way to stop competitors from getting too close is to sue them.
"Copying ideas is how progress is made. It’s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal)."<p>Distinction between ideas and implementations in software? Impossible. In my opinion it is one of the reasons why software patents will always be broken.
John pull together a number of ideas and commentary about software patents and patent law from a variety of industry commentaries.<p>An interesting read.
For a sample of Gruber-pretentiousness, check out the last sentence (while picturing him wearing a monocle):<p><i>I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary.</i><p>Oh do say Gruber ol' lad! Your taste is so <i>precisely</i> exquisite.