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I'm not a fan of how Apple is going about this, but. To me, a patent troll is a company that holds a patent and wields it aggressively without producing anythi
by shadowfiend 14y ago
I'm not a fan of how Apple is going about this, but.
To me, a patent troll is a company that holds a patent and wields it aggressively without producing anything, and that's the way I've generally seen the term used. Clearly Apple doesn't fit this definition, as they are both making and selling tons of devices that use these patents.
In fact, there's nothing you can really say that indicates Apple is misusing patents. They are, unfortunately, using patents exactly the way patents are meant to be used. Patents are meant to stifle innovation in a direction that's already been taken. It's their purpose: exclusive rights for however many years in exchange for public disclosure. The only critique that I think can be made of Apple's use of patents at this point is that they're using them at all (which is a perfectly valid critique, mind you).
- mibbitier 14y agoThe issue is, you should never be granted obvious patents like "swipe to unlock". Mobile phones / tablets are fairly trivial by now. Computer, touchscreen, software. It's not rocket science. Nothing there should really be patentable IMHO.
- runn1ng 14y agoTruth to be said, the things that are obvious now were not obvious at all in 2007.
- gaius 14y agoThat's exactly it. Any of us could write a program to calculate E=MC2 in a minute. These anti-patent types think this means they're all Einsteins.
- mibbitier 14y agoYour example is very apt. Isn't it great that you can't patent mathematics? Software and hardware should not be patentable like it currently is. Sorry, but since I can remember, (20 years ago say), the idea of a touchscreen tablet/smartphone was obvious. It was absolutely inevitable, and it was boring waiting for the technology to appear to allow it to happen. Absolutely nothing on any smartphone, tablet, etc is innovative to the point where a patent should be granted.
- gaius 14y agoThe devil is always in the details. Since the first internal combustion engine, the car was an obvious development. But it turns out that there is more subtlety to making a car than simply swapping a horse for a motor on a carriage. Would you say that absolutely nothing in any car or truck is innovative to the point where a patent should be granted? Tablets are an interesting case study because we've been down this road before (google for Windows XP Tablet Edition, 2001). Anything in a modern tablet that wasn't in XP Tablet, or the Apple Newton, you can say required innovation to do.
- mibbitier 14y agoPersonally, I think patents do far more harm than they do good. They reward complacency. They reward laziness. They stifle innovation.
- gaius 14y agoThen I hope you never need to do anything more complex than copying something someone's already done, least of all invest your own money in risky research that may yield no results.
- mibbitier 14y agoFWIW I'm listed as inventor on around 10 patents. The only area I think patents do make some sense is for medicine, where the R&D costs are astronomically high. But most other fields, R&D isn't that big a cost.
- runako 14y ago>> Mobile phones / tablets are fairly trivial by now. "Trivial" would imply that bootstrapped companies would be turning them out by the millions. Maybe they are a little harder than trivial? In any case, I think you mean "trivial" in the sense that an answer to a test question is always "trivial" when you're looking at the answer.
- mibbitier 14y agoThere's quite a ton of different android smartphones, which all look and function basically the same - same with tablets. They're likely all made by the same few factories in China for a few dollars each.
- creesp 14y agoThe thing is that it just isn't that obvious. Not one cell before Apple's iPhone had swipe to unlock. Not one cell had touchscreen that works without stylus. Same thing with tablets. Sure, Microsoft started making them long time ago but using styluses on the same GUI was not that practical. That's why they never entered mainstream market. iPhones and then iPads brought new GUI for whom you didn't have to use styluses and you didn't have tiny unclickable icons. Everything is made for touching from the ground up. Sorry for going off topic.
- dataminer 14y agoNeonode N1 had swipe to unlock before iphone.
- ctz 14y agoNot one cell had touchscreen that works without stylus. Incorrect: LG Prada. For me, pointing to one or two features of the iPhone as proof of it being innovative misses the target. I regard Apple products as innovative and successful principally because they are consistently usable, designed well, marketed well and technically innovative at the same time. Apple's competitors rarely hit all those targets in a given product. (Likewise, sorry for off-topicness!)