Michael Wolff:
But let us not argue the case that all this quite obviously impedes innovation and is part of a new unreal property land grab – not about technology at all, but about intellectual property: an effort to privatize much of what was once understood to be shared and public (indeed, not ownable, like the shape of the iPhone).
There is just so much wrong with Wolff’s story, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s just take this little gem of a paragraph.
How is it that stopping a company from blatantly ripping off your design “obviously impedes innovation”? It doesn’t. As I wrote earlier this week, all it does it stop copying. It encourages innovation because companies will have to think for themselves instead of stealing like Samsung did.
This is not about the shape of the iPhone. Nokia has a rectangle phone too, but Apple didn’t sue them. This is about Samsung stealing everything that Apple did, from hardware design to software and sold it as their own.
Samsung and writers like Wolff are using this innovation argument as a scare tactic. It won’t work.
I agree with your sentiment, but would say that I hope it won’t work. Wolff is probably not the only one out there who doesn’t understand the definition of “innovation.” Apparently his editor is missing that page of the dictionary too. We can never underestimate the power of ignorance, especially among the Guardian-reading public.
We need to differentiate between design patents and utility patents. Design patents don’t impede innovation (as you say, that just prevents outright copying). Utility patents, however, do impede innovation.
Also, the Nokia comment is misleading. Apple has licensed its design patents (the same one it used to go after Samsung) to Microsoft. Nokia uses Microsoft’s software, and is presumably covered under the cross-licensing agreement Apple and Microsoft have entered. Thus, we don’t know that Apple didn’t go after Nokia because Nokia didn’t “steal” Apple’s stuff. Could just be that it’s due to the cross licensing.
I could be crazy, but I suspect that this puddle of techno-buzzword-filled gibberish he wrote was published for one reason only. To get hits. There’s likely no evidence that the writer is as ignorant as this article portrays him to be. They just want hits.
Common sense doesn’t get hits, or a dozen pages of comments. Ignorant, biased, and outright stupid on the other hand…
That is not a paragraph. That is a horribly written sentence.