What would be better for the users? Assuming the iPhone was better than what came before. Which action from incumbents would be best for users?
a) Do not copy the iPhone. Make old ugly phones. (What blackberry did) Now users are stuck with old ugly phones.
b) Make something different, not because it's better, but only for being different's sake. (what windows phone did) Forces users to adapt to something new instead of using what they're already used to.
c) Embrace the innovation. Put all that's good about the iPhone in your product. Then iterate through it and improve upon it. (what samsung did) Now users have the best of both worlds, they have the brand new innovation, in a format they're used to. And taking benefit from next iterations improved from it.
It's obvious that option C is best for users. Might not be the best for the original innovators. But it's the best for consumers.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that intellectual property is first and foremost intended to protect users. Not innovators. Protecting innovators is a means to a greater end. It's the vehicle that we found that would, in theory, lead to greater products for users. But, unfortunately, often there's a conflict of interest between inventors and consumers.
As an innovator, it's in my best interest that everyone in the planet must pay their every last time to me if they ever stare at my invention, and are only allowed to improve upon it if I allow it. But as a consumer, it's in my best interest that inventions are shared and improved upon. So I can have the best of both worlds.
When there's this conflict of interests. Consumers should always take precedence. Because protecting consumers is the only good argument to back up IP in the first place. If that's not the goal, then IP is meaningless. Protecting inventors for protecting inventor's sake has no value. We do so because we believe that will lead to greater products for users.
It's very common to see a confusion between these in these discussions. Even in courts. Every time I hear "apple is being ripped off because they paid so much money into R&D" or "artists are entitled to their music, and not you". It's clear there's a disconnect between what IP should be and what you think it should be. You shouldn't care whether it's protecting the inventor, you should care whether it's protecting the user. Whenever you're in doubt, you should ask yourself if doing something will protect or hurt the user.
And in this case. It's obvious that even tho Samsung did copy a lot from Apple, they're also improving a lot on what existed before. What they're doing is not in the best interest of those they're copying from. But it's in the best interest of users. Punishing Samsung hurts consumers. That's what we should be worried about. If samsung loses this, it sets a terrible precedent for our industry. And it would be a great loss for consumers. Regardless of who copied what for which reason.
This is sort of a separate question and one that is separate to the trial.
The trial is asking "did Samsung copy Apple?", this question is "should that matter?" which is a question for our law makers.
The side you don't talk about is what benefit accrues to someone who does great design or R&D or produces great art if it can just be immediately copied by someone who doesn't have to make the investment in time or money. If that deters investment then it's not necessarily in the long term interest of the users.
Personally I'm not intrinsically anti-IP, I see some benefit, I just think the level of protection that's afforded goes on for too long and is handed out to too easily.
My feeling is that if you look at how markets develop, there is a period where there is rapid innovation followed by a period of stabilisation and standardisation. If we provided protection during the initial period (maybe three to five years) that provides incentive but may also encourage innovation as people looked to innovate themselves to compete.
Then after the market has settled down and there are clear winners and losers, the protection is moved and the standardisation you talk about can come to pass as the foundation for the next wave of changes.
But critically IP needs to be looked at on a market by market basis. Having a one size fits all system that covers drugs that need years of expensive testing, music that might be written in a few hours, software that is almost certainly redundant in a couple of years and hardware (that depending on it's nature could fall almost anywhere on the spectrum) is mad.
> what benefit accrues to someone who does great design or R&D or produces great art if it can just be immediately copied by someone who doesn't have to make the investment in time or money.
If you assume that everything Apple invented was trivial to copy. Then even then, Apple was still the richest company in the whole planet before having ever bothered that anyone copied them. The richest company in the whole planet. It seems to me that the R&D investment already payed off, lawsuits or no lawsuits. I believe that answers your question.
It's clear from these results that Apple and competitors will invest in R&D anyway no matter if they get copied afterwards. It still pays off for them. I'm pretty sure the world won't stop inventing new things because some are being copied.
I don't assume that at all, it's why I say a one size fits all approach makes no sense.
Different things have different costs to develop, different value, different life span, different barriers to duplication and so on. Some of the things Apple have been granted patents to they'd have done if they had no protection at all, others they may not have bothered with.
But it's easy to look at the success of the iPhone and say "it's obvious it paid off" but not all R&D leads to an iPhone and not all companies are Apple. That's like talking about running and only using Usain Bolt as an example.
I agree that we should have different IP laws for different situations but I don't think profitability or size is a good metric to use.
EDIT: I wonder (thinking out loud) whether some sort of system where you have to be willing to license all patents on something like a FRAND basis might work (not FRAND in terms of the detail but the overall principal)? No-one gets exclusivity but you do get a return. Competing companies can then work out whether they think it's worth paying the modest fee or whether to develop and alternative themselves.
With consumer demand in mind. Don't you agree that if an invention didn't see the light of day, doesn't that mean there wasn't a market for it in the first place? Then why does it matters if that invention wasn't put in market, if consumers didn't want it in the first place? Remember we're not trying to give benefits for inventors for no reason. We're trying to give consumers something they want. We're not trying to throw money at inventors to invent random stuff no one cares about. We're trying to create cool new things for consumers. If there is no consumer demand for an invention, why would consumers care if the invention didn't make it to market?
Consumer demand doesn't necessarily equate to success or profit for the inventor.
Say you're a one man start up and you invent something really cool in your garage. You start marketing it, get a bit of leverage and sell a few. It's going great, you've got some orders, get some money from an investor, you've got a proper workshop and are growing nicely.
Then Samsung or Apple see what you're doing and think it looks cool. They get their factories up to speed and throw a few million dollars into marketing (that you don't have needless to say) and before you know it they're selling millions. Everyone wants it, consumer demand is off the chart and no-one cares a jot about you in your workshop any more because Apple and Samsung can make the thing cheaper and get it to consumers faster.
So, it made it to market, there's plenty of demand and yet where's the incentive for you to do anything when you have your next great idea other than go and get drunk in a ditch because you've got no desire to get screwed over again?
Yes the consumer benefits from cheaper devices but they also benefit from great people having great ideas and being incentivised to do something with them because they know they could get a reward.
And that's before we get into talking about how we do want to encourage failure because if we try 1000 long shots, even if 90% of them fail, we'll have more great stuff than if we try 100 things and half of them work out. research risks benefit the consumer in the long term.
I don't agree with that at all. In theory if a product never sees the light of day, one can assume it is a bad product, but that's still a textbook example of a converse fallacy. I am a man with 10 fingers, thus all men have 10 fingers.
There is a reason "Shut up and take my money" is a meme. Look at the LightTable project that has been shown here on HN a few times over the past few months[1]. Take a look at the current state of popular IDEs. There are hundreds of common patterns shared between every one of them. Chris Granger comes around and shows a new idea and new paradigm for software engineering and everyone goes wild, a Kickstarter campaign starts up, and he gets to work on trying to get a product out the door that thousands of people want. For the sake of argument, lets say he fails to produce the product (personal issues come up and he has to quit, or whatever). Does that automatically make the project a bad product? Thousands of people still want to use it, over 7,000 people have already put money down in support of it. Are those people just idiots when it comes to choosing a hot new product and can't tell a doomed project from a good idea?
Consumer demand does not equal market success. There are hundreds of examples I could give of product features I've personally implemented for my work that have been thrown away because some stakeholder didn't see the value at the time it was shown, and on occasion that same feature gets requested later in the product's lifecycle.
I didn't say demand will always inevitably lead to new products on the market. I said that if there's no demand for an invention, then the consumers won't care that it didn't go to market.
Funny how the Samsung apologists have gone from saying "of course it's not a copy, they had these designs before Apple" to "what else could they do?". This defence of plagiarism as being somehow in the better interest of consumers is laughable. "intellectual property is first and foremost intended to protect users"? What have you been smoking?
> Funny how the Samsung apologists have gone from saying "of course it's not a copy, they had these designs before Apple" to "what else could they do?". This defence of plagiarism as being somehow in the better interest of consumers is laughable. "intellectual property is first and foremost intended to protect users"? What have you been smoking?
Intellectual property has always been a temporary monopoly granted to provide economic incentives to inventors/writers/what-have-you for societal advancement.
Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#Objective...:
"The stated objective of most intellectual property law (with the exception of trademarks) is to "Promote progress."[12] By exchanging limited exclusive rights for disclosure of inventions and creative works, society and the patentee/copyright owner mutually benefit, and an incentive is created for inventors and authors to create and disclose their work."
That said, I don't like your tone. Arguing, for or against a position does not make one an apologist.
The U.S. constitution makes it quite clear that intellectual property exists for the benefit of citizens, to promote the advancement of useful knowledge and discoveries.
From Article 1, Section 8:
Congress shall have the Power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
I guess it's fair to say that 'the Progress of Science' is for the benefit of citizens, but there's definitely cutouts for the benefits of inventors & authors.
I think this muddiness definitely sits near the root of current IP debates.
The problem is Samsung did not look at the iPhone and say, let's build a UI based on icons the width of a finger, swipes for navigation, and simplify as much as possible. Instead they copied non essential elements to leach off of the iPhone brand. Copying limits you to making a poor imitation of the original. But, inspiration allows you to put scroll bars on both sides of the phone, because they are non functional so why not as it might be better.
You are the founder of evolup.com. Let us say your product/service becomes a huge success. Seeing your success, existing social games developers want to do the same.
Which action from those existing developers would be best for users?
a) Do not copy your product/service. Continue doing things the old way.
b) Make something different, not because it's better, but only for being different's sake. Forces users to adapt to something new instead of using what they're already used to.
c) Embrace the innovation. Put all that's good about your product/service in their offering. Then iterate through it and improve upon it. Now users have the best of both worlds, they have the brand new innovation, in a format they're used to. And taking benefit from next iterations improved from it.
So where does your preferred option (c) leave you in this scenario? Would you whole-heartedly welcome another player "embracing your innovation"?
If that happens to me, I'll lose all motivation to innovate any further. What is the point after all?
You're asking the wrong question to the wrong person. I'm actively in contact with other local game developers trying to get them to do the same thing I'm doing (and compete with me). I've even helped others with implementation details. Which, I believe, will help grow the ecosystem for all of us, myself included. Since what I'm doing is too new (arguably ahead of its time), there's still some prejudice from both users and investors against my technology. If others were doing it as well, that would help me. Do you wanna copy me as too? Feel free to contact me, I'll help you. I can teach you how to properly implement procedural generation to reduce your costs with game artists.
At the end of the day. I trust my skills in my area. And deep inside, I'm confident that no matter how much I'm copied, whoever copies me will always be one step behind me. Because I'll keep on innovating one step further. The only reason I founded a startup is because I believe I'm better than the competition, otherwise I wouldn't have. Realistically, I believe my competitors are much more likely to become clients to my API than to actually try to implement it themselves.
That's just one of the many reasons humans will continue to create and innovate, no matter how much innovation is copied.
If by definition of "success" you mean getting rich and improving the lives of people in the process, then does it really matter if other developers will start copying from them?
"If that happens to me, I'll lose all motivation to innovate any further"
Well, tough luck kid, but a free market has no morals. In a free market the law of the fittest applies. And you should be glad there are still free markets out there, in which people like us can thrive.
We're not talking about making generic innovations in your products similar to the iPhone. We're talking specific non-innovative features: white handset on a green background icon, for example. A dock using the same color scheme. Identical curves, with a chrome border on a black case. A home button on the center bottom.
Many consumers buy the iPhone "because it's iPhone" - they can't even tell you half of its innovations. So you left out d, which is what Samsung did:
d) Build a device that usurps the panache of the iPhone
Apple was one of several manufacturers bringing hardware innovations happening in the industry to smartphones: Large, colourful LCD screens, mobile processors, GPUs, and wireless technologies. None of that was pioneered by Apple (paradoxically a lot of it was courtesy of Samsung). A lot follows from what is made possible by the new hardware.
Imagine that tomorrow someone -- say Apple -- makes a device that can read your thoughts. Nokia rushes a thought-reading smartphone to the market just before everyone else gets their own thought-reading smartphones on the market. Does Nokia suddenly have a worldwide exclusive right to it?
This is all very similar to the countless "on a computer" patents.
a) Do not copy the iPhone. Make old ugly phones. (What blackberry did) Now users are stuck with old ugly phones.
b) Make something different, not because it's better, but only for being different's sake. (what windows phone did) Forces users to adapt to something new instead of using what they're already used to.
c) Embrace the innovation. Put all that's good about the iPhone in your product. Then iterate through it and improve upon it. (what samsung did) Now users have the best of both worlds, they have the brand new innovation, in a format they're used to. And taking benefit from next iterations improved from it.
It's obvious that option C is best for users. Might not be the best for the original innovators. But it's the best for consumers.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that intellectual property is first and foremost intended to protect users. Not innovators. Protecting innovators is a means to a greater end. It's the vehicle that we found that would, in theory, lead to greater products for users. But, unfortunately, often there's a conflict of interest between inventors and consumers.
As an innovator, it's in my best interest that everyone in the planet must pay their every last time to me if they ever stare at my invention, and are only allowed to improve upon it if I allow it. But as a consumer, it's in my best interest that inventions are shared and improved upon. So I can have the best of both worlds.
When there's this conflict of interests. Consumers should always take precedence. Because protecting consumers is the only good argument to back up IP in the first place. If that's not the goal, then IP is meaningless. Protecting inventors for protecting inventor's sake has no value. We do so because we believe that will lead to greater products for users.
It's very common to see a confusion between these in these discussions. Even in courts. Every time I hear "apple is being ripped off because they paid so much money into R&D" or "artists are entitled to their music, and not you". It's clear there's a disconnect between what IP should be and what you think it should be. You shouldn't care whether it's protecting the inventor, you should care whether it's protecting the user. Whenever you're in doubt, you should ask yourself if doing something will protect or hurt the user.
And in this case. It's obvious that even tho Samsung did copy a lot from Apple, they're also improving a lot on what existed before. What they're doing is not in the best interest of those they're copying from. But it's in the best interest of users. Punishing Samsung hurts consumers. That's what we should be worried about. If samsung loses this, it sets a terrible precedent for our industry. And it would be a great loss for consumers. Regardless of who copied what for which reason.