We are about to reach the climax of a very big war among multi-national technology companies. The chess pieces of this war will be intellectual property (IP). In all war there is collateral damage and in the IP battles that damage is two-fold effecting consumers and smaller technology companies.
A Brief History of Software and Patents
The IP Wars have been going on ever since the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) opened in 1802. It wasn't until almost 200 years later that it issued a very special patent to Amazon.com for a software process, "1-Click." It wasn't the first software patent, but it was the first USPTO-issued patent that was controversial within the software technology group. The patent itself covered no special technologies. No special algorithms. It was a patent of process. Further, the process itself was so ubiquitous within the software community that it didn't seem distinctly unique to Amazon.
This brought up a huge PR and process challenge for the USPTO. They quickly became swamped by attempts for similar patents from business people at large (not just technology folks). Since the 1-Click patent was issued in 1999, the technology community has been very torn. On the one hand, patents were being upheld by the courts and if you didn't play (which meant pay lawyers to make sure it was worth playing at all) with the USPTO, someone will either patent away your rights to your own work, or ignore your unregistered rights and use greater resources to overtake you. On the other hand, it was clear to many that the speed of innovation is too great for policies and laws written centuries ago to have much merit in today's society. Copyright law, in particular, has clearly outlasted its namesake "copy" due to the very nature of digital media where everything that exists can be considered a copy. There are similar issues with patents as well.
But it is also not so simple. In a world where many patents are a mix of hardware (read lengthy and expensive research & development [R&D] cycles) and software (read as short and cheaper R&D cycles) process innovation has become very complicated to understand and expensive. Combining expensive hardware claims with less expensive software claims has made it easier for large companies to protect software that probably would not have been worth the trouble of protecting alone. This has become particularly true in the last 5 years in the mobile technology world. This is why we have landed here today. Apple's iPhone is inarguably one of the most disruptive pieces of technology in its combination of hardware, software and services of the last 2 decades. Apple was very prepared, and for its part, patented a lot of the technology that made the iPhone unique.
Apple also did what many technology companies did. They used other company's patented technologies when it was clear that that company had no interest (though reserved the right) in defending their IP. A fun example of this is actually how Twitter doesn't defend its list refresh patent that Apple is now using in iOS 6. Much of technology would not function if everyone protected their patents, so there is an understanding of the "greater good" within the technology business. But one company's good is another company's opportunity for profit.
As a last bit of background, what is also important to know is that almost all previous suits by Apple, or of Apple have been settled before a trial began. This includes suits with Samsung's partner OS partner Google. Since it is difficult to peel apart what is Samsung's IP from what is purely Google's and since the suit is only with Samsung (at this point), in this article, I'm only going to refer to the IP in question as belonging to Samsung.
APPLE VS. SAMSUNG
APPLE'S COMPLAINT
Apple has sued Samsung on the claim (to keep it simple) that Samsung has purposefully (that's a big distinction in the world of patent litigation) copied valuable pieces of Apple's IP.
The types of interaction design IP cover 3 distinct types:
- iconography
- layout
- gestural interface design