27. August 2012 · Categories: Apple, Copyright

With the jury handing Apple a huge win against Samsung (Florian Müller has a good overview), I feel conflicted in my reaction. On the one hand I welcome it as Samsung has been quite willful in copying the iPhone almost verbatim, and they have definitely crossed the line of decency here, on the other hand the asserted patents are uncomfortably close to core touch screen functionality: the over scroll bounce patent, tap to zoom, pinch to zoom. If you remember that Apple also has patents about gesture detection heuristic and inertial scrolling on the books, then this amounts to a monopoly for still another 15 years on very essential user interface paradigms for touch screens.

These are important breakthroughs, but the problem is the balkanization of user interfaces this would bring. While the vendors would love the extra lock in, it is not good for society to have every touch screen device use its own touch vocabulary. The conventions were pretty much in the air when the iPhone debuted (see this brilliant TED talk), and their core (that is everything using at most two fingers, plus the four finger swipe) should be available to everyone. Otherwise we get what the situation with cars was 100 years ago. Can you imagine not finding the accelerator or the brake pedal? That used to be quite normal, and this is not a situation I want to see for touch screen interfaces. They will be just too pervasive that it can be acceptable to have to relearn them between devices.

After all, patents are not a god given right, but a creation of men to encourage extra research and development. They were created because for society the benefit of extra innovation is higher than the licenses one would have to pay to the inventors, and the slower spread of the invention because of extra costs. But I honestly do not think that this should entitle Apple to a payment in the hundreds of billion dollars, as they believe is their due. They demand 30$ per unit, we can expect 7.5 replacements in the next 15 years per consumer, and have half a billion users likely growing to 2 billion people.

Apple has already been richly rewarded, while being quite stingy with the actual inventors behind these patents, none of them even remotely getting anything close to what Tim Cook is making. So the appropriate way to deal with it would be to give Apple say 10 million dollar per patent in compensation, and then put these into the public domain. After all these inventions would likely have been discovered independently by now.