Since the beginning of time, Apple has been crying foul about people stealing their IP. Oh, they took this from me. They copied that. If everyone keeps taking stuff from us, we won't make any money, and we won't have any reason to innovate. What's the incentive?
If I were Apple, I'd say in response...
You mean besides being one of the top 5 riches companies in the world? A company that basically sells variations of 8 products? I'd say your attempts to innovate have turned out pretty damn well for you all. Were I a more cynical person, I'd say your attempts to "protect what you've created" by patenting the minutiae of everything you've laid your hands on is really a very transparent attempt at controlling the market by riding your previous innovations into the ground, while not putting in any more hard work.
I'll tell you the biggest problem with the current patent system. It allows for ideas, concepts, and end results to be patented, not the implementation . I'll give you an example of one of the stupider things I've seen get submitted to the patent office.
Jeff Bezos had this idea for a tablet. It has very little hardware in it. The only thing it has in it is a minuscule amount of ram, and a CPU powerful enough power to accept inputs to send over the internet and drive the display. No harddrive of course. It's cloud based. All content is processed and delivered from the cloud.
...lets disregard the fact that what he's describing is basically a super fancy television. The patent's still pending last I checked.
The real kicker isn't that he's trying to patent an implementation. Just the basic idea. So if someone goes out and builds a working version of this concept, they're infringing on his IP.
And why should that be patented? Everyone has ideas. Ideas are cheap. Concepts are cheap. It's the implementation that's important. If you're allowed to patent basic ideas, then that means NO ONE ELSE CAN MAKE OR IMPROVE UPON IT. Innovation, being the improvement upon established ideas as much as it is new one, dies. Cuz at some point, a bunch of corporations are going to own all the ideas and concepts. What do we do then? Pay these companies exorbitant amounts of money to build working versions of their ideas? Pay them to improve upon their designs?
Good thing this is only a recent problem, because Apple would've been choked to death by IBM before they even got out of the garage.
The only things that should be patentable is implementation. You can think of a steam engine and build it, but only the specific mechanical construction should be your intellectual property. If someone else comes out with a better steam engine than yours, well...too bad. Guess you gotta go back to the drawing board and come up with an even better steam engine than his if you want to keep making money. You can't own the concept of an engine powered by steam, Thomas. Sorry.
And don't even get me started on software patents, which are basically patents for math formulas and specific ways of wording and organizing things.
The whole system needs to be rehauled in a big bad way.
An idiot who's grand idea to take all the inventors up into the mountains to pout and stroke their collective egos would've blown up in his face in about 3 years time.
