Invention, not idea. May sound subtle but it's an important point. The anti-patent people think that you just have an idea in the shower and you can get a patent on it and that other people have the same idea and they lose out.
The reality is, it takes a lot to create a patentable invention, it's not protecting the idea, but a specific implementaion.... and if my experience is representative, original inventions are very rare.
One of my patents is about to run out, and despite the industry needing to solve this very problem for the past 20 years, and several other methods of solving it that I can think of (that are pretty obvious) ... people don't even try.
The patent (which nobody is aware of) doesn't prevent them from solving it in any number of ways.
But what the industry does is simply ignore the problem.
The patent was ahead of its time, obviously, but I am surprised that nobody has taken a crack at the problem at all in teh time period.
Hell, a patent violating implementation from somebody who came up with the same solution would have been great (not because the patent would be enforced against them, it wouldn't) ... but because it would show someone actually was thinking about the problem!
Nobody has even had the same idea in the past 20 years, despite a billion dollar industry which would benefit greatly from it....and if someone did have the idea, their implementation would likely be vastly different due to the advances in technology over the past 20 years, and thus not violating the patent.
The reason: people simply aren't that inventive.
Patents are protecting hard work, and something that is actually quite rare.
Here's my problem with the applcation and assignment of many of the patents Apple uses and has.
We tend to on MR focus more on the design and elements. "hurr hurrr, rounded corners therefore it's copying"...
But if you read through some of the patents, more technical ones that Apple has sued over, you start to question how it was awarded the patent in the first place.
from my understanding, Patents weren't intended to prevent others from accomplishing the same end result. They were intended from preventing people from using YOUR method to come to the same end result.
However, some of the wording of some of these patents are very vague, and Apple seems to be of the impression that the end result is the patent.
If you read through the 90 page Patent brief apple posed to Samsung when this all began, there's little wonder why Samsung decided to let it go to court. Many of Apple's patents are vague in "how" and are very focused on results.
Software patents tend to be very vague cause they don't cover the code that gets the result. Without the code including, you lose the "how" it's actually accomplished, leaving the patent overly vague. hence why apple can have a patent on "3d rendering in a GUI". or "adding calender events to a scheduling system", which are arguably too simplistic, and things done since the dawn of computing.
There's a good reason apple never was able to even beat Microsoft in court in the 90's. Which is why it did surprise me when many of these patents won in California's court. however, that case is far from over, and we're seeing day by day Apple's "win" being chipped away. Many of the patents they won on are already temporarily invalidated. we've seen the total awarded changed and a new retrial on that ordered.
I don't necessarily blame apple. They are trying to protect what they've done, and block others from directly copying. But at times they seem very prohibitive in the industry rather than driving of it.
Just think about it. If Apple won their cases back in the 80s / 90's and effectively blocked al WIMP based GUIs', where would modern computing be today? everyone has built off eachother for so many years that the technologies are codependant on eachother.
