Apple is, Apparently, an Island

Apple has won over a billion dollars in damages. Not one of their patents was anything but the shape and user interface features on their phones and tablets. After decades of corporate PR convincing us that these companies can own vague shapes and ideas, that elements of a product are property unto themselves has taken its toll. We have been convinced that Apple is a poor little soul and big mean Samsung ruthlessly stole from them. Things like rounded corners and flat faceplates and bouncy icons and user gestures allowed Apple to claim over a billion dollars from a legitimate competitor. No technological components were stolen, no unique ideas copied. There were no fake iPhones were sold, and no one on earth confused the Samsung phones for iPhones. At no point did Apple lose money to Samsung in any way other than by Samsung selling a competing phone.

But this is the same culture where you own every song and sentence you write for 70 years after you die. This is the culture where you can patent obvious features in software like search bars and object coding. This is the culture where millions of iPhone owners cry out in joy that a company they don't buy products from is being punished for selling competing products, where they fight in forums and with friends with claims that Apple invented touch screens and phones and computers and sex.

This is the culture where an entire political party refuses to admit cooperation helped them be successful. We are officially an Objectivist culture, having convinced ourselves all success, all ideas have no precedence and are by right one person's forever.

Logic Priest

UPDATE:

Apparently I am not the only one suspicious of a jury getting through the pages of instructions and 700 questions and it appears my initial assessment that it was purely cultural was right. Lawyers over at Groklaw combined with strange interviews with the jurors have made it seem like the jury decided before and without the benefit of the instructions. They decided that because Samsung compared their products, was an Asian company and had not been "first" they must have copied and were deserving of punishment. Since patent law is not about punishment but compensation for theoretically lost business, this is already a break with the legal bindings on the jury. The fact that the foreman admits basically leading the jury around actually following instructions and another juror admits they had made up their minds on day one, despite evidence offered afterwards, the case looks weaker and weaker. Appeal is very likely now.

It just goes back to my claims above. Americans have become convinced by lobbyists and PR campaigns that you can own a vague idea and form. The jury ignored the Samsung patents and let this ridiculous idea of "stealing", combined with a healthy dose of racism taint their decision. They decided bouncy screens and jiggling icons are the property of the American company and that the Asian company just stole it and deserves to be punished for that. Copyright may be corrupt enough to allow such strange ideas of property and punitive damages, but patent law isn't, yet. As broken as patent law is, punitive damage and form are not part of it. Hopefully the appeals court will help cement the idea that you cannot patent basic functions, but only methods and inventions to do said functions.

Maybe, just maybe patent law can get the reforms it needs. Shorter terms, stricter requirements to start with.

Academics

PZ Meyers has a post and link up that is frankly upsetting. Yet another way the US is falling behind due to privatization: higher education. We all hear the crap about public education failing, and that now includes public universities. Republicans have pushed for school vouchers to gut the primary and secondary education of our country, now they funnel funds to over priced and under qualified for-profit schools like Devry and Pheonix, where graduation rates are terrible, hiring rates are worse, and they cost as much as an ivy-league school.

The over political nature of faculty jobs, the remaining funds universities have going to coach salaries and non academic president's salaries have led to good scientists and educators leaving the system to make money elsewhere. Even as the states and the fed cut primary and secondary education funds, even as states and the fed funnel money out of them to tax breaks and for-profit schools, we have science funding under attack. There seems to be an all out war on education, on science, on intelligence in general. The US lead the world in science and technology for years but now we have an entire political party who cuts funds from and even demonizes education and research, the basis of such leadership. They think that private corporations will advance the world? Even while the private corporations suppress inventions that threaten their monopolies and sue each other over vague patents to keep innovation out? It seems like every card is stacked against an intelligent generation. From kindergarden to a PHD it costs more and more for less, with no prospect of a good job or even the ability to start a new company, since it will be sued out of business the second a tech giant sees it as a threat, the US is headed for a new stone age. The oligarchical nature of the Republican party isn't just about making as much money from bribes and insider trading and outsourcing as possible, it seems to be actively working towards making a new peasant class, blindly following the conservative march towards destruction.

Logic Priest

Broken Patents, Google Saves the Day?

While Google is getting more and more involved in the patent wars that muddy up innovation in the tech industry these days, especially in defending Android and Android partners, they have helped by creating a patent search. For a few years now the Google patent search engine has given potential innovators and curious bystanders a way to effectively search the highly obfuscated patent system of the US, and now they offer a new feature: Prior Art search.

Assuming they don't start to muddy the results themselves, which they have avoided in ordinary searches for a decade now, this could be a way to navigate an over expansive patent system, at least until (if) it gets fixed. To make any technology or software these days seems likely to infringe on someone's broad and poorly defined patent, so this could be a way to work around it, as well as is possible with such a fucked up system. Hell, the US patent system let Apple patent a search bar and rounded edged rectangular phones. Patents are supposed to protect, for limited times innovative and non obvious inventions, not styles and features.

Logic Priest