Rampant Intellectual Pickpocketing

-
This article was first published by dmcityview.com

Stealing is wrong. Right after we teach children to share, we have to teach them sharing doesn’t mean taking what’s not yours. At that age theft means taking someone else's toys, bike, or seat in the family van, but as you get older it takes on all types of different meanings. Stealing someone’s bike or wallet is an obvious concrete form of theft, poaching someone’s girlfriend or taking credit for someone else’s work… that misappropriation of an entirely different order. In these smaller examples it is obvious a wrong has been committed, it’s not until you get industry scale larceny that culpability becomes blurry. Case in point, the entire smartphone market is a disgusting mess of pilfered ideas.
This fall, one of the biggest cases of intellectual property theft went before the supreme court. After years of battling in lower level courts Apple has finally got it's day in the highest court in the land to excuse Samsung of pirating key aspects of the iPhone starting in 2011. Specifically Apple believes Samsung lifted the iPhone’s round corners, outside case design, and grid layout of applications. To be fully informed one must know Samsung has for years been manufacturing hardware for Apple so copying and pasting the iPhone design would not be a hard heist to pull off, but the iPhone physical design is not the most original idea.
Intellectual property cases are among the stickiests crimes to adjudicate. Apple holds a great deal of patents on iPhone and its design, but also an incredible cache of prior art and similar products existed prior to its consumer release. Without going into ridiculous arguments about tablets being and smartphone like devices existing in decades of cinematic science fiction, practically every computer, laptop, and device with a screen has incorporated round edges, a hard durable outer case, and grid based applications have been a feature of graphical user interfaces for decades. The only real argument Apple has is its patents and Samsung having detailed iPhone design plans prior to launching its own smartphone line in 2011.
Patents are one of the worst double edge swords in modern society. Protecting product designs or original ideas is important to carving a niche in the modern marketplace, but at the same time virtually anything can be patented and a patent holder doesn’t even need to produce a product or be the first come with an idea to exercise their legal ownership of a concept. Apple obviously doesn’t fit into this crowd of litigious, silent patent trolls but this case is emblematic of the issue. Why does anyone get to plant a legal ownership flag on the concept of a personal electronic device with rounded corners? Looks at the edge of every surface in the room you’re currently in and you’ll discover nearly everything has a rounded corner.
If anyone should be upset it should be Motorola or Blackberry. Before Apple, Samsung or anyone became the king of the cellular mountain, these companies set the standard including rounded edges and screens with neatly laid out program icons. If anything this supreme court hearing should have happened eight years ago with the plaintiff being Blackberry. The iPhone is really nothing more than an intuitive Blackberry with a color screen you touch with your finger instead of a stylus.

Of course the hot potato of IP theft will continues to be passed around with Google unveiling its in-house designed and manufactured Pixel line of phones, and wouldn’t you know, the Pixel looks a lot like the iPhone… The vicious theft carousel goes round once more.

Patrick Boberg is a central Iowa creative media specialist. For more tech insights, follow him on Twitter @PatBoBomb

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FCC to the net neutrality rescue

-
This article was first published by  dmcityview.com In case you haven’t heard, the last couple of weeks have been pretty big concerning the future of the Internet. Net Neutrality, a term that means everything and nothing, depending on your web literacy, was for all intents and purposes cemented in the Federal Communications Commission’s book of regulations. The simple explanation on what this means to you is that the Internet will continue to be the fast-moving, cat meme-filled, pornography-laden super highway it has always been — i.e., no changes. The complicated explanation takes much concentration, so grab a cup of coffee and maybe a protractor because, seriously, this is important. At this point there’s no way around it — we all take the Internet for granted. It is the most important and intricate communication tool ever invented, and every time you turn on a web-enabled device you expect it to be there. Well, truthfully there is no “there” to it. The Internet isn’t a place,...
Read more

Tech Talk: Tune in to network TV, but for a fee

-
This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The rise of high-speed Internet and online streaming video over the last decade has definitely shaken the broadcast and pay TV business. While burgeoning Web technology has contributed to lower ratings and dipping revenues, it appears what the TV industry is most afraid of is a tool older than the medium itself, the antenna. Aereo , an online streaming video service, leases customers dime-sized antennas that retransmit locally broadcasted TV content over the Internet. This means someone living in Oregon can lease an Aereo antenna deployed in New York City and watch TV content hours before its broadcast in his or her actual time zone. The streaming video start-up has upset the broadcast TV industry so much, it’s scheduled to defend its legality before the United States Supreme Court in April. Broadcasters are challenging Aereo’s legal right to stream their content online without paying providers retransmission fees. Cable pro...
Read more

Continuing Education and the ISU Futures Forum

-
Image
Last Friday I had the unexpected pleasure of taking pictures for the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism's Future's Forum. A couple week's earlier I was given the photog assignment, but few details except for a handful of choice people to photograph. It wasn't until I showed up that I found out it was a Greenlee event (a school I have a little history with). It turns out the "Futures Forum" is a chance for current journalism students to hear from industry execs, ISU grads in the field and  current  students with unique intern experience. This year's panel was made of a senior editor at Better Homes & Gardens, an Ag magazine exec, an graduate who now works at ESPN and a student who recently interned for Rolling Stone and Maxim. For the majority of the forum I was looking for different photography angles, but after the M.C. held a cheer for the recently deceased and beloved professor, Barbara Mack, and announced the topic, my interes...
Read more