Exhibit 42,517 of how deeply government is embedded in the “free market”: Apple just sicced its lawyers on HTC, an Android phone manufacturer, charging that it violated a gazillion Apple patents. Why HTC and not Google, which came up with Android?
[Harvard Law Prof. Jonathan Zittrain] believes Apple is simply going after a less powerful company first, one with much smaller pockets than Google.“It clearly involves some form of litigation strategy of picking off the weaker members of the herd first,” Mr Zittrain said. “They can always add Google to the suit later on.”
Here’s the problem. It’s one thing if you’re talking about property like, say, a bicycle. The government’s involved — cops & courts — but at least it’s pretty straight forward to decide if your bike’s been stolen from you. But once you start treating ideas as if they are property? Let the games begin! Now companies can try to beat competitors with lawyers instead of engineers.
After decades of players tweaking the economy’s rules around patents to stack the deck in their favor, MIT Prof. Eric Von Hippel sums up the end result:
“It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it,” he said. “The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”
I’m sure the government-hating Republicans will get right on it…
What’s particularly galling about Apple playing these bullshit games is that a lot of the core ideas of Apple’s first operating system came from another company — Xerox. If Xerox had protected its intellectual property many years ago the way Apple is doing it now, Apple wouldn’t exist. Or as Bill Gates supposedly said to Steve Jobs when Jobs accused him of stealing from Apple when Microsoft developed Windows:
Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
