Patent silliness

Two recent rulings had suggested a measure of sanity in the smartphone patent wars — federal judge Richard Posner put a decisive end to the two-year squabble between Apple and Motorola Mobility (now owned by Google),denying both an injunction on the other’s sales,saying that “neither has shown that damages would not be an adequate remedy”. Only recently,Oracle’s lawsuit against Google,for having cloned application programme interfaces used by Java to build its Android platform,had been dismissed entirely.

Software qualifies for both patent and copyright protection — and patent-litigation has now become a cumbersome,innovation-sapping exercise. Each company amasses an arsenal of patents,and there is an entire industry of patent trolls,whose sole occupation is to search for evidence of any infringement. Every tiny little feature,like “slide to unlock” or an inbuilt spell-check,has been declared Apple’s own,which it zealously seeks to guard from Samsung’s predations. While some of these may be genuinely new,the idea of owning the spell-check in this day and age is absurd. Besides,it turns its face against the very nature of technological advance — imitating and bettering. The patents skirmishes are,of course,business by another name. These legal injunctions are meant to keep the competitor’s products off the market until they lose that space altogether. For the time being,the war over intellectual property is going to be as vigorous as the competition to develop the next new thing.