There have been 2 cases recently which are good examples of 2
different types of patent disputes that I believe should be seen quite
differently.
In one an Inventor went to MS with a technology, which MS rejected,
then replaced with it's own version. This is theft of IP, except that the
court overturned the verdict against MS for what appears to me to be
a strange reason.
In another case MS used an XML based system for documents. In this
system the documents could be customised by XML, MS got sued
successfully. I have seen nothing in this case to suggest that MS knew
about the technology or the patent, and I would think that this is fairly
obvious technology. (Note that I am not in possession of all facts
here, I am going on limited headlines)
1) If you develop anything these days you run the risk of developing
something that someone else has a patent on, you may not know
about this until you receive a letter of breach by the owner of the
patent. This is the nature of the world we live in.
2) If you develop something of any complexity you are no doubt going
to be using some existing technologies and expanding on them. Most
of these technologies are going to be public domain. Some are not and
you may not become aware of this until you get a letter.
3) Sometimes companies get approached by inventors offering
technology and have filed patents over such technology. Sometimes
this is technology that you believe is obvious or were already
considering and you believe their patent is not going to succeed or is
not going to stand up in court.
4) Sometimes companies get approached by inventors and offered
technology and decide that they are big enough to take on the little
guy and ignore the patents and steal the technology.
It looks like MS fell into case 1 on one and case 4 on another. Not that
I know enough to be certain.
It looks like Apple falls into case 2. Again this is not based on
complete knowledge.
What happens when you discover that you have used a technology
that has a patent over it?
If you believe the patent case will proceed at all you start negotiating
to license it. If you cannot reach an agreement that both parties
accept then you are likely to end up in court.
This is what is happening here.
I think that MS has faced this kind of situation on a few occasions
and so has Apple, and they will again.
For this kind of situation it is stupid to talk of Apple or MS not
innovating. All technology is based on other technology, innovation is
not development of technology from nothing, that is not possible.
But if a company knowingly takes technological developments of
others and claims that they invented them, then this is bad.
If you were to say claim that touch screens, or parental controls or window
organisers that show you all your open windows were your invention, or more
strangely l=invented by your users, when in fact they were in competitors product
for years then this would not be innovation, improvement of your product but not
innovation.
If you were offered a system to provide trial versions of software,
turned it down and built it yourself, when it was patented, then this
would be bad.
If you release an XML based document system not knowing that there
was a patent over part of it then this would be unfortunate for you,
and expensive, but not bad behaviour on your part.
But why claim that because Apple offers a way to browse images and
reduced size previews, and so do other companies that all of their
innovations are not to be acknowledged?
That'd be like saying that Bill Gates didn't write a BASIC interpreter
many years ago because MS just lost a patent case.
(OK not a complete innovation either, but significant historically)
Or like saying that anything MS does invent is not innovative because
they use the English language, and they didn't invent English.
