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The Apple / HTC patent suit

March 4th, 2010 07:35 UTC by John ·

Following on from the news that Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement, Dave Winer links to a very thorough post by John Gruber about software patents, which quotes from a post by Tim Bray. Gruber’s post is perhaps the most thoughtful I’ve read on the problems in today’s system, and I wanted to point out a few excerpts:

From Tim Bray:

I’m having trouble seeing the benefit to society in granting patents on something that could never possibly be done secretly. I also think that to get a patent, an invention should include innovation both in conception and implementation.

From John Gruber:

To me, “user interface” patents are hand-in-hand with “business method patents” as examples of things which, no matter how innovative or original, ought not be patentable. They’re idea patents.
. . .
Copying ideas is how progress is made. It’s copying implementations that is wrong (and illegal). Admittedly there are gray areas, and reasonable people can disagree about whether some specific instances cross that line. But HTC’s phones are not copies of the iPhone. The Nexus One is without question highly influenced by the iPhone, both in terms of physical form factor and the Android software from Google. But it is also without question not a clone.
. . .
Great ideas make the world better. Apple can rightly expect to benefit greatly from the ideas embodied by the iPhone, but they can’t expect to reap all of the benefits from those ideas. That’s the nature of implementing insanely great ideas. The bar has been raised, and, yes, Apple did most of the lifting.

Both posts are well worth a read in full.