Comments on: 200+ Patents on the iPhone, but Does Apple Really Need Them?

By: Code Monkey Ramblings

Code Monkey Ramblings — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 01:12:48 +0000

Apple only has itself to blame for its past

Ohhhh boy… ure, the Mac OS was light years ahead of Windows 1.0, and it took Microsoft until Windows 3.1 or even Windows 95 to get to near feature parity. Did that translate into the immense marketshare and “big profits”…

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:01:58 +0000

Good point about big and small companies. Apple has a history of ripping off the big, slow guys as much as the little guys. Much of the iPhone was taken from LG, to cite another example.

By: Mark Blafkin

Mark Blafkin — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:54:25 +0000

Richard, you’re definitely right on the Xerox point. I chose not to get into the history of how that particular company squandered its investment (from a corporate POV) in R&D, because it was time I didn’t have… That said, the point I was trying to make was that the GUI and mouse-based computer controls are the kind of innovations that can only be protected by patents. Copyright and trade secrets are not enough in that context.
Your final point about “the first big company to steal ideas from a small company gets exclusive rights” is an interesting one. I’m not sure I would call Xerox a small company (then or now), but patents are more critical for small businesses than large ones. That is why we spend so much of our time at ACT advocating for small innovators to protect and defend their innovations.

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 03:15:05 +0000

Xerox PARC did patent much of the work they did. I know for a fact they filed patents on Ethernet, and it was necessary for early Ethernet vendors to pay them a fee of $1000 to build adapters. The fee also bought a block of 16 million addresses.
Some of the overlapping windows stuff goes back to Doug Englebart at Stanford in the 60s, so they obviously weren’t able to patent all of it.
Apple seems to have a unique perspective on IPR: they believe that the first big company to steal ideas from a small company gets exclusive rights. It’s odd, but they have lots of supporters.

By: Noel Le

Noel Le — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 01:07:31 +0000

Richard, I see the philosopher in you.
Check out the book, Open Innovation, by Professor Henry Chesbrough. http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/08/print/003338.html.
Chesbrough talks of the early tech industry days, when firms like Xerox and IBM undertook massive R&D, but if the resulting work did not tie directly into their revenue chain, it would simply sit on the shelf. However industry practices have changed. Such R&D would be patented and licensed to external firms today, thereby benefitting the industry and consumers.
If Chesbrough went back in time, he would tell the execs at Xerox Parc to make sure and patent their work and then get these guys, Gates and Jobs, to sign a license

By: Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:10:32 +0000

I agree with you on the basic point regarding the importance of patents and Tim Lee’s Kool-Aid drinking habits, but I’d like to correct the record on the Mac vs. Windows question. The truth is that both Apple and Microsoft stole overlapping windows from Xerox, who had used it on a variety of experimental workstations such as the Alto before productizing it on the Star and the 1100. There was no question of Apple patenting this invention because it was Xerox’s from the beginning.
Patents being out of the question, Apple tried to do the next best thing and copyright their implementation. That didn’t help, of course. And the look-and-feel case was a non-starter because of Xerox.
Early versions of MS Windows had tiled windows because they were afraid of impinging on Xerox’s patents for overlapping windows, but they worked out some kind of deal as I recall.
Both Apple and Microsoft hired people from Xerox to do their windowing: MS got Charles Simonyi, the architect of Word and later of Windows, and Apple got Larry Tessler.