Yesterday, Cupertino surprised everyone by throwing a bonafide legal temper tantrum about rival handset maker HTC’s alleged infringement on up to 20 Apple patents.
Although Apple is targeting HTC, the takeaway here is clear: Apple’s going after Android, HTC’s bread-and-butter. Google recognizes this, and is standing in solidarity with HTC.
As Apple fans, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture here. Competition is good for the consumer, and Android becoming a credible threat to the iPhone’s dominance will only make the iPhone cheaper and better for consumers in the long run.
There’s other aspects that make this sort of patent battle bad news for consumers though. The New York Times Bits blog asked some IP experts on the possible ramifications of the Apple-HTC patent dispute, and according to Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain, if Apple wins, we could see the courts order HTC to hit the kill switch on their Android phones, just like what happened in the TiVo/EchoStar lawsuit of 2004.
“The judge simply ordered EchoStar to connect to the DVR boxes via the Web and destroy the functionality,” Zittrain explained. “Patent law is a completely different universe online. That means if the court were to side with Apple and issue an injunction that insists HTC kill the phone, or at least some of its functionality, they easily could.”
What’s the big deal, you might ask? Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander: Apple may well prevail in this lawsuit, but Apple is also being sued over patent infringement by Nokia. In fact, as the mobile marketplace becomes more and more crowded, a lot of handset makers are suing each other, trying to determine how much their patents are actually worth in a court of law.
The point is, if Apple is capable of getting HTC to hit the kill switch on their Android phones in court, eliminating violated patents like, say, multitouch…. the exact same thing could happen to Apple down the road. An utterly broken US patent system, thousands upon thousands of overly broad user interface patents and dozens of ultra-competitive companies suing each other is a bad scene for all consumers.
Perhaps Eric Von Hippel, a professor at the Sloan School of Management, said it best: “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. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”
