It's not just a protection of the Apple brand and the product that they call an iPhone, it's a patent on rounded corners, buttons, applications, layout,.. Basically the whole burger and the temperature you put the grill on.
No - it's a patent on stuff that looks and behaves like an iPhone on a device that basically amounts to an iPhone.
Windows Phone looks a lot different to an iPhone - and they've never been sued by Apple over it.
I'd argue that Windows' Phone's live tiles is actually a really neat innovation - an innovation that wouldn't have been necessary had Microsoft been able to just copy the Apple 4x4 grid of rounded icons.
Apple having the patent on their 4x4 grid of icons on a smartphone doesn't just protect Apple's innovation of laying out the screen like that (let's remember the PDAs before it were miniature desktops and the nokia phones had hideous text menus or circular scroll menus - when the iPhone came on the market the 4x4 desktop with side-scrolling pages was unique in the market) - but not only did Apple protect their innovation, they encourage their competitors to innovate themselves.
As a consumer, I win - I now have the choice of choosing the innovation from Apple (4x4 with side-scrolling to get to apps) or the innovation from Microsoft (the live tiles and vertical scrolling).
And if it was up to Apple, I would not be able to buy a Galaxy SII anymore.
I'm sure that's the case. But in the world we currently live in, Apple doesn't set the law.
Government created markets rarely work.
The patent market isn't a government "created" market. It's a government "enabled" market.
The government aren't giving artificial value to ideas - people want to be able to buy and sell them - the government is merely enabling people to trade the items that they want at the prices that they want.
It discriminated against SamSung in favor of Apple,.
No it didn't. The government didn't decide the outcome of that case.
The value of the patent is not weighed in the brilliance of the idea. The value is how much can I sue for or how long can I protect the product I invested in from competition.
The value of the patent is whatever the market decides is it's value, Maddus. The government doesn't tell Apple to patent things. It doesn't tell Microsoft what the value of Skype's patents are, or tell Motorola to sell patents to Google at $15 each.
Big damages are only awarded for big infringements. Apple got $1bn not because their idea was really clever - but because Samsung swindled $1bn of value from Apple by stealing their research and incorporating it into their product without asking or paying Apple for it.
If I made the evildictaitor-phone that looked like an iPhone, Apple could sue me for it. But unless my phone happened to sell hundreds of millions of units, Apple would only get a small amount of money out of me for it, because my infringement would be small compared with Samsung's.
The value of the patent is whatever the market decides. Get this through your head. It is capitalism that drives the patent market, not the government. And the government preventing patents is the same as the government closing down the market for patents.
You can't have it both ways. If the government are a big pile of idiots who get in the way of market capitalism, how come you keep wanting the government to intervene to close down the market?
