Andrea Monti

Apple’s (wrong) idea of giving ideas a “patentable” status keeps finding its way into the media’s mind. Whether this is a direct consequence or a side effect of a spin doctor’s devised strategy, doesn’t change the fact the the more and more journalists fell into this trap.

The latest example is a Vanity Fair column that accounts for the Samsung vs Apple patent trial. At a certain point the columnist writes:

Bit by bit, the new model for a Samsung smartphone began to look-and function-just like the iPhone. Icons on the home screen had similarly rounded corners, size, and false depth created by a reflective shine across the image. The icon for the phone function went from being a drawing of a keypad to a virtually identical reproduction of the iPhone’s image of a handset. The bezel with the rounded corners, the glass spreading out across the entire face of the phone, the home button at the bottom-all of it almost the same.

While, from a patent infringement’s perspective, the similarities of the physical appearance between the devices have some merit, the fact that both phones shared similar or even the same functionality has none. You can’t protect a software functionality as such, because only the relevant source code can: this is clear for legal scholars, not so for the outsider of the legal community.

But this lack of knowledge helps planting into the people’s mind the seed of the “give-idea-a-patent tree”. Once grown into politician’s mind (notoriously not so versed in the legal subtleties), this tree will likely offspring a poisoned fruit in the form of some new (case) law that will finally give Apple what it aggressively looks for: power over thought.

According to MacRumors, Apple commented the favourable trial verdict in the case against Samsung by stating:

We are grateful to the jury and the court for their service,” Apple told Re/code. “Today’s ruling reinforces what courts around the world have already found: that Samsung willfully stole our ideas and copied our products. We are fighting to defend the hard work that goes into beloved products like the iPhone, which our employees devote their lives to designing and delivering for our customers.

This statement is the latest iteration of a disturbing notion of intellectual property that Apple is pushing since the days of the notorious “trashcan trial“: ideas can and must by “owned” by somebody.

Neither patent law nor copyright law say so. On the contrary they clearly state that ideas as such cannot be legally protected. Nevertheless, by planting the “our ideas have been stolen” meme Apple is trying hard to make courts stretch the letter of the law until it can be enforced to ideas as such.

I am astonished by the inertia of the rest of the ICT companies (at least those companies who relies on Open Source components to design its products) in connection with this issue. True, there are more actual and urgent matters to deal with, but on the long term when Apple will finally succeed in having a court stating that ideas as such can be “own”, then it will be too late to complain.