Apple and Samsung's legal fight is patently ridiculous

As someone who makes a living by selling the fruits of my intellectual labour, I probably don’t need to declare that I have a particular bias when it comes to discussions of intellectual property  – I think it has value. I think a fair price for fair work is a universal principle that applies whether that work is digging a ditch, building a house or implementing an idea. Originality is not easy.

That said, I object when intellectual property laws are used to stifle creativity. The case of the flautist from rock band Men At Work using a snippet of “Kookaburra” and being dragged through the courts and accused of plagiarism, for instance, was a travesty.

And I object when trivial ideas are defended as if they are revolutionary. For example, amazon.com and its ‘1-Click’ technology, which basically takes you straight to the checkout rather than to a shopping cart. It’s the digital equivalent of the 12 Items Or Less lane at Coles, but Amazon extracts a pound of flesh from every online retailer that uses it.

Or, and this is getting closer to my point, Apple’s ‘Slide To Unlock’ on the iPhone. Every mobile phone ever built has had a ‘lock’ feature, and every mobile phone ever built has had some mechanism by which it was ‘unlocked’. If you’re going to build a phone around a touch interface, that mechanism is either going to be a tap or a slide. How can you patent something that basically comes down to a coin-toss?

But there it is. ‘Slide To Unlock’ is one of the patents Apple is defending most fiercely in its suits against Samsung. It has already won a similar suit against HTC, whose phones now require a tap to unlock. Heads or tails.

On the other hand, ‘Apple Data Detectors’ are not trivial.

I first saw ADD demonstrated in 1996, while Apple was still developing a next-generation operating system under the code name ‘Copland’ (after the composer, not the Stallone film). I first used it as a plug-in with Mac OS 8 (when it didn’t actually work all that terribly well, truth be told – it wasn’t in Mac OS 9). It’s a technology with a long history.

This feature recognises useful things like dates, email addresses and phone numbers, and offers the user actions they may like to take with them. Copious evidence has been presented at trial demonstrating that both Samsung and Google recognised that this feature, as implemented on the original iPhone, was a killer feature and something Android needed. Android now has a strikingly similar feature: tap on a phone number and your phone offers to dial it; tap on a date, and you can add it to the calendar.

Not surprisingly, Apple called foul, and has won case after case proving that its invention was pinched. But unlike the judge in its case against HTC, the judges in the cases against Samsung and Motorola (a proxy for Google) have not granted injunctions. They can see the importance of the technology, and have said Apple must negotiate licensing deals.

And here is where the story takes a turn for the surreal. Samsung in particular is now keen to argue that ADD is an obvious feature, hardly innovative, and has little to no monetary value. This argument, remember, comes after it has avoided an injunction on the basis that the feature is essential. Not to mention having spent untold millions of dollars defending its use of the thing. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

Apple, for its part, doesn’t want to negotiate licensing with a figurative gun to its head. Having been ordered to the table, its bargaining position is weakened – if it refuses whatever terms Samsung offers, will it risk the wrath of the court? Might Google and Samsung be allowed to continue using what has been proven to be copied technology for free simply by refusing to offer what Apple deems a fair price? They have little incentive to do otherwise.

We are, as they say, through the looking glass here. Apple invented something – no one denies that now – and risks losing it not in spite of the fact that it’s good, but because it’s good.

And that’s absurd.

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order