Why Apple is going to court

Critics have generously attributed to Apple a number of motives for which it is constantly suing. In their opinion, Apple is suing to monopolize the market and sell its products at an inflated price. To oust competitors from the market or punish them for not thinking different. And of course, that all of this is part of Apple's big plan for global technical dominance .

But in reality, all these assumptions are not the real motive of Apple. Being logical in appearance, in fact, these opinions only play on emotions, exposing in a negative light the complex technical, legal and ethical aspects of the problem and force the reader to agree with the author that Apple are bad guys.
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In fact, Apple has practically only one real motive for ships, and more on that below.

The roots of patent courts

From the standpoint of users, a lawsuit from one company to another is nothing more than an act of aggression. Gadget lovers sometimes feel like kids whose parents swear in the kitchen. All they want at this moment is that this hassle is over as soon as possible.

However, the companies themselves see these meetings in a completely different way. To them, this looks like a family council, in which the courtroom is only a public place, where the difference of opinion can be settled by a third party in the formal process. And the result will be a decision that is binding on both parties (theoretically).

Moreover, a patent lawsuit for each company is only part of a much larger program for the protection of innovative developments. An innovative company invests in development and research, smart people solve complex problems, and generate new ideas. If the idea is original, then it is expressed in the form of a patent application registered with the national patent offices of the country concerned. And if you don’t protect your achievements legally, then there’s no point in the whole process for the company.

Blame the rules, not the player.

I noticed that most people who criticize the greedy Apple actually criticize the system itself. They criticize Apple because they take its skillful actions for being too aggressive, at the same time taking the incompetence of some other companies for their honesty.

In particular, critics believe that small things can not be patentable - in contrast to something fundamental. They also believe that only functionality can be patentable, but not design and not look-and-feel. In reality, according to the current laws of the United States, even small things can be the subject of a patent along with the design itself.

Yes, maybe they really should not be covered by the patent system, but at the moment it is. And if you do not patent all the details of the product, including the design, and will not sue the violators of these patents, then your competitors will do it. So the system is arranged.

I admit, nobody likes the current patent system. We all dream of the day when the patent system becomes honest, rational and will contribute to innovation as much as possible. But companies supplying products right now do not have the privilege to dream. They either survive or die by the current rules.

This is especially true for Apple, because Apple makes one phone. And if the sale of this phone is banned for infringement of a certain patent, the company will be almost destroyed within one day. Compare this situation with Samsung, which produces a million phones, and in addition sells refrigerators, televisions, video cameras and a variety of other products.

The process of protecting innovations is important for Apple to the extent that for them the question of life and death is whether they will be able to protect their achievements. And so far they have come out.

Why do companies sue

There are so many reasons for innovative companies to sue over patents.

Some fading companies are desperate for money. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, they find that some intellectual property — a legacy of past glory — can be turned into a much-needed capital for them. Most likely, Kodak and Yahoo would be a good example of companies that are suing because of this.

Others crave reckoning. And they are judged because someone condemned them. For example Khe-khem- ... Sung! This is the basic strategy of the boxer: as soon as your opponent hits, immediately conduct a deafening counterattack - this will break his morale.

Other companies, at the same time, just want to monetize their development. People are actively using their ideas, and they would not mind getting it due. For Microsoft, for example, this is one of the main reasons.

There are also speculations. Patent trolls invest in the purchase of research companies at random, and then prey on patent violators, hoping to make a profit more than the cost of the process. Or another form of speculation, which consists in the fact that a tiny company sees in front of itself a competitor succeeding in using a certain idea, which some courts may recognize as a violation of the patent of this crumb. And naturally, they also want to bite off a piece of cake. Apple often has to deal with claims of this type.

However, none of these motives is what Apple moves.

Why Apple Goes to Court

Apple's nightmare is a world in which all phones and tablets look and work the same, and people buy them, focusing solely on price, computing power, and the like.

Apple is suing in order to prevent competing products from looking, working and lying in the hands of the user in exactly the same way as her own products do. In other words, the Apple innovation and innovation protection program is struggling with the industry falling into general similarity.

All these claims, the subject of which are existing products, are inherently aimed at preserving future products. These claims are prophylactic and their main goal is not profit from the claim in itself, but the influence on the process of making future decisions among competitors.

Robert Dickerson Jr., a patent lawyer not involved in the Apple-Samsung process, said in an interview with the New Yore Times : “In the future, companies will think well about how similar to the products of competitors they want to make their products; in terms of the shape, size, design and atmosphere of the product, to the extent that they are similar or unlike to make icons. ”

At one end of the “product similarity spectrum” there are companies that produce almost identical goods — for example, oil or, say, sugar. Their products are ranked exclusively by price. On a separate barrel of oil you will not find a bright logo.

And at the other end of this spectrum are products that are their direct opposite. For companies that produce such products, brand preferences of customers and their loyalty to a particular brand, gives you the opportunity to put a higher price, while providing a certain set of qualities characteristic of a particular company. As an example, you can bring Vermicelli Rollton or Toyota Prius. (in the original, McDonald’s Big Mac is used as an example, because there are a lot of fast-food chains in the USA that offer similar sandwiches - approx. trans.)

For almost every product there is a struggle between branding and commoditization . There are companies like Nike who claim that their shoes and brand are unique, and therefore you pay a high price for a high class. And there are dozens of companies whose message is the opposite: our shoes are not worse than Nike, but much cheaper!

A few years ago, Lego sued the Chinese toy company, Tianjin Soco, because its Soko-cubes too closely resembled Lego-cubes. No, they were not compatible - it was impossible to stick the Soko cube instead of Lego, and moreover, Tiandzhin developed the idea by developing a slightly different color scheme and its unique figurines of the heroes. But Lego won the trial and Thianjin had to wind up.

What Soko Cubes did was the commoditization, the depersonalization of the industry. Soko would have won the competition for the price. Lego, on the contrary, wanted to brand the industry in order to compete with its brand and product differentiation.

This happens in almost every consumer goods industry and the mobile device market is no exception.

Apple is constantly at the top of the list of brand value. She achieves this by successfully combating the forces of depersonalization. An interesting fact about Samsung is that it plays on both sides. Being, on the one hand, one of the faceless companies “do everything in a row” (like Google), and on the other hand, it is no less successful in branding than in commoditization. This fact is one of the reasons for the great success of Samsung.

Of course, Samsung is an innovative company and of course, they copy ideas. They make both brand-focused products and typical, faceless products. They are universal, and at the same time do everything.

Not so with Apple, which is a narrow specialist in the field. They produce only radically distinguished, brand-bound products, and part of their strategy is to fight against the forces of impersonation.

And it is precisely because of this that Apple goes to court.