Ars Technica: If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone

If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone

According to his official biographer, Steve Jobs went ballistic in January 2010 when he saw HTC's newest Android phones. "I want you to stop using our ideas in Android," Jobs reportedly told Eric Schmidt, then Google's CEO. Schmidt had already been forced to resign from Apple's board, partly due to increased smartphone competition between the two companies. Jobs then vowed to "spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong."

Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. The iPhone didn't emerge fully formed from Jobs's head. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades—much of which occurred outside of Cupertino.

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I'm pretty impressed that a publication as usually favorable in its Apple coverage as Ars is calling them out on this. The article isn't detailed to the point where people familiar with the subject will learn much (just two pages), but I think this may make it easier to approach for people that have stayed away from this topic. Obviously an opinion piece, but worth a read.

EDIT: And of course I posted this to the wrong forum somehow. If a mod could move this to the Rumors and Reports forum, that would be great.

I think this sentence sums it up nicely:

This pattern of combining and refining of previous innovations is the rule, not the exception, in innovative industries.

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It's impossible to develop a product that doesn't reflect the design of other products.

Look at two obvious example: notifications in iOS 5 are a blatant copy of Android's system (you can't really argue that there was no influence here) just like Google appears to have adopted pinch-to-zoom after seeing it on the iPhone (although pinch-to-zoom appeared earlier than the iPhone, as the article mentioned, Google no doubt adopted it because it proved successful for Apple).

I like this quote - it sums up my feelings:

The important question isn’t whether such “stealing” occurred, it’s whether we want to live in a world where it’s illegal. Do you want to live in a world where only Apple is allowed to make phones with pinch-to-zoom capability (and dozens of other features) until 2027? I sure don’t.

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vansmith said:

I like this quote - it sums up my feelings:

The important question isn’t whether such “stealing” occurred, it’s whether we want to live in a world where it’s illegal. Do you want to live in a world where only Apple is allowed to make phones with pinch-to-zoom capability (and dozens of other features) until 2027? I sure don’t.

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It's a tricky thing, patent law... On the one hand, there's something to be said for the idea that patents have run amok, especially where software is concerned. And nobody wants to see one company have a monopoly over anything...

On the other hand, I don't think anybody can deny that Apple poured tons of time and money into iPhone research and development. To watch competition benefit from that research without paying for it, and bring alternatives to market in record time thanks to not having to figure everything out -- that's just not right either.

Maybe some kind of compromise is needed. Fewer years of "exclusive rights" combined with some regulations governing licensing to competitors...

Shikarnov said:

On the other hand, I don't think anybody can deny that Apple poured tons of time and money into iPhone research and development. To watch competition benefit from that research without paying for it, and bring alternatives to market in record time thanks to not having to figure everything out -- that's just not right either.

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You could replace Apple with any company's name & iPhone with any other device and that statement would be just as valid. Let's remember that Apple has "borrowed" just as much as anyone else has.

vansmith said:

You could replace Apple with any company's name & iPhone with any other device and that statement would be just as valid. Let's remember that Apple has "borrowed" just as much as anyone else has.

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And yet, somehow, before the iPhone, smartphones were mostly Symbian devices or Blackberries used by geeks or and some business people. After the iPhone, the market for smartphones exploded. Saying Apple is the same as any other company in this space is being disingenuous. Maybe Apple's hands aren't squeaky clean, but before them nobody could bring smartphones to the masses. And after, everybody suddenly can? I find that unlikely - and unfair.

It's not disingenuous in the slightest. Apple has had tremendous success in bringing the smartphone to the consumer level (I don't want to say "to the masses" because that would imply that others had tried and I don't think makers such as RIM really did). To say however that Apple is somehow unique suggests that Apple did not build on the work of others (they did and still do) and that Apple is somehow single handily responsible for the proliferation of devices in the consumer market (which is not true either). Apple brought the smartphone to a different market, building on technologies either designed by others or on technologies that they had developed (which had also been built upon). They definitely played a major role but not the only one. And let's remember that being first doesn't mean that everything you do afterwards is unique. The way you've worded your argument sure makes it seem like you think that.

On a more technical level, if it wasn't for the Mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon, you wouldn't have an iOS or OS X kernel. If it wasn't for the KDE project, you wouldn't have WebKit (a fork of KHTML) and thus, no Safari. If it wasn't for Michael Sweet, Apple wouldn't have CUPS and thus, no printing subsystem. On top of all this, 90% of the software used in Apple's networking and server related toolset was developed by the open source community. Thus, Apple owes a lot to the work of others, whether it be actual code contributions or it be inspiration. To say otherwise is being disingenuous.

You make fair points. However, everything throughout the course of history is built upon what came previously. I don't believe that invalidates the uniqueness of - and the interest in protecting - every good idea, or combination of ideas, that came about since the invention of the wheel. But that's why patents expire, so we can protect innovations without starting from Square One every time.

It seems to me that Apple introduced new ideas or new implementations of old ideas with the iPhone in 2007 -- not the least of which was capacitive mobile screens, multi-touch software and interfaces on mobile devices, phones without keyboards, etc. And what happened after they showed the world how it was done? Competition, using Apple's own ideas, started cropping up within a year.

At this very moment I'm working on a new method that I'm hoping to sell some day, and it scares the H**l out of me that some big fish player is going to be able to steal my work - will benefit from my own personal investments - and nobody's going to care because microprocessors were in invented in 1971, and HTML in 1994, and thus my idea is obviously standing on the backs of giants and so isn't worthy of protection from theft.

Welcome to the world of technology .

Yes, Apple has done some innovative things over the years and there is no doubt in my mind that people have borrowed things from their products. It's something you'll have to contend with if people like your own work and want to make something similar. It's frustrating sometimes.

Shikarnov said:

At this very moment I'm working on a new method that I'm hoping to sell some day, and it scares the H**l out of me that some big fish player is going to be able to steal my work - will benefit from my own personal investments - and nobody's going to care because microprocessors were in invented in 1971, and HTML in 1994, and thus my idea is obviously standing on the backs of giants and so isn't worthy of protection from theft.

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The issue here is that Apple is one of the biggest perpetrators of this form of "theft," but they only seem to think it's a bad thing when other people do it - and of course, they have the money and legal muscle to drive smaller competitors to their knees even when the claim is questionable at best (black, rectangular tablets... really?). Technology builds on other technology: if you want to beat the competition, I think implementing the idea in a way customers like more is a much more favorable method than using patent law to try to prevent anyone with a smaller bank account from ever making something similar to (or an improvement that incorporates) your idea and stifling progress.

^ I do agree with that. And I don't advocate for patents which last for long periods of time. But there does need to be some period of time which is protected, otherwise what's the point?

My idea pertains to social media and will probably be extremely attractive to the likes of Twitter or LinkedIn. I have no incentive to even build it if, after I work tirelessly to bring it to market, and before I can even get 1000 customers, Twitter puts their legions of developers on the case to duplicate the technology overnight (after I've, of course, shown them how it's done) and put me out of business.

If that's not stifling progress, then I don't know what is.

How long should a protected period be? I don't know. I'd be happy with two to three years. At least then, I'd have some time to roll out my idea, and if some big fish wants to use it, they'd have to buy me out.