Why Apple Goes to Court

Critics generously attribute to Apple a number of motives, because of which it is constantly suing. In their opinion, Apple is suing to monopolize the market and sell its products at an inflated price. Drive competitors out of 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 Apple's real motive. Being logical in appearance, in reality, these opinions only play on emotions, exposing the complex technical, legal and ethical aspects of the problem in a negative light and force the reader to agree with the author that Apple is bad guys.

In fact, Apple has almost only one real motive for the courts, and more on that below.

Patent Roots

From a segregated user perspective, a lawsuit from one company to another is nothing more than an act of aggression. Gadget lovers sometimes feel like children whose parents swear in the kitchen. All they want at this moment is for this hassle to end soon.

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

Moreover, the patent lawsuit for each company is only part of a much larger program to protect innovation. An innovative company invests in development and research, smart people solve complex problems, and give rise to new ideas. If the idea is original, then it is expressed as a patent application registered with the national patent offices of the respective country. And if you do not protect your achievements in law, then in the whole process for the company there will be no sense.

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 excessive aggressiveness, while at the same time accepting the inefficiency of some other companies for their honesty.

In particular, critics believe that small things cannot be patentable - unlike something fundamental. They also believe that only functionality can be patentable, but not design and not look-and-feel. In reality, according to current US laws, even little things can become 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 design, and will not sue the infringers of these patents, then your competitors will do it. This is how the system works.

I admit, no one likes the current patent system. We all dream about the day when the patent system will be honest, rational and will maximize innovation. But companies supplying products right now have no privilege to dream. They either survive or die under current rules.

This is especially true for Apple, because Apple makes onetelephone. And if sales of this phone are banned for violation of a patent, the company will be almost destroyed within one day. Compare this situation with Samsung, which produces a million phones, and in addition it sells refrigerators, televisions, camcorders and a number of other products.

The process of protecting innovation is important to Apple insofar as 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 at all

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

Some dying companies are desperate for money. Scratching through the guts, they find that some intellectual property - a legacy of former glory - can be turned into capital that they so desperately need. Most likely Kodak and Yahoo would be a good example of companies that are suing because of this.

Others crave retribution. And they are suing because someone sued them. For example Khe-khem- ... Sung! This is the boxer's basic strategy: as soon as your opponent hit, immediately launch a deafening counterattack - this will break his morale.

Other companies, at the same time, simply want to monetize their developments. People actively use their ideas, and they would not mind getting what they owe. For Microsoft, for example, this is one of the main motives.

There are also speculations. Patent trolls invest in the purchase of research companies at random, and then prey on patent infringers in the hope of making more profit than the process will cost. Or another form of speculation, namely, that a tiny company sees itself as a competitor, succeeding in using some idea, which some courts may recognize as a violation of the patent of this crumbs. And naturally, they also want to bite off a piece of the pie. Apple often has to deal with this type of lawsuit.

However, none of these motives is what drives Apple.

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, processing 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 their own products do. In other words, Apple’s innovation development and advocacy program is struggling to push the industry into a similarity.

All these claims, the subject of which are existing products, are inherently aimed at preserving future products. These lawsuits are preventive and their main goal is not to profit from the lawsuit in itself, but to influence the process of future decisions of competitors.

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

At one end of the “product similarity spectrum” are companies producing virtually 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 exact opposite. For companies that produce such products, the brand preferences of customers and their loyalty to a particular brand, makes it possible to put a higher price, while providing a certain set of qualities specific to a particular company. An example is Vermicelli Rollton or Toyota Prius. (in the original, McDonald's Big Mac is used as an example, because in the USA there are a lot of fast food chains offering similar sandwiches - approx. translations) For

almost every product, there is a struggle between branding and commoditization. There are companies like Nike that claim their shoes and brand are unique, and so you pay a high price for a high class. And there are dozens of companies whose message is the opposite: our shoes are no worse than Nike, but much cheaper!

A few years ago, Lego condemned the Chinese toy company Tianjin Soko , because its Soko-cubes too closely resembled Lego-cubes. No, they were not compatible - it was impossible to stick a Soko cube instead of Lego, and moreover, Tyanjin developed the idea by developing a slightly different color scheme and his own unique figures of heroes. But Lego won the process and Tyanjin had to curtail activity.

What Soko Cubes did was commododization, depersonalization of the industry. Soko would win the competition at the expense of price. Lego, on the contrary, wanted to brand the industry in order to compete due to 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 brand value list. 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 “do everything in a row” companies (such as Google), and on the other, 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.

This is not the case with Apple, which is a specialist in the field. They only produce products that stand out radically, firmly attached to the brand, and part of their strategy is to combat the forces of depersonalization.

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