| That assumes that infringement and innovation happens in a vacuum for Google. If Google came out of a rain forest in South America and just happened to have produced an iPhone with no human exposure in 2008 -- then sure I'd say maybe it was obvious. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum for anybody. Apple didn't come out of a rain forest in South America and make an iPhone. They were exposed to previous innovation by MITS Altair, Xerox Star, Bell Labs Unix, Microsoft, Acorn, Commodore Amiga, Palm, Motorola, Nokia, and even some of their own previous work (NeXT, Newton). Innovations are judged as obvious or not in the context of the innovations that came before, not in the context of a primitive tribe. Besides that, functional patents don't cover Patent discussions frequently get out of hand because a lot of issues get conflated. Some of the issues that should really be considered separately: 1. Overly-broad patents that effectively cover general ideas rather than specific inventions. 2. Non-novel patents that cover topics essential to computer science, covered by expired patents, and/or previously documented by academic papers whose authors are not associated with the patent. 3. Obvious patents that cover simple techniques used by everyone but nobody else patented because actual practitioners considered them public knowledge and/or too trivial to patent. 4. Patent terms that are ridiculously out of sync with the pace of technology. The arguments I've read that led me to my current position on software patents are far too lengthy to summarize in a single post, but if you want to understand where I'm coming from, read What Technology Wants[0] by Kevin Kelly, along with the collected works of Pamela Jones, et. al. on Groklaw. [0] Kelly makes some untenable logical leaps in nonessential arguments in the first few chapters, but the core ideas (that innovation does not occur in a vacuum, that most inventions are independently invented in parallel, and that innovation practically has a life of its own) are well-presented and defended. |