The long, drawn out battle between Apple and the Android army stopped being reasonable a long time ago. Since 2010, the Cupertino, California company has launched lawsuit after lawsuit against HTC and Samsung over even the tiniest details in its software patents, details like the ability to swipe to unlock a smartphone on an HTC phone or the basic design of Samsung’s Galaxy tablet. Most recently, Apple successfully lobbied for a ban on Samsung’s new Galaxy Nexus phone in the United States over a feature that searches for information on the phone as well as the web. Apple told the judge that Samsung infringed on one of its patents, the judge ruled in Apple’s favor, and now Samsung has to remove the feature in order to bring the phone to market.Apple hasn’t won many allies in its campaign to keep competitors’ products off the market. In fact, it’s been cast as the tech industry’s biggest bully and an enemy to innovation. After all, Apple’s habit of suing competitors over seemingly insignificant patent violations keeps new features like Samsung’s quick search box out of consumers’ hands. Why? Because Apple thinks it’s stealing. “This kind of blatant copying is wrong,” the company said in a statement about the case, “And as we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.” This from the same company whose founder Steve Jobs used to rattle off Pablo Picasso’s “great artists steal” line with remarkable candor:Though the bullying seems to make sense on the surface, nobody’s really on board with Apple’s general litigation strategy. Earlier this summer, judges started throwing out Apple’s patent infringement cases since they couldn’t see how either side could prove it was harmed. And experts are just over the legal back and forth. “It’s a bad scene right now,” MIT innovation professor Eric von Hippel told The New York Times. “The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that's what society gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”What’s become increasingly apparent, however, is that Apple’s cutthroat approach works. With a $570 billion market cap and nearly $100 billion cash on hand, Apple’s become the most valuable company in the world over the course of the last decade, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. Of course, this comes at the cost of stomping on innovation, building its products in some of the world’s most oppressive factories and paying its retail employees terribly. But aren’t these kinds of strategies exactly how the world’s richest companies get so rich? And at the end of the day, isn’t the new iPad just amazing?
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It’s really sort of a brilliant strategy for the world’s most valuable tech company. Remember that Apple’s most innovative products are really just better versions of products that already existed. The iPod was hardly the world’s first portable mp3 player. It came to market years after dozens of other mp3 players failed to gain traction. The iPhone wasn’t the first touchscreen, GPS-enabled, Internet ready cell phone. Models like Motorola’s A1000 and Palm’s Treo were also years ahead of Apple, however lacked the simple, elegant design. So naturally, when Apple improved products on the market, it would want credit for those improvements. However, Apple’s aggressive pursuit of patent violations stretches way beyond getting credit. Apple’s been keeping Samsung and HTC’s devices from even going to market due to single software features for years now.
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