When Modern Business Practices Attack!
- Daniel Chapman (Idea & Commentary) & Chris Suico (Artwork)
I though I would do a nice little "what if?" this week. What if companies in the past had been as legally aggressive as modern companies are today.
I was sifting through the news looking for something interesting to do a comic on, and the major theme that kept coming up just about everywhere that I looked was that modern companies, particularly IT companies are spending more and more on holding other companies back via legal and political means.
The implication here is that would then seem to mean that the money used on legal affairs is no longer available to go towards research and development and pushing their own products forward. Anecdotally at least, There certainly is more new legal news than new product/feature news.
Which bring up two questions - Are patents working like they should, to protect inventors and encourage innovation, and also why is the software, and particularly mobile arena's so heated whereas other industrial sectors are not.
To answer the first question, I think we need to start with the second.
When the idea of the patent was first propagated, the industrial revolution was already well underway, and most of what we could call "foundation" inventions - fire, the lever, the wheel, gears, springs, ore smelting and so on - were already common knowledge, and thus out of the reach of patents. As a result, most of the patents in the analogue world are for higher level inventions, and difficult to infringe upon without deliberately copying an invention.
In the digital world however, we are embarking on a completely new technological path, and so those foundational technologies are still being discovered and, unfortunately, patented like wildfire, meaning that it is almost impossible to make a modern mobile or software product and not infringe on someone:s patent somewhere accidentally.
Added to that is how patent lawyers have wised up that clear specific patents are bad, and broad vague patents that cover a lot more than the actual invention make it much easier to sue everyone over.
Even further is how in the digital world, things are much more absolute and clear cut than the analogue world so often there is only one "right" way to do something, or at the very least there is an absolutely most efficient and effective method to perform a given task. Should your company happen to stumble upon this method and patent it, then your competition can never have an optimal product without paying you.
If we look at analogue discoveries as an inverted pyramid, each discovery leads to an expansion of ideas and more opportunities in that area, then digital tech is often the opposite, with each discovery leading to further refinement and optimization of a concept until the best method of approaching a problem is reached.
Let's take mobile phone design as an example.
It is no coincidence that smart phones and tablets are becoming more and more similar. Designers are searching for the holy grail design that provides the best interface for the widest range of people. There will be such a design, and Apple is arguably the one who has come the closest so far. Once we reach this optimal design - the most user-friendly, yet powerful interface - then there will be little room to maneuver for the companies that have not patented or licensed it. The only step they can really take is to aim for a different product category entirely.
One could argue that analogue world also has absolutes, such as the most economic car engine, but the difference is that in analogue it is almost impossible to measure and predict accurately enough to bring about that absolute, whereas in the digital world, measurement, analysis, testing and prediction are all already done in absolute steps, so fine tuning is much easier.¬ (Note that this will change in some areas as we digital-ize the world such as we are doing with car engines now)
Getting back on track, we have seen two important points that make patents in the digital era a liability more than a benefit - The digital world works in absolutes and innovation involves constant refinement not expansion. This means that any patent on a digital concept can potentially completely stop anyone else from innovating, or even being competitive on that concept.
So, and I am pretty sure I am preaching to the choir here, the answer to our first question above is clearly a no, even without getting into some of the arguments against software patents specifically.
The saddest part about all this is that the real losers here are us, as every dollar spent on stopping others from innovating is a dollar not spent on actually innovating and providing a better future.
I did the course for better understanding of servers nothing else...i have done ccna,ccnp...now preparing for ccie security 
and it's working like a charm. I find Linux very useful because it gives more life to older computers...
