The Apple Effect

Apple's Q2 profits where $6.0 billion, tack on another $1.05 billion in the copyright suit that Apple won on Friday. Couple that with a stock surge that added about $15 Billion in value to the company and the fact that copyright law may still allow the judge to bump up the penalty to $3.15 billion and you got a pretty good week for the largest company in the world. Some of the intellectual property in the Apple litigation involved things like pinch-to-zoom, tap-to-zoom, an inertial scrolling behavior that includes a "rubber band" effect at the end of a page, and other features many consumers have come to expect from a quality smartphone user interface. Google's free Android OS (watch out Google, you know the Apple legal team is eyeing you) or yes, even Microsoft's latest Windows Phone implement some of these features. So some of these complaints could be aimed at competitors other than Samsung, but few of these other companies actually make any money "copying" Apple's mobile device ideas. Here are the specific patents that Samsung has been found infringing upon.

What are the repercussions here? If Apple were enforcing patents on ground breaking and unique new inventions that had taken several years and stacks of cash to develop and if, like in pharmaceutics, Apple required several years of market monopoly to recoup those investments, then the idea of the richest and most powerful company in the world suing a competitor over such feature infringement might not be met with such revolt. Raise your hand if you think that's what's happening here. Yeah, me neither.

What's going on here is this; The richest and most powerful company in the world, is suing their sole profitable competitor for imitating a few cool features that reflect a very small portion of the smartphone experience, features that shouldn't have been patentable in the first place.

Patent 087: A Rectangular White Phone - Seriously? 

Patent 677: A Rectangular Black Phone - Hmmm... must be a larger model...

Patent 305: Squarish App Icons - In the famous works of Jimmy Falon imitating Adam Sandler, "Who are the ad wizards who came up with that one?"

Apple has stacks and stacks of these ludicrous patients on file. One can only imagine that they probably have some that involve using electricity to power the phone, using a microphone and speaker to send and receive voice signals, and, of course, using a phone as a paperweight.

But take comfort Apple, if Microsoft, Cicso, IBM, and half a dozen other tech companies have taught us anything, it's that you don't need to keep coming up innovative and new ideas in order to stay on top of your industry. Oh wait-a-minute, nevermind.