by nat-colley
Apple Sues HTC, the Maker of Google’s Nexus One Phone – NYTimes.com
1:41 pm in Law and Society by nat-colley
Apple Sues HTC, the Maker of Google’s Nexus One Phone – NYTimes.com.
It is one thing to actively protect your intellectual property that you invested a lot in and which gives you a competitive advantage. It is another to use the courts as a business strategy to slow down the competition. The solution to a competitive marketplace should be to be nimble, not to hire lawyers. Only time will tell what merit, if any, Apple really has going in this litigation, but in light of the Palm prior art, it looks like all they are doing is buying time.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/what-apple-vs-htc-could-mean/
“So why did Apple sue HTC and not Google? Mr. Zittrain believes Apple is simply going after a less powerful company first, one with much smaller pockets than Google.
“It clearly involves some form of litigation strategy of picking off the weaker members of the herd first,” Mr Zittrain said. “They can always add Google to the suit later on.”
Mr. Von Hippel also said that these lawsuits pointed to a bigger problem with the patent system. “It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it,” he said. “The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.””
