What Apple Versus Samsung Means For The Future Of Innovation

On November 21, 2013, a jury ruled that Samsung owed Apple more than $290 million in additional damages in its patent infringement lawsuit. This case–one in an ongoing series of trials–brought the total awards to Apple to about $930 million.  A jury last year had already ruled that Samsung had infringed on five Apple patents related to the iPhone’s design and functionality.

But according to Apple, the real issue in the case wasn’t about money and patents. “For Apple… this case has always been about innovation and the hard work that goes into inventing products that people love,” Apple said in a statement.

My question is:  “What will Apple’s victory really mean for user interface innovation in the long run?”

The Best Design for the Job

Now, the reason that Samsung copied Apple’s design should be obvious to anyone who has an iPhone. It works!

Samsung’s design infringements included the use of “swipe and motion” gestures, icon-based dashboards for individual apps, and even the ubiquitous “pinch and zoom” feature now used by many mobile devices when viewing images.

These design patterns are clearly the best available for devices with a small form factor. To put it simply, when you have a small screen and have to use two or three fingers to perform common actions, there’s only so much you can do. Apple created the best way to address these ergonomic issues, and these conventions are quickly becoming the standard for mobile devices going forward.

A Long History of “Stolen” Designs

So we’ve established that Apple has produced the best design for a mobile phone.. The question then becomes, “How much of such a design should be intellectual property assigned to a single company?”

If you look at the history of product design, the answer is not so clear-cut.

Apple itself lost a similar lawsuit in the past. The company filed a monumental copyright lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988, charging Microsoft with not only copying the Macintosh windows-based operating system, but even for a using a tool as generic as the mouse. AsSteve Jobs was quoted as saying in his biography, “Bill [Gates] is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.” Yet Apple eventually lost this suit. The judge ruled that Apple inadvertently gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Macintosh user interface in November 1985. This loophole probably saved Microsoft from ending up in the same situation as Samsung, but there’s no doubt they would have continued on their path to developing the Windows OS regardless.

History has many other examples of inventors blatantly incorporating elements of another’s designs into their own products. Imagine how difficult it would be to design an automobile today if standard features like a rear trunk, side view mirrors, and even the placement of windshield wipers were off limits.

Henry Ford himself was the first to acknowledge his debt to all the inventors who had gone before him. “I invented nothing new,” Ford conceded many years later. “I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work, and the discoveries of still other men who preceded them. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the great forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” (Source: “Flash of Genius: And Other True Stories of Invention,” by John Seabrook).

Indeed, Henry Ford successfully fought off patent infringement lawsuitssimilar to the Apple lawsuit against Samsung. In 1903, at the beginning of the American auto industry, a group of eleven car manufacturers formed the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers (ALM) and attempted to control who should be allowed to build and sell cars. Their weapon was the 1895 Selden patent, which the ALM claimed covered all gasoline-powered vehicles. Carmakers who didn’t join the ALM and pay royalties on each car sold could be sued and possibly forced out of business. Ford, however, gathered the support and resources he needed to win his battle with the ALM and the Selden patent.

Can you really patent the best design for the job?

Implications for Future Designs

What does Apple’s success in its lawsuit against Samsung mean for the future of innovation in user experience design and human interface engineering?

It will mean three things:

1. Companies will continue to design and patent user interfaces. And there will be constant courtroom battles to decide who came up with each minor innovation that makes up the design as a whole.
2. Assembling a set of existing tools into a new idea will be very difficult without running into the royalty censors and being audited.
3. It will stifle innovation because companies won’t be able to improve upon established design trends. This will make it more difficult for user experience professionals to come up with the best possible designs for products.

In other words, while Apple claims to be protecting innovation with its lawsuit, the result is likely to be just the opposite.

Forbes.com