commentary Apple learnt its lesson when it tried - and failed - to sue Microsoft for copyright infringement of its interface. It has since turned its attention to patents but should not be allowed to succeed here either.Bill Gates once famously compared the computer industry to the automobile industry, saying that if General Motors had kept up with technology in the same way that the computer industry had, "we would all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 to the gallon".
This smarted the automobile industry, to the point that General Motors responded with the wilting comment that if Gates' analogy was followed to its logical conclusion, we'd all be driving cars that crashed twice a day. But the motoring giant didn't stop there; rather, it reversed back over the still-twitching body of Gates' speech to point out that, occasionally, executing a manoeuvre such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine; similarly only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought Car95 or CarNT (this was in the mid-90s remember), at which point you would have to buy more seats; and of course new seats would force everyone to have the same-size bottom.
And then, of course, there was the comment that Apple would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five-times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five percent of the roads. I'd add a little corollary to that -- and here's where we take a slight detour if not flip, as they say in Cupertino, a proverbial shitty -- to the effect that Apple would try to stop anybody else from using a steering wheel to turn the wheels, or from putting the gas pedal within reach of the driver's foot.
Yes, we're talking interfaces. Just imagine where we would be if automobile manufacturers had been able to stop any other manufacturer from producing a car cockpit that worked in a similar fashion to theirs. Not at our destination, that's for sure, unless perhaps we had taken the correct driving test for the particular make of car that we were driving.
Apple tried the computer equivalent of this -- let's call it interface-jacking -- in the late 80s, when it tried to sue Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for copyright infringement over their first, faltering attempts at graphical user interfaces. At the time, Apple had already agreed to license parts of the user interface that appeared in the Lisa and Macintosh computers to Microsoft, which was then working on Windows 1.0. But as Microsoft added more features in Windows 2.0 and later in 3.0, Apple got worried and filed suit against both Microsoft and HP (which at the time was working on an Apple-like skin for Windows called NewWave) to stop them using elements that it used in its Lisa and Macintosh platforms. Apple lost all its claims, except those that related to the trashcan icon and the file-folder icons in HP's long-since abandoned NewWave. An appeal by Apple to the US Supreme Court was later denied.
Critics at the time suggested that Apple was attempting to gain all intellectual property rights over the desktop metaphor for computer interfaces, which, although made popular by Apple, had actually been invented at Xerox's celebrated Palo Alto Research Centre. And Xerox, presumably in its own fit of copyright rage, filed an infringement lawsuit against Apple that (to many observers' annoyance) failed on a technicality.
Now, it seems, Apple is up to its old tricks, but with a new twist. Last week the US patent office filed an application from the computer maker, first exposed by attorney John Kheit on macobserver.com, covering the user interface of the iPod.
Apple obviously learnt a valuable lesson in its lawsuit against Microsoft and has turned its back on copyrights as a way of protecting its interfaces. Patents can arguably offer much better protection of intellectual property than copyright law does, but they are designed to protect ideas rather than the expression of ideas -- which is the domain of copyrights.
Apple does not seem to be seeking to protect the look and feel of the iPod (though it can still do this using copyright and trademark law) so much as its underpinnings.
If Apple's lawyers can be congratulated on one count in this matter, it is in writing a patent application that comes close to resembling English and does not go out of its way to obfuscate the concepts that they are trying to patent. The result is that the patent application is pretty easy to read; and it is hard to see anything revolutionary in there.
Few could deny that the iPod is a superb example of industrial engineering, or that the user interface is one of the coolest around, or, indeed, that the accompanying iTunes service may yet prove to be the one that makes the music industry recognise it can mix with the Internet after all.
But I have yet to see anything in the iPod interface that I have not seen before elsewhere. If this patent is granted, it will simply serve to show what a car-wreck the US patents system has become, and should serve as a warning to governments elsewhere.
As the airbag in General Motors' fictitious computer car would have said before going off: "Are you sure?"
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