Patent Arms Race Fuels Mobile’s Doomsday Machine
►http://www.wired.com/business/2012/09/patent-arms-race-fuels-mobiles-doomsday-machine
“I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
Steve Jobs famously turned to Cold War weaponry to describe just how badly he wanted to eradicate Android from the face of the Earth. His metaphor perfectly captures the shoe-pounding histrionics of the mobile patent battles that most recently claimed Samsung as a casualty in its struggle with Apple. We’ve mapped today’s 21st-century tech combatants onto the original conflict — expensive, global, and seemingly never-ending. In the current strife, two superpowers, Google and Apple, vie for world domination by building the biggest, most technologically sophisticated arsenal. Except this time around the deterrents aren’t ICBMs but patents. So far neither side has directly opened fire on the other. Both have instead relied on legal proxy skirmishes, using lawsuits and countersuits as a containment strategy. Even as Apple purges native Google apps from the next version of iOS, rumors of high-level diplomacy have surfaced — and none too soon: It’s mutually assured destruction if real war breaks out. Neither company wins, but the rest of the world loses as the legal fallout sends us all back to the feature-phone Stone Age. Makes you want to duck and cover.