Lawsuit Frenzy!

So here we are. In a world where cell phones are more commonplace than purses, the companies making them are more petty and possessive than little girls fighting over Barbie dolls. We have Apple suing Motorola and HTC and Samsung, Motorola and HTC suing Apple, Apple being sued by consumers, Microsoft suing Barnes and Noble, some random company suing app developers, Oracle suing Google, and more.

If you look through those links -and do some research of your own– you’ll note the absurdity of most of these claims. They’re all over the place, including:

• How a phone screen unlocks
• How a phone accesses e-mail
• Being able to update
• Concealing external antenae
• Allowing a clickable link to choose how said link opens
• In-App payments
• Using tabs
• The way a Cloud-based service interacts with devices
• Shape
• Color
• Bevels
• Speaker placement and shape
• How a phone works

This doesn’t even include previous lawsuits such as the kind used to defend the ability to intuitively scroll that was so popular. This sort of thing is wasteful and counter-intuitive; I understand that companies expend time, energy, and money into developing IP and new ways to implement procedures, but let’s take a step back and think about this for a moment. In the case of Apple’s case against Samsung where they tried to say the Galaxy series of devices “copied the iPhone and iPad in the instances of size, shape, and color,” there is such a thing as “too much.” I mean, they literally filed a suit because Samsung made a large, rectangular device in black with silver accents. I realize how many colors there are available, but there are only so many ways a mobile device can be shaped. It’s absurdity in its most absolute form.

What we need, as a technologically-advanced society, is a universal, patent-free entity that handles R&D for every manufacturer creating mobile devices. There are infinite ways to be competitive and innovative without worrying if Company B is copying the way your photo gallery displays photos, or whether Company X is violating your patent on how their phone handles incoming calls while watching porn. While each and every mobile smartphone available in the world today is technically unique, they are fundamentally similar, and that really is how they should be handled. A phone or tablet functions based on core properties, and the rest is just streamlining the user experience.

In its most recent bout of crazy, Apple claimed that the launch of the Galaxy S3, as the “most widely preordered gadget in history,” would cause “substantial, immediate and irreparable harm” to its sales of the iPhone. Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I personally don’t see anything so fantastic about the newest member of the Galaxy family that would so impact sales of ANY phone, much less one in particular. At this point, people base their decisions for selecting a mobile phone on size, performance, price, OS, durability, brand, accessory options, social status, 4G capability, etc… any number of unpredictable factors. A TON of people won’t be getting the S3 based on price alone, and then there’s the crowd that doesn’t like large screens, or those who don’t like Android or Samsung in particular. As someone working in the field directly selling these phones to consumers -a grunt, as it were- I don’t see such a large impact in sales for Apple. Not to mention that we’re talking about A FIELD OF BUSINESS. Competitors exist in business, and sometimes their projects are just plain better than yours. If you lose a chunk of sales because someone out there with a similar product made theirs better, the solution is not to sue the crap out of them in hopes of preventing them from selling their product in your primary country of origin, it’s to CREATE SOMETHING BETTER IN TURN. This is how innovation WORKS.

Hopefully someone with an impact will put Apple in its place, and from there the other manufacturers will fall into line. We NEED an entity to handle the mundane nuances of device usage and operation to prevent nonsense like this from taking place. That way consumers still get their nice, tidy, intuitive packages, and manufacturers can focus on what they do best: making handsets.