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Technology

Patent Fights Are About Hearts and Minds

As much as I talk about Imaginary Property on the blog and on Twitter, I don’t often get a chance to really lay out the problem with Intellectual Property and copyright quite as nicely as this article does. Discussing the latest round of M$ / Google / Oracle / Samsung arguments over patents, the author gets into the really important bit for everybody else:

Google vs Microsoft Isn’t Just A Battle of Products, But A Battle of Ideas | Epicenter | Wired.com.

Don’t underestimate the reach of these caricatures. This spring, I was playing Angry Birds with a seven-year-old who patiently explained to me why he liked Apple more than Verizon, because Verizon’s Droid phones just stole all its ideas from Apple’s iPhone. (I still haven’t told him that I have a Verizon iPhone now.)

My young friend may have been mixed up on the details, but he was lucid, he was deliberate, and most importantly, he was absolutely convinced. That’s what Google’s fighting here, in public — and that’s why Microsoft and others will be fighting back.

The question of why copyrighting does or does not hurt innovation is a topic which I have yet to address on the blog. I’m thinking I should start doing better with that.