Apple as cult

Speaking of land grabs, I have been delving into the way Apple handles other people's intellectual property, my interest sparked by reading about how once your e-book has been infected (as it were) with the Apple virus your rights are severely compromised. My friend Ron Colman asks (on his Likelihood of Confusion(R) blog) whether Apple is a Cult or mental thing?: and I also find Chris Barton in the New Zealand Herald asking whether Apple is becoming an evil empire. Richard Dreyfuss has made this recording of an Apple licence agreement, with "comically evil voices" - could recitals of software licences become a popular new genre? Best of all is this wonderful piece by the great Umberto Eco, The Holy War, in which (being 1994) Mac is pitted against DOS ... and he considers whether Apple is Catholic and DOS Protestant, the one offering a single route to salvation, whereas DOS (nowadays, read Windows - although I don't think that works nearly as well, and perhaps the Protestant tradition is now in the hands of Linux and the open source movement) allows more latitude for interpretation, and requires difficult decisions. Lovely.

Hubris: Apple's knuckles rapped by Court of Appeal

The whole world, or at least quite a large part of it, knows the story of Apple's failure to post the apology which the courts thought they had told it to post, to Samsung. But there's more to it than is apparent from reading the newspapers. Have a look at Samsung Electronics (UK) Ltd v Apple Inc [2012] EWCA Civ 1430 (9 November 2012) and marvel that they ever thought they might get away with it.

As Sir Robin Jacob made clear - indeed, went out of his way to emphasise - the case was never about whether Samsung copied the iPad. It was about whether Samsung had infringed a registered design, which was not the same as the iPad, and as Sir Robin had said on the original appeal, the case had to be decided as if the iPad had never existed. The UK case was not at odds with decisions of other courts around the world - in fact, it was at one with them, which is precisely the opposite of the impression given by the Apple statement. The court awarded costs to Samsung on an indemnity basis, one of the devices available to it as "a mark of the court's disapproval of a party's conduct, particularly in relation to its respect for an order of the court." It must, indeed, have come close to being contempt.

I have read some comments which accuse the Court of Appeal of Apple-bashing. Apart from demonstrating a degree of ignorance which should deter any sensible person from going public with their views, the idea that somehow an American corporation should be able to cock a snook at the legal system of a country in which it does business is disturbing - one can imagine the howls from the same commentators if a British company treated the American legal system that way (however richly it might deserve it).

Apple takes licence for clock design

Reports throughout the media tell us that Apple has agreed to licence a clock design from Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB), the Swiss railway operator, because the clock provided in Apple's iOS 6 was too similar. SBB's iconic design, the red second hand of which is in the shape of a railway guard's signalling disc, dates from 1944, and was designed by their employee Hans Hilfiker. It remains in use in stations throughout the railway service, and the design is licensed to Mondaine, a Swiss watch maker.

But this all begs the question, what intellectual property rights are there in a 58-year-old clock design? None in the UK, for starters. Copyright, which I guess would have applied back in 1944, will have been curtailed under Schedule 1 to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and if there were ever a registered design that protection will long since have expired. Surely Swiss law isn't very different (although the licence must be worldwide, and looking at national laws doesn't get us very far). So what's the problem? Evergreening, that's what ...

The terms of the licence remain confidential, but it looks as if (contrary, perhaps, to the reports) this isn't a licence of a design at all, but another type of intellectual property.