Forget Apple vs Samsung, an even bigger patent war has just begun

It took seven years, but the battle over phone patents between Apple and Samsung is finally over. The two major phone makers fought over key components of their devices – from wireless capabilities to the "rubber band" of your screen bouncing when you scroll too far from its limits on an iPhone – since 2011. But this week, a California district court declared that the dispute was over, with both parties reaching a settlement agreement.

The endless battle encompassed almost all levels of courts in the United States, and spread across the globe. It started with Apple claiming that Samsung had infringed on its patents and "trademark" (design elements, including initially Apple's claim that Samsung had the appearance of "bad". a rectangular product with the four corners uniformly rounded).

Originally, a judge accepted this decision and ordered the South Korean company to pay Apple $ 1 billion in damages … which sparked a long fight, calls and counter-calls until this week's decision. But what was it really about?

Take your mobile phone and you hold in your hands the result of millions of hours of work and hundreds of thousands of patents filed with a variety of companies. "The number of patents in a phone is so huge that no one has ever been able to count," says Florian Mueller, founder of the FOSS Patents blog and intellectual property activist. To perform a count, you have to look not only at the telephone patents, but also hundreds of thousands or millions of software patents.

A tech giant like Samsung, Apple or IBM can register up to 5,000 patents each year – engineers writing them "at a breakneck pace," says Horace Dediu of Asymco, an analyst at mobile telephony. "IBM is doing it seriously, they are just piling up a huge arsenal of patents." Apple alone has more than 75,000 patents and has filed more than 2,200 patents since the beginning of 2017. Samsung has filed more than 10,000 patents over of the last 18 months and has 1.2 million

"My personal opinion is that this absolutely exorbitant number of patents you find in a phone shows that the obstacle to obtaining a patent is too weak, "says Mueller. There should be a more substantial investment behind each patent.

However, patents are not only important for the protection of inventions: they are also a tool for the production of money. "Patents are one of those currencies that is always traded," says Dediu – or sold.

They are a tool used against opponents in a highly competitive industry. "If you have a patent, you can prevent someone else from shipping a product that contains this intellectual property," says Dediu. "Generally, the rights are fully owned by the patentee and these rights mean that a counterfeit product must be taken off the market."

The malicious use of patents to prevent competition rarely occurs, but the sheer scale of patents can stifle innovation. Mueller calls it a "patent puck". Companies can develop a new device or technology and then be defeated. "You will inevitably – because there are so many – find yourself having infringed a patent," he says. "It's a real problem for the industry."

Patents can also serve as a deterrent to prevent people from competing too closely with names established in the technology industry. And that, Dediu and Mueller are in agreement, is a worrying development. "Patents are starting to become an arms race," says Dediu – and he is worried about the result. "If the opponent is in the same business, then you have big discussions or mutually assured destruction."