Vacation... Day One
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| from Morguefile |
So, some people take vacation in February and go to sunny Florida or something. Whatever. We're heading to Monroeville this morning to the Greenberg Train Show :) In half a foot of snow.
Yeah, I'm a nerd, get over it.
So this morning, after reading the Bible ( online of course, 'cause that's what I do), I was reading c|net ('cause that's what I do) and there's an announcement of another lawsuit against Apple for patent infringement. And I don't know the details, it's just a brief article and I didn't dig, but it sounds like another lawsuit about ideas. And it drives me nuts. I mean, WAY back in the earliest of palm pilot days I said to Lori, "I won't get another one of these until it's a phone that does internet and video and is an mp3 player" LONG before the iPhone was on anybody's radar. So...should I sue Apple? Oh, wait, I didn't write it up and file a legal document. Dangit!*
It's not like the idea was exclusively one company's idea. It's been floating around there for...like...ever.** So the question is, did Apple steal the implementation of the idea. That's the big deal. And that's WAY harder to prove. Because there's only so many ways to do these things, right? Though Apple seems to have one way, and everybody else another...***
The long and the short of it is this. Become a success at ANYTHING, and you're going to get sued by somebody who wants a piece of that success. And the bigger you succeed, the more you're going to get sued, the more time you're going to spend in court...
Ask Mark Zuckerberg: maybe justified, maybe not so much
Or Microsoft: ahh, just Google it
Steven Spielberg: Homage?, Who Owns History?, Twister
And on it goes...****
Who wants to become successful? I mean, some of these people can't help it, right? The drive is in them. Steve Jobs, Steven Spielberg, they do what they do (or did) because it's who they are. And they're good at it. And that makes them a target.
At some point, though, wouldn't you just want to say, "Enough." Chuck it all and go retire on an island somewhere?
Or take a vacation in snowy Monroeville and look at model trains?
EDIT - Vacation day three and I see here on c|net and, yeah, Apple's suing just as much as they're being sued. The point wasn't "ooooo poor Apple" the point is - the bigger you get, the more time you spend in court - I guess on EITHER side of the...um...table?
*And then the iPhone came out and I said, "Not 'til it's on Verizon" and then it went on Verizon and I said "Not 'til it can hold all 16000 of my songs" and, well that won't happen for a long time, and THEN it will be, "Not 'til it's the FREE phone option on my plan" 'cause I'm the cheapest guy I know :)
**Since internet time isn't real time, forever in internet years is the half-life of a typical video game, if you/'re lucky, or, if you're not so lucky, the half-life of a viral video on YouTube...
***Yeah, I read c|net, but I don't really know anything about the nuts and bolts of this OS stuff...
****You can pretty much Google any successful person and the word lawsuit and find that they're the target of at least some kind of lawsuit - interestingly (to me at least) George Lucas - who openly admits to taking elements of all kinds of other movies for his Star Wars series - doesn't seem to have been on the receiving end of a plagiarism or copyright infringement lawsuit - though he's filed a number of them - and he has been the target of other lawsuits, of course...
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