Jony Ive has told of his frustration at the way in which certain companies seem to copy Apple's designs and design styles. Fair enough, it always is frustrating to be the trail blazer and then see people copying what you've proven is a good idea. But the truth is that as a matter of public policy we actually want people to do this. To observe what it is that the consumer likes and or desires and then go off and produce more of whatever that thing is. This is true of designs, of pieces of technology, of the basic production of anything and of business models. We really do want people to be copying what is successful.
Here's what Ive had to say:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, as the saying goes, but Apple’s design guru and very precious genius Sir Jonny Ive doesn’t see it that way - he reckons its more like robbery.
The knighted creator of all things i-related was asked by an audience member at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in San Fran if similar designs from rivals such as Xiaomi was a validating pat on the back.
“I think it’s really straightforward: it really is theft and it’s lazy and I don’t think it’s OK at all,” he responded, admitting this was maybe “a little bit harsh” and made him sound “perhaps a little bit bitter”.
We could even describe it as theft and it would still be OK: in fact, we've set up our entire system to encourage this happening. Because people copying/stealing what is successful leads to more consumers being able to get that thing which is successful: this is the very definition of making those consumers richer which is the point of having an economy in the first place.
We've got three different concepts at play here. Patents, trademarks and copyright. They all rather blend into each other but the essential concepts are quite different.
A patent protects a new method of doing something. It's not possible to have a patent on "a smartphone" for example. But you can have (and Apple and other have many on various aspects of this) a patent on a particular way of transmitting data to a smartphone. Here we're noting that a new way to do something is a public good. There's almost no way of stopping someone from, in a purely free market, taking that new way of doing things and copying it. That's great for the consumer of course, at least in the short term. But we also look at that public goods aspect of it. If anyone can copy it then how can the originator make any money? And if people can't make money out of origination then we think that we'll have less original stuff than if they can make a profit. So, we invent this property right, this intellectual property called a patent, so that people can make a profit. This doesn't stop people coming up with some other way to achieve the same end, but it does stop someone directly copying.
This is all more of an art than a science, getting the balance right, but we want to encourage that original creation but also allow people to explore other ways of doing the same thing once that original method has been found to be something that people want.
Copyright doesn't really concern us here: but trademarks do. This is the area that covers the sort of design work that Ive is referring to. Here, you cannot stop someone using aspects of your design at all. But what the law does allow is you stopping someone from "passing off". Say that new iPhone: trademark law doesn't allow you to stop anyone from producing something of the same size, the same functionality and so on. But it does stop anyone making something that would fool people into thinking that it was an iPhone when in fact it wasn't. That's what "passing off" means. Pretending that the no name landfill Android is in fact an iPhone.
Note what this means: the aim and intention here is entirely different. We are not trying to protect Apple's innovation at all: we're trying to protect the consumer from being fooled into paying Apple prices for something that isn't an Apple. But we're absolutely fine with people copying aspects of that design: precisely because we're entirely happy with whatever it is that consumers like appearing on more products. Because we think that makes consumers richer over time.
We very specifically have the rules that we do so that innovations can spread through the economy. A patent covers a specific manner of achieving a goal: trademark covers only fooling consumers. Thus Apple has (rightly) a trademark on the exact layout of Apple stores. To stop people being fooled into thinking they are in one when they are not. Apple also has all sorts of patents on the specific manner in which an iPhone works. But it doesn't have a patent on the idea of a smartphone, nor does it have anything at all, not even a trademark, on the details of their design. For the aim isn't here to protect the producers at all, the end goal of the system is to maximise the innovation and choice that reaches consumers.
