Responsible patenting

Samsung recently suffered another loss at the hands of Apple’s lawyers when Judge Koh ruled that Samsung did indeed infringe upon Apple’s patent for autocorrection.

While it is debatable whether or not Samsung, or even Android, have been cautious in putting their products together, in this specific instance, the autocorrection patent might just be one of those things that wasn’t their oversight. On the face of it, it is a fairly specific and clear patent, whose language, apart from being weighed down by legal long-windedness, is in fact, surprisingly crisp about what is being patented. Here’s the abstract of the patent:

One aspect of the invention involves a method that includes: in a first area of the touch screen, displaying a current character string being input by a user with the keyboard; in a second area of the touch screen, displaying the current character string or a portion thereof and a suggested replacement for the current character string; replacing the current character string in the first area with the suggested replacement if the user activates a delimiter key on the keyboard; replacing the current character string in the first area with the suggested replacement if the user performs a first gesture on the suggested replacement displayed in the second area; and keeping the current character string in the first area if the user performs a second gesture on the current character string or the portion thereof displayed in the second area.

To simplify, the abstract states the following: “On a touch screen, we’d like to patent showing what the user is typing and the process of making a choice between that typed stuff and one or more correct options we suggest. The interaction that the user does to pick our suggestion could be a delimiter key (but not necessarily that) and some other sort of an interaction could be used for retaining the user’s own string.” At first, it really does look fair that Samsung should be punished for not honouring this patent. Apple really did have a point. There are a couple of things that push the reader very hard towards that conclusion.

Firstly, why does it sound like a patentable idea? One of the strongest reasons why one feels obligated to honour Apple’s idea is because of the sheer magnitude of innovation that is being discussed here: In a world where Nokias and phones with physical keypads were the norm and devices were getting bulkier, Apple had created sleeker, simpler touch screen devices with ground-breaking fundamentals that brought with them, an equally powerful ecosystem of ideas within and around.

Secondly, one has to appreciate the way everything in the iPhone has an elegant solution. Almost every small workflow in the phone would have had to be invented by Apple - hardly anything like that existed before.

These are strong reasons to believe that what we read in the abstract above is a patent worth granting. I then tried to think of ways in which Samsung could now come up with a designaround to get out of this mess. That’s when I realised that there was something fundamentally wrong with Apple’s patent. Where exactly is the patentable solution? Where is the innovation, the idea that warranted a patent? Is the abstract describing a solution or is it just rephrasing the problem statement as a solution?

The problem statement here, for example, would be that the user, while typing, needs to be able to see correct word options and pick them. If you look at the abstract now, the patent sounds alarmingly similar to this problem statement, albeit with longer sentences. What Apple really has patented here is not an idea at all, unless one assumes that the principle patentable idea is ‘the delimiter key’ interaction.

If Apple gets to own the rights to the problem itself, how is anyone supposed to solve it without infringing upon the patent? Is it right to grant Apple the ownership to a problem just because they discovered it first? Is it right to patent problems at all? I don’t think so. Patents must be used to protect innovations and ideas - these are words that describe solutions, methods to solve a problem and not the problem itself.

This doesn’t mean Apple has no innovation in autocorrect. Of course, it does - It has innovative algorithms which find out what are the correct options, it has interface ideas which place the correct alternates right above the typed string, and it has smart rules of interaction which assume the user meant the correct option and not their own typed string if the user just presses the space bar. Most of these, however, are not mentioned in the abstract. The patentee has taken a step backward to patent the idea in a way that other similar ideas are also defeated. That is fair enough, but that step backwards has turned out to be so big that the patent granted rights for the problem itself. It granted rights for the ‘what’ and not the ‘how’.

That is where the patentee’s responsibility comes into picture. The responsibility that lies with the patentee is in the care that they must exercise when taking that step backwards towards the more abstract. People who have ideas worth patenting must also be keenly aware of striking the right balance between making a patent so specific that it is useless and making it so abstract that it ends up describing the problem itself.

Of course, the patent offices must realise this too, but if I, belonging to this domain myself, had difficulty realising that Apple’s autocorrect patent is philosophically wrong, one can imagine how often the patent offices would fail to see this. So, the responsibility must lie with the patentee.

This is why I feel Judge Koh’s ruling was unfair for Samsung, for Android and for the tech community in general.

I did some digging around on the issue and found an excellent article by Prof Mark Lemley of the Stanford Law School. This article states, quite succinctly and accurately, how patentees have now gone back to patenting the ‘function’ itself and not the method of achieving the result of that function. If people understand this difference more clearly, many patent wars would end.