Apple's response to Lodsys is slow in coming, but good (sorta) for developers
It took long enough, but Apple has finally sent a letter to Lodsys backing its developers and telling the troll to get lost. Not in those words, exactly, but Apple’s general counsel Bruce Sewell’s response to Lodsys leaves no doubt that Apple will not be letting the company troll its developers. Unfortunately, this is just a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
If you haven’t followed the story so far, here it is in a nutshell: Apple licenses a patent from Lodsys that (apparently) it believes relates to the in-app purchase functionality used in iOS. Apparently wringing cash out of Apple itself wasn’t enough, so patent troll Lodsys decided to see if it could pick the pockets of Apple’s developers as well. And more than a week went by without any response at all from Apple.
Last week on Friday I wrote about the EFF calling Apple out to support its developers. Given that Apple is forcing many of its developers to use the toolkit to implement in-app purchasing by the June 30 deadline, the company has every reason to stand up to Lodsys.
So credit where due, Apple gets a hat tip for actually doing the right thing and telling Lodsys to “cease its false assertions that the App Makers’ use of licensed Apple products and services in any way constitute infringement of any Lodsys patent.”
The flip side, of course, is that Apple supports a system that encourages this sort of behavior in the first place. The patent that Apple licensed relates to “two-way local interaction” with a user that “elicits user feedback.” Real novel stuff, there. By being part of the patent shakedown, Apple is perpetuating the environment in which troll companies like Lodsys thrive. Of course, Apple depends on the patent system as much as the troll it rebukes here — so it can try to sue competitors when they start, you know, competing. Remember, when Apple copies features from other OSes, it’s innovation — when competitors copy features from Apple, it’s infringement.
So the developers that incorporate in-app purchasing seem to be safe, from Lodsys. They’re still open to all other manner of patent threats. Apple’s licensing the patent from Lodsys doesn’t really make the developers safer — it encourages the behavior that Lodsys is exhibiting now.
The likely reaction, if Lodsys is smart, is that it will back off the infringement letters it sent to iOS developers and try again elsewhere. But it won’t deter other patent trolls from targeting iOS developers.
Good on Apple for, finally, responding to Lodsys on its developers behalf. But if the company really wanted to do the right thing it’d be working to get rid of software and business method patents altogether.
