The Apple watch patent battle is the latest in a long war over innovation in America
The Apple watch patent battle is the latest in a long war over innovation in America
Apple is getting ready to end sales of two of its new watches after it lost a patent battle. The devices monitor blood oxygen levels using a technology that a medical device company called Masimo says it developed. The U.S. International Trade Commission agreed, and if its ruling isn’t reversed, Apple can’t sell those watches, which by some measures could cost the company $300 million to $400 million in sales.
Apple’s patent battle is just one in a long chain going back hundreds of years in the United States.
America had a patent law before it had a Bill of Rights.
“Even while the Constitution was being drafted, there were rival steamboat inventors lobbying members of the Constitutional Convention for patents,” said Christopher Beauchamp, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School. The biggest patent wars in U.S. history actually happened 150 years ago.
“The pattern then was that people got fundamental patents that controlled a particular technology and then sued very large numbers of defendants,” said Beauchamp.
Alexander Graham Bell sued every company that used a telephone without his permission, Beauchamp said. A similar thing happened with waterwheels, sewing machines, barbed wire.
“The inventor of rubber dentures sued every dentist in the country and made basically thousands of people pay to use rubber dentures or face lawsuits,” said Beachamp.
The head of the company was later murdered by a vengeful dentist. In the 20th century, as innovation was controlled by fewer and bigger companies, patent wars were less common, Beauchamp said. But recently they’ve increased again.
“Technology itself has become more complex,” said Rob Merges, author of “American Patent Law” and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s more components in a lot of our products.”
One smartphone can involve 250,000 patents. See the Apple watch with the blood oxygen meter.
“You see patent wars fought not just in the U.S., but over in Europe, China, India, South America,” said Steven Pepe with law firm Ropes & Gray.
And more recently, we’ve witnessed the rise of what are pejoratively called patent trolls.
“Entities asserting the patents as part of an investment vehicle to make money as opposed to protect a competitive position,” said Rich Miller with law firm Ballard Spahr.
Meanwhile, patent law continues to adapt. A court in the United Kingdom decided that artificial intelligence models could not be patent owners.
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