Term paper on Copyrights and intellectual property

Google v. Oracle

The way in which Google is competing against Apple in the smart phone race is through a phone operating system known as Android. This operating system combined with phones created from different manufacturers like Motorola and HTC make up for one of the leading competitors the Iphone has. However, as stated, Google’s Android system has been directly and indirectly targeted for patent violations as of late. Directly with the claims filed by software company Oracle. Android’s operating system utilizes certain aspects of a programming language known as Java, which was developed by Sun Systems who is now owned and controlled by Oracle. The software company is suing Google “seeking a court ruling that would ban further use of its intellectual property and force the destruction of all products that violate Java-related copyrights on the code, documentation and specifications” (Bloomberg, 2011). Google contends that the patents that Oracle is citing in their suit are not only invalid, but any users of their platform have a license to any patents named. Should Oracle get their way, there would be a tremendous blow to the Android platform and the phones themselves as this would call for the company to come up with an operating system that was void of Java or any other Oracle owned technology. In addition to the software meeting patent and intellectual property obstacles, the hardware that Google’s OS has been tied to is meeting resistance as well.
HTC v. Apple

Apple has been a success through the creation and distribution of computers, digital music players in the Ipod and moved on to the smart phone market with the Iphone. The success the company has enjoyed is arguably due to a business model in which copyright law is utilized in order to maintain an upper hand against competition in their respective markets. By copyrighting and patenting their software, hardware and other features, they are helping to ensure that they remain at the top (Reder, 2009). One of the more unique features that the Apple Iphone offers to consumers is the utilization of a fully functional touch screen. As of 2011, Apple had been granted a patent awarding full ownership of the touch screen interface that is most used by smart phones. In addition, the patent is wide-sweeping in the technology that is covered under it; tablet PCs and music players that have touch screen technology could be affected as well (Fish, 2011). With patents such as these, any competitor could easily be in violation of the patent and as such, Apple could pursue legal action against them, as is the case with phone developer HTC, which was sued by the Iphone creator in 2010.

The suit in which Apple had first filed against the Taiwan based company stated that HTC had violated 20 of their patents including those relating to the Iphone’s user interface, architecture and hardware (Patel, 2010). The case involving Apple and HTC has potentially turned into a legal back and forth, where HTC is awaiting a ruling from the International Trade Commission or ITC panel, the company has purchased S3 Graphics, a company that holds patents that the ITC had decided were being violated by Apple, which HTC could fall back on should the panel decide to find in favor of the Iphone creator (Cheng, 2011).

Through this potential back and forth between the two companies one can see some issues in which patent rules create not only a broad spectrum for the patentee to call violation on another, it also allows for the owner of said patent to amend the scope to any other activity or use that could potentially be a violation as well. For instance, the examination of The Northern District of California Patent Local Rules yields the following:

Even though the patent owner will have identified a particular activity as infringing in character prior to the initiation of the suit, the patent owner should not overlook the possibility of other activities which better support the case. Thus, plaintiffs should use discovery to request information concerning activities in an area as broad as any possible scope of the patent in suit. (Turner, 2001)

In other words, the owners of the patent are not only encouraged making their scope of violation extremely broad; they are also given the opportunity to amend this to apply to any other violations they see fit.

Conclusions

With the new technologies’ emergence, the number of legal disputes over intellectual property has increased tremendously in recent years. It involves such issues as the copyright and infringement that were thoroughly studied in this paper.

The intellectual property rights are recognized by the local and international law. The researchers define copyrights, patents and trademarks as the most valuable and important categories of the intellectual property rights.

It’s interesting to know that this intellectual property rights field of law is one of the most disputable and creates difficulties for the arguing parties and the judges.

As it is stated in the Introduction part of my paper, regulation and deregulation of the intellectual property rights is a very controversial and debatable issue. Information is considered to be a public good; therefore the public interest should be taken into account.

There is dispute of under which circumstances the information should become free and be a public welfare and, on the contrary, when the company can have full rights for its intellectual property is a constant dispute of our days.

Besides the major elements of the intellectual property rights, the issue of cost of legal suit was overviewed as well. And the conclusion that was made is in that paragraph is that the suit will make sense for a defendant only if the settlement amount would be greater than the time, effort and money spent to pursue the case.

Also, two well-known current legal examples of intellectual property rights disputes were given, such as Google v. Oracle, and Apple v. HTC. In the case of Google v. Oracle, a software company is suing Google for using certain elements of a programming language Java that was developed by Oracle. In the other mentioned suit case, Apple is pursuing legal actions against Taiwan based HTC; Apple states that 20 of their patents were violated by HTC.