<sigh> At the moment, everyone is suing Apple and in return Apple is counter-suing everyone. It’s not just Apple, Google, Nokia, Sony, you name the company they are probably suing someone for some sort of patent breach.
This is not the way make technological progress. In fact taken to it’s extreme this sort of thing, could slowly drag us back to the dark ages!
Okay granted, that is the extreme case, but I’m thinking the way things are going right now, we are pretty close to the extreme case already.
So if we take the current situation forward and make it the extreme case, what do we get?
Simply the end of technological development. Basically no small or medium sized companies will dare trying to develop anything new, because as soon as they do they will be sued by the large corporations in to the ground. These large corporations will basically be huge store houses for patents and have vast teams of lawyers to do the suing. Also they will have to make something’s because there business model of suing everyone and everything, will not be sustainable in the long term, in the short to medium term however it will be very profitable.
These large companies will do a little research and development of there own, but it will be very tightly controlled and hidden away, for fear that another company will get wind of it and start suing them for breach of some obscure but impossibly broad patent. Also because of the huge risks involved in this sort of research, only things which have a definite and profitable end use will be developed, which means basically just consumer products. No research or development will get done unless there is an obvious short term profit to be made. Anything that could take years to develop will never be looked at.
So this will mean that there will not be much call for scientists and therefore universities will not produce so many, which means science departments will shrink, this in turn means less jobs for scientists (teaching could become the biggest job for scientists in this scenario). It wouldn’t take long like this for science to ‘waste away’ as an apparently unneeded appendix for society. However science is always needed.
In this extreme scenario we could get the situation where the big companies, worried that amateur scientists could start making discoveries which threaten the corporations intellectual property, could start making the case for distorting textbooks, urging that these where the tools used by people to steal there ideas. When a society starts to destroy knowledge, that is it for the society, it can’t survive for long.
Do I think this scenario would ever play it’s self out?
No, but not because the big companies wouldn’t go to these extremes, I think the current satiation shows that they would do that without a second thought. No I don’t think this would happen, simply because, we as a society would not allow it to happen. I think long before we reach the situation I describe above, there would be some sort of popular up rising, a lot of bloodshed and chaos, followed by some sort of return to normality.
Do I think we are close to this sort of thing happening now? Sadly I think yes, and I just hope that some sort of sanity prevails before we have to go through either of these two scenarios.
Now, that I’ve described this idea, I’m thinking that there is a very good setting for a story in there somewhere, and I think I have it…
Off to the writing cave!
Tags: apple
