Stephen Fry wrote a piece looking at various new smartphones, but had an interesting riff at the beginning about the spate of lawsuits and patent purchases in the industry. I saw that Apple were awarded the patent for the slide to unlock innovation which has been around for a long time and doesn’t seem to be done first by apple anyway. Fry ruminates on how this is affecting the industry:
Do we remember any of this happening in the auto industry? Does whoever came up with the limited slip differential get a licence from every car that uses one? Or the inventor of fuel injection, the overhead camshaft or the wishbone chassis? Did it happen in the manufacture of radio and television sets? Maybe it did but we just didn’t know about it. To the outsider the current situation resembles nothing so much the bloodiest kind of shark feeding-frenzy.
All very good points. What has this got to do with aid or development? Well, it reminded me of the great article by Ha-Joon Chang (“Kicking away the ladder”) which examines patents in historical perspective. It was one of the best things I read in my masters year, because I thought differently when I had finished it. There is also the book version but I liked the sheer power of having your assumptions challenged within 20 pages. It is definitely worth a read.
