The Applepire Strikes Back
January 9, 2011
Darth Vader used Imperial Storm Troopers to squash trade disputes between business interests on planets, solar systems, and even entire quadrants of his galaxy. His plan was simple—work it out, or the Empire will confiscate your assets to use at its whim. In many cases that included your life, or possibly the lives of your entire species. Fortunately, Lord Vader doesn’t run the International Trade Commission. In fact the ITC is an independent, nonpartisan, quasi-judicial federal agency ran by a committee of three democrats and three republicans who are very likely not pupils of the Dark-side. This research paper will look at whether the International Trade Commission should ban the importation of all patent infringing Android devices made by the Taiwan-based company HTC Corp, even though some argue it could give Apple Inc. a possible monopoly on the smart phone market in the U.S.
The recently deceased visionary of Apple, Steve Jobs, believed that good products were ALL about good design. In fact, within his lifetime Jobs became an iconoclast in the world of design. “In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service—Steve Jobs” (Isaacson, 2011). Jobs built Apple on innovation and design. He then was forced out of the company for over a decade, and returned years later to save it from the throes of bankruptcy on his same genius insights of innovation and design. It’s very easy to look at the technology we currently use in our everyday lives and claim that the products of Steve Jobs and Apple—by design—have changed the world.
Job’s story is a perfect example of why intellectual property should be...