Apple Steps Into Patent Fight To Unnecessarily Silence A Little Girl
We've covered plenty of stories concerning Apple's ridiculously arbitrary nature as the gatekeeper for iOS apps, approving or pulling them with little reason. And, of course, we've discussed a variety of ridiculous patent lawsuits …
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop Techdirt opened in March 2012, when a patent threat loomed over a little girl's iOS app. What has changed is Apple's posture: after publicly insisting in August 2011 that it would intervene on behalf of developers against patent assertions like Lodsys's, and after the December 2011 licensing arrangement TechCrunch branded a deal with a patent troll, Apple has now stepped into this fight on the side of blocking the child's app.
First-order effects
- Apple's gatekeeper power lands directly on one small developer: a complaint routed through the App Store can pull or block a child's app before any court rules on the underlying patent claim.
Second-order effects
- Patent holders gain an enforcement shortcut — getting Apple to act against an app costs far less than suing its maker, which pushes assertion activity toward small iOS developers least able to litigate.
Third-order effects
- If platforms routinely arbitrate patent complaints at the store level instead of leaving them to the courts, software patents become private leverage over dependent developers, and App Store governance becomes de facto IP enforcement — the same gatekeeping discretion Techdirt has documented in Apple's arbitrary approvals and pulls.
The trend: The smartphone patent war is moving inside the app stores, where platform owners act as private enforcers of software patents against the smallest developers.