All it took was a couple of innocuous third-party app screenshots in several patent applications Apple had filed late last year, and the next thing you know, vocal advocates of developer rights were screaming nothing short of bloody murder! If you haven’t tuned into the ‘Where To?’ furor that has erupted so far, what actually happened is this. Apple’s patent application described an integrated travel application for the iPhone, which allows you to for example feed an itinerary into your iPhone and have it send out notifications to your hotel and taxi service the moment you landed at your destination! It just so happened that in the description of the patent, there was a screen image that was pretty much a direct copy of the interface found in the third-party application ‘Where To?’. What was meant to illustrate a user interface that one might expect in such an app turned into quite something else. Instead of being treated as a tip of the hat to the developers of ‘Where To?’ for their excellent user interface, Apple has on their hands mass hysteria and blind panic that followed (in some circles, at least), with many claiming that Cupertino was trying to patent third-party application ideas and claim their IP to be its own. Things only quietened down when reps from Apple sat down with folks who developed ‘Where To?’ and discussed alternatives such as attributing the screenshot in the patent application to ‘Where To?’.
As loyal and fiercely protective developers get around a platform, Apple’s possibly learnt something out of this – reach out to your developers and keep them in the know, especially if their intellectual property figures anywhere in your documentation.
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