I’ve been musing on Apple’s suit against HTC. John Gruber has some thoughtful arguments. However, he seems to conclude that good ideas shouldn’t get legal protection of exclusivity — something I cannot quite agree with.

I’ve also been thinking about Apple Inc.’s CEO Steve Jobs’ much-repeated “good artists copy, great artists steal” quip, which he attributes to Picasso (though the evidence for the source is thin). Whatever the original source and the exact original words, I cannot imagine that Mr. Jobs (or any reasonable or semi-reasonable person) would utter such words with the idea that copy = plagiarize or steal = rip off. If a good artist copies, presumably copy must mean something positive in that context, and since a great artist steals, stealing must mean something even better. (Note also that a great artist is presumably also a good artist.)

The only interpretation I see when hearing “good artists copy, great artists steal” is as follows. An artist that revisits a theme introduced by another artist, but with a new perspective (e.g., rewriting a story moving a previously marginal character to center stage) or a significantly different form of expression (e.g., rewriting a work of prose as poetry) has found a good approach. However, that artist is only truly great if the revisitation displaces all earlier works as the defining work. In other words, the great artist has taken away (“stolen”) the majority mindshare on the topic. For example, James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic” was hardly the first movie telling the story of the ill-fated ship, but it displaced all other versions to the margins. In that sense, James Cameron can be said to be a great artist (I write this even though I didn’t particularly like that movie).

With that point of view, I note that Mr. Jobs is closely associated with at least three (and maybe four) instances of such “greatness”. Number one, the original Mac: Apple didn’t invent the notion of a mouse-and-bitmap-based interface, but with the Mac they displaced previous implementations (including Apple’s own Lisa) as the eminent example. Even when Microsoft’s imitation became the market-dominant implementation, Mac remained “the original” in popular culture. So ironically, Apple both bought and stole the PARC Alto technology (using the positive meaning of stole). Number two: iPod. Again, Apple didn’t invent the basic concept, but the interface and miniaturization of their implementation made it such that some years later many people use the term “ipod” to refer to any portable digital music player. Number three, iPhone: Not the first smartphone by a long shot, nor even the first phone relying mostly on a touch interface . And yet it completely redefined the category, and only a few years after its introduction, non-touch-based smartphones are quickly becoming a minority. (I said “maybe four”, thinking about the Apple ][ personal computer. It was significant and it set the standard of its time, but I don’t think it quite “stole” like the other examples. NextStep and MacOS X were also good but not great in this sense — ironically, Mr. Jobs was running Next Software, Inc. when he made that quote.)

In the world of writing, plagiarism is a bad thing and widely regarded as such. It’s also a “blurry thing”: I cannot tell where plagiarism ends and originality starts. However, there are also areas that are clearly plagiarism and areas that are clearly not. I think commercial products should stick to the latter.

In the world of technology “plagiarism” is common, and not always fiercely condemned. Indeed, plagiarizers often end up displacing the creative original. I think that’s unfortunate.

Now about Apple’s suit: I think of phones like the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One as plagiarizing Apple’s iPhone. I’m not saying that they’re not “better” in some ways, but those ways are fairly insignificant and most of those devices’ appeal comes from the creative work that went into iPhone (work that was subsequently copied — not in the “good artistic way” discussed above). Palm’s Pre, on the other hand, I think of as being in the blurry zone, and while there is no “good part of the blurry zone”, I even think Palm Pre’s innovations put in the better end of that zone.

John Gruber:

What worries me is the idea that Apple, or even just Steve Jobs, believes that phones like the Nexus One have no right to exist, period, and that patent litigation to keep them off the market is in the company’s interests. I say it’s worrisome not because I think it’s evil, or foolish, or unreasonable, but because it is unwise, shortsighted, and unnecessary.

Maybe it’s unwise and shortsighted, but I support the suit to some extent, because I think that endorsing “plagiarism” in any form ultimately holds us all back. (Hence, I think the Nexus One should have “no right to exist”.)

Had Apple gotten legal exclusivity to the Mac interface elements many things could have happened. The bleakest scenario is that it could have been the end point of computer interfaces because no competitor would have found something significantly better and the existing alternatives would have been found nonviable. On the other hand, such a situation might have given the impetus needed for competitors to really pursue something better. (I have more thoughts on this… I may write them up later.) Instead, we now have a system that has fostered an industry that encourages minor variations with little innovation. As a result, it might be a while before our Mac-based computing environments are replaced by something significantly better. The bleak scenario that might have been is only a little worse than what we got.

I don’t like software patents, because more often than not they patent “discovery” more than “creation”. So I pinch my nose at a legal suit that uses those devices. However, while we wait to see fixes for intellectual property law, I welcome some action that will discourage plagiarism because I believe it will also encourage fierce innovation out of competitive necessity.