Patent troll or not, Paul Allen finds a friend in Steve Wozniak |
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Patent troll or not, Paul Allen finds a friend in Steve Wozniak
Is there some kind of secret brotherhood of lesser-known Microsoft and Apple founders? Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder better known as Woz, is voicing some surprisingly strong support for Paul Allen and the Microsoft co-founder's patent litigation against Google, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants.
Asked about the lawsuit during a video interview with Bloomberg News, Wozniak says he's "not at all against the idea of patent trolls," and he believes Allen's suit represents the fact that inventors have rights under the U.S. patent system.
Here's an excerpt from his comments.
I’m not a lawyer, and we’re getting into the legal category, not just the technology category, but I think this lawsuit represents the idea that, you know, hey, patents, individual inventors, they don’t have the funds to go up against big companies. So he’s sort of representing some original (inventors). I’m not at all against the idea of patent trolls cause I’ve had friends who just got forced into bankruptcy by bigger people who had more money and could have a lawsuit against them, forced them to be their own lawyers, and in the end, sometimes they’re victorious. But it’s a real hard way to do it. So if you’re going to have a patent and say ‘It’s worth some money, I’ll sell it,’ well, even if Paul Allen makes a fortune off of it, I think he had the insights to recognize which patents were valuable.
At that point, Bloomberg's Scarlet Fu points out that Allen himself wasn't an inventor of the patented technologies he's suing over, which were produced by his Interval Research lab in the 1990s.
"Well, Paul Allen was an inventor in the past," Wozniak responds. "He had a big impact even on my own choices of what to invent."
Later, when asked about the timing of the suit, many years after the technologies were considered innovative, Wozniak defends Allen further.
"To do something first — it’s so hard to do something first, and once you’ve done it, everybody says, oh, this is possible, now it seems so easy, it seems trivial," he says. "No it wasn’t, at first. Those patents should be respected."
Previously on TechFlash: Also in Allen's patent pile: Stuff like Twitter, Foursquare
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