By Mike Lee and Christophe Jammet

We’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the current state of content distribution in the digital world today. Today’s content distribution systems disseminate media in myriad formats: movies, TV, books, music, games, magazines, newspapers, photography, and more.  It’s hard to quantify how much money goes through all these industries, but considering that Apple, Amazon, and Google all have skin in the game, it’s easy for it to be a multi-billion dollar industry.

When we discuss content distribution and the experience of consuming content online, we constantly come back to the topic of piracy.  Sure, bootlegging has been around for ages in other media formats-   who here (above 27) hasn’t ripped a CD to tape back in the 90′s? Back then, however, the reliance on physical media hindered piracy to a degree.  Today’s digital media formats are easily downloadable, and with a good connection, an entire artist’s discography can be had in a few hours.

Leaders of myriad creative industries shout from the rooftops about how piracy is destroying their livelihoods and taking money out of their pockets.  The MPAA and RIAA aggressively prosecuted individual perpetrators for years before setting their sights on the actual file sharing platforms instead.  And don’t even get us started on SOPA.

So what’s the problem?   Are people really that immoral? or is there something more to the issues of digital content piracy?

Yes, yes there is.

Simply put: Most content piracy in this day and age is a service issue. User experience gaps and poor distribution arrangements are the two leading causes of digital piracy in entertainment.

The role of emerging platforms and new user behaviors

Today’s sought after content consumer is a digitally enabled one.  More and more people are “cutting the cord” and abandoning cable TV.  In fact, over 1 million cable subscribers cut the cord in 2011 alone.  Watching movies in theaters have deteriorated,  with ticket costs rising and attendance falling to 16 year lows.
While those stats are jarring, it’s doesn’t mean that people are consuming less content. They are just shifting to newer distribution platforms:

• More swedes under 35 listen to Spotify than commercial radio
• ebooks are outselling paperbacks in the US
• Three times more people watch music videos on youtube vs. downloading music

Digital Content and the advent of popularized streaming services enable increased content consumption across all major entertainment verticals.  You don’t have to look long to find examples:

• Itunes (Music, Movies, TV, Books)
• Amazon ( Music, Movies, TV, Books)
• Youtube (Video)
• Hulu (Movies, TV)
• Steam (Games)

The fact is, digital content distribution platforms are a boon for all of the entertainment industry verticals. The prospect of being able to sell a product to the consumer without the cost of physical media is at the core of today’s shift in user behavior.

So why is piracy such an issue? It’s a complicated answer, and we’d like to start our answer with a visual explanation from internet comic sensation TheOatmeal:



While humorous, we truly think this is how most people, including ourselves, behave. Now that almost anything is available to stream on Amazon, we barely pirate anymore. However, one month ago Christophe wanted to watch “Das Boot” and was looking to purchase it from a streaming service provider. It wasn’t available anywhere except as a DVD. Checking a torrent site revealed that it was readily available to download as a torrent, which would have taken less than 15 minutes to download.

Again, the content distributors’ failures to distribute their copyrighted content in a seamless manner across media types caused their represented artists to lose money. Piracy is largely a service issue.

Most people don’t download to avoid paying, they download because the incumbent content distributors were beaten to the punch in the digital arena by pirates.

The most glaring examples of this are in the TV and Movie industries.  Content rights are tied to both advertising revenues and outdated media delivery methods (cable TV, DVD).  This creates a conflict of interest between distributors, content creators, and the consumer:

• Cable companies rely on people to pay them to deliver content via cable boxes.
• Streaming services, which would bypass the need for cable TV subscriptions, are a threat to the status quo revenue model that cable companies take in, both on the subscription side as well as advertising.
• TV networks have begun working around this model, with most offering their content online.  This was due largely in part to networks finally figuring out how to properly monetize streaming content through ad revenues.
• Movie studios and their distributors have relied on the theater release/dvd sales path of revenue for their new releases.

The tipping point for this era of piracy occurred on the day digital downloads and streaming became technologically viable.  At that moment, content distributors became responsible for putting infrastructure in place that enables users to consume their content in a seamless manner.  Failure to do so results in pirates filling the gap by creating efficient distribution methods, and content owners missing out on revenue.

Want to Beat Piracy? Look at Video Game Distribution

Content distributors in TV and Movies have largely been reactive instead of proactive.  They could learn a thing or two from another industry: PC Gaming.

The PC gaming industry is no stranger to piracy issues.  It was especially vulnerable to software piracy back when games were sold exclusively via physical media. The last few years have brought rise to streaming video game services, which bypass the need for physical media.

Christophe doesn’t hide the fact that he is a huge fan of Valve’s digital game distribution service, Steam.  The service is an (almost) one-stop shop for PC games, from AAA-titles to independent games.  Think of it as an itunes for games. And it’s a big industry:  with over 35 million users, Popular game titles are able to quickly rake in hundreds of millions in sales.
Steam’s founder, Gabe Newell, has spoken before about Steam’s successful introduction into markets where piracy runs rampant:

“We’re a broken record on this,” Newell told me,. “This belief that you increase your monetization by making your game worth less through aggressive digital rights management is totally backwards . It’s a service issue, not a technology issue. Piracy is just not an issue for us.”

And it’s not because Steam avoids regions of the world known for their software piracy, they actually embrace them. “When we entered Russia everyone said, ‘You can’t make money in there. Everyone pirates,’” Newell said. But when Valve looked into what was going on there they saw that the pirates were doing a better job of localizing games than the publishers were. “When people decide where to buy their games they look and they say, ‘Jesus, the pirates provide a better service for us,’” he said. So Valve invested in getting the games they sold there localized in Russian.

Now Russia is their largest European market outside of the UK and Germany. “The best way to fight piracy is to create a service that people need,” he said. “I think (publishers with strict DRM) will sell less of their products and create more problems.

Mr. Newell’s candid point is the key to solving a majority of piracy issues across the rest of the entertainment industry. It’s a point that’s hard to make to people who work within the rest of the entertainment industry.  We’re not here to whitewash the moral implication of piracy-  the answer to that is obvious.  What’s important is to recognize the circumstances that cause the average person to resort to that behavior. If demand for original content is high and the people selling it don’t offer it in an ideal or convenient way, then someone/something will arise to meet that demand in a better way. You can chide consumer behavior all you want, but that’s how it is.

Going after individual pirates and even the platforms that they use is treating the symptom, not the disease. The key to suppressing average users from pirating content is to hold content distributors responsible for doing their job properly.  Imagine how content distributors would run their businesses if they didn’t have the right to sue people pirating in mediums that they don’t service.

Content distributors have a responsibility to both creators and consumers to be at the forefront of content distribution services.  It’s intrinsically linked to the rate at which technology progresses as a whole.  If content distributors continue to drag their feet when technology offers new avenues of content consumption, then the same thing will happen again.

Maximal revenue potential lies in having distributors be responsible for offering the best and easiest ways to consume content. Because if they don’t, someone else will.

Facebook also recently disclosed that its user base has reached over 901 million,  with 1 billion being a plausible prediction of the end of the year.

My, how Facebook has grown. It’s the largest social network by far, easily eclipsing Twitter’s 500 million userbase. It’s as close to ubiquity as its going to get.   But where does it go from here?  

Inevitably, Facebook’s userbase growth rates will plateau and trail the rates of overall internet adoption.  As a soon-to-be publicly-traded company, it’s now under the scrutiny of the public and its investors when it comes to growth.  When you’ve maxed out your market share, where do you look for growth?

Cue the Instagram acquisition.  Facebook’s staggering $1 Billion bid for the mobile startup is astounding, but it makes sense. Most Instagram users are already on Facebook, so it’s not about acquiring more users.  What it is about, however, is promoting activity within its existing userbase.  In its recent S-1 filing, Facebook purchased Instagram “as independent mobile applications to enhance our photos product offerings and to enable users to increase their levels of mobile engagement and photo sharing.”

By acquiring apps and services that compliment its existing experience, Facebook is promoting increased user activity and content creation.  Instagram’s 40-million-strong user base now serves to enrich facebook’s ecosystem through:

• Content creation:  all the photos taken on instagram that are shared on Facebook
• Engagement: comments, likes, and sharing on Facebook
• External exposure: via sharing instagram content on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr

This concentration on user engagement is explicitly tied to Facebook’s revenue model.  Instagram-related activity on Facebook increases the time spent on the site, the number of pages viewed, and most importantly, the exposure to ads.

The more time people spend on Facebook, the more ads they are exposed to.  The more ads they are exposed to, the more Facebook can charge. That equals more revenue through CPC’s and CPM’s.

With an already-ubiquitous userbase and tons of cash to spend, we predict that you’ll be seeing quite a few more acquisitions that play into this focus on increasing organic user activity.

I wonder, however, what Facebook’s users will think of this new active-user-based acquisition strategy. Do Facebook users want Facebook to become a giant sum of all these parts? Is Facebook’s core UX design capable enough to handle its expanding products and services?  What do you think?

Here we are, day 4 of SXSWi and effectively my last day as I’m heading back to NYC tomorrow. Today’s featured panel was a deep, well rounded, and relevant look at leveraging Social Media in the B2B Space.

If you’re a reader of your blog, you know that I’m a huge supporter of NFC technology and all that it entails.  the prospect of being in a room full of like-minded individuals to talk about the significance of the technology was like a dream come true for me.

The room was full of influencers from all industries and geos: Finance, payment processors, marketers, hackers, social media people- all in one room to discuss the following:

“Ask the average American about NFC and they’ll tell you that the New York Giants are the champs. For all the musing the tech community loves to make about NFC, envisioning a future of smart posters and tap payments, the technology has yet to gain much mainstream interest. The current surveys and projections send us a mixed message that while NFC-enabled phones will dominate by 2014, at present most people just don’t care about mobile payments. NFC could end up a phenomenon or a flop, and it all depends on the moves of a few key players. Is this the next big innovation or just the next Q-Cat or Gizmondo? We’ll look at the Vegas odds for an NFC win in US, the players that could make it happen and the technical and psychological challenges that could keep Americans from ever knowing NFC isn’t something you need cleats and a cup for.”

We covered a host of sub-topics within an hour, and I wish the conversations could have gone on longer.  Here are my main take aways from it:

• A majority of the perceived use for NFC rests in transaction enablement.  However, many individuals in the panel asserted that there are nigh limitless applications for the technology.  For it to become a viable payment method, card processors, banks, and payment services need to adopt common standards and ensure that payment is in fact as easy as tapping your phone on a sensor.  Additional steps run the risk of making NFC payments more cumbersome than using a card.
• NFC will not become commonplace unless it addresses needs that affect many people.  Then service providers will support it and tech providers will have to respond to the demand by integrating it. The successful adoption of NFC also relies on the willingness of technology producers to not only integrate them across their products, but to adopt a set of standards that ensure its universal functionality.
• Bluetooth technology is a great example of how stringent tech standards allowed for it to become widely adopted.
• The success of NFC in the US market may rest on whether or not Apple decides to integrate NFC into its next generation of product. That’s why there’s so much focus on transaction enablement.  It’s easy and obvious to see how the simple, tactile action of tapping your device on something to pay instead of cards or cash can be a powerful enabler.  However, the current iterations of NFC payments don’t quite lend themselves to that pure, simple experience that it needs to be in order for it to be adopted.
• There has been quite a bit of talk around NFC being the next QR Code.  I find that statement to be reductive.  QR codes are a marketing tool, only capable of pushing information in one direction.   Does NFC technology have the ability to be used in a similar fashion? Sure.  But the capabilities of NFC tech go far beyond being able to grab a hyper link to a website.

To give you a better sense of the discussion, here are some selected Tweets:

At the end of the day, the universal adoption of NFC would create a host of revenue opportunities.  Whether or not that happens depends its ability to enhance and enrich the lives of many consumers at once.

Greetings from #SXSWi 2012!  Once again I’m here in Austin, ear to the ground, livetweeting like a manic d-list celebrity, and keeping tabs on what’s going on in digital across industries.

After spending some time in an insanely long registration line, I got the party started at 2PM with the first panel of the year.   Titled “Brands as Patterns,” I was keenly interested in hearing a discussion on messaging patterns across today’s communications platforms.

The panel came with the following description:

Brands today exist in multiple mediums, defined by multiple voices. The media brands inhabit is iterative, with no beginning, no end, and little permanency. In that context, adherence to a big idea and endless repetition of centralized, fixed rules can make a brand seem unresponsive and out of step with its audience. But without repetition, how does a brand create consistency? And without consistency, how does a brand maintain value? This panel will debate, show examples and outline a new model within which experience designers show how brands should behave.

The Panelist was led by Marc Shillum of Method, Inc. and the rest of the panel proved to compliment him well. The panel’s theme came to be after Shillum wrote a an essay on brands as patterns (read it here)

The discussion covered a broad range of areas within the topic of pattern behavior in brand, but these were the main themes that were focused on:

• Interactions between the company and the consumer define brands.  This concept seems to be primarily derived from the world shifting its attention to digital communication platforms.  Our prevalent methods of communication and messaging are now inherently driven by a 2-way interaction.  The core of a brand’s identity rests in these interactions.  Because of that, Shillum and the rest of the panel argued that IX and UX designers should be the stewards of a brand.  He mentioned the concept of ”active branding:” blending interaction design into brand design. brands can create equity through actions, not statements.
• The patterns of communication that brands use have drastically changed over time.  This is primarily due to changes in behavior brought on by emerging communication methods in digital.  Communications are no longer “push-only”  They now have to be iterative, conversational, adaptive, and varied in order to build brand value through meaningful interaction with consumers.
• Ideal brand communications are inherently juxtaposed: communications work at their best when they allow for chaotic deviation within a controlled area. Walter Werzowa, the composer of the panel, cited Beethoven’s 5th symphony as an example.  While Beethoven repeats the same thematic element over and over again, almost all of them are slight variations. Our brains are wired to detect not just patterns, but variations within patterns.  We’re intrinsically designed to be engaged by this sort of thing.

Here are a few tweets from the panel:

While this talk strayed from specifics, it offered a core set of strategic rules  for brands to live by in this day and age.  Brand value isnt the only thing that is derived from interactions with customers.  So are sales. And I’d like to bet that the former affects the latter.

Aside from Linsanity, Pinterest has been the most talked about topic in NY.  It has become one of the 5 best drivers of referral traffic for retailers on the web matching Twitter’s effectiveness as of January.  Much has been written about Pinterest including this article from DDG’s Christophe Jammet about social curation.  But how are brands supposed to use Pinterest to further their own interests.  Here’s your How To Guide in 3 Simple Steps

Pre-work: Sign-Up

If you are unfamiliar with Pinterest you should read this Business Insider article for a basic overview on its functionality.  There are some brand limitations right now including the fact that brands can’t link to their Facebook pages.  It currently only supports individual pages.  However, you can link your branded twitter feed and website to your boards.

After you create your brand account, go into your profile settings and link your brand’s Twitter account and turn on “visibility” as shown below left. Once you turn your Twitter Link on, you will see a popup like the one below right to authorize Pinterest to use your Twitter account.

Step 1: Understand the Opportunity

Pinterest offers a unique opportunity for a brand to personify its mission statement and generate earned media impressions.  This activity should sit somewhere between your PR department and your brand marketers. This is not the site to sling your goods, you have Amazon for that.  This is the site to display the aspirational life your brand espouses.  It also gives you the opportunity to promote the creativity and passion your brand evangelists have, while further strengthening their brand affinity.  You will also have complete control over the images you select for your boards.  This is one of the few native brand safe environments.

Step 2:  Get Started

Here are some examples of boards brands can create, but haven’t yet.

Coca-Cola should have a pin board dedicated to pictures of polar beers to promote is “Arctic Home” preservation campaign. These pictures could be used to drive donations to the World Wildlife Foundation and other organizations Coke sponsors.

BMW should have pin boards featuring unique driving roads from around the world to enjoy the “Ultimate Driving Machine”.  These images could be of top 10 places BMW enthusiasts want to drive and could be tied in to a contest to win a trip to drive a BMW on one of these roads.

Keystone Light should have a pin board curated by their spokesperson Keith Stone around his “Collected Works of Smoothness” asking his loyal fans to live the smooth life and create their own “Keith Stone” boards

Step 3 – How to Curate your Boards:

Brands should use the rule of thirds when curating their site.  1/3^rd of your pins should be branded content created by your company or agency.  Another 1/3^rd should be images curated from around the web that work to promote the lifestyle or personification of brand you are trying to achieve from Step 1.  The other 1/3^rd of content should be re-pins from other boards in Pinterest to promote your brands social following on the site.

Next Steps

Signup for Pinterest. Follow boards that are relevant to your brand. Enjoy the added traffic and brand lift.

Pinterest is still a relatively new platform that is growing wildly and is still without a revenue model.  This may be the genesis of a crop of imitator sites or could fall out of fashion the way of Chat Roulette.  I recommend securing your brand name now and taking advantage of being an early adopter either before the clutter starts or while the collective interest lasts.

How is your brand using Pinterest?  Leave a comment and let us know!

Business Insider ran a piece about marketing giant Proctor and Gamble’s plans to shift its advertising strategy in a major way:

“P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.

He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget….

McDonald eventually said:

As we’ve said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we’re quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available.

In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.

While it’s extremely sad that P&G’s strategic move will result in 1,600 layoffs, it’s a direct consequence of P&G sticking to its traditional ad media guns for so long.

It speaks to something I’ve been harping on for over two years.  Back in November 2010 I in my DDG blog post titled “Making the Business case for Social- a CMO perspective,” in which I lamented the double standard that faced the digital world when it came down to how big brands spent their advertising dollars.

With P&G’s acknowledgement that digital and social ad spends are more efficient drivers of engagement, the marketing giant now has an excuse to simultaneously rein in its overall spending while increasing its spending in digital arenas.

I guess it’s natural for there to be a lag between the pervasive adoption of emerging media platforms and ad dollars, but to me it has been a glaring arbitrage opportunity for some time.

Does it mean that traditional media is dead?  No, I don’t think so. But brands need to readjust their distribution of ad spend so that the focus is on channels that engage audiences efficiently. The ever-increasing sophistication of digital marketing tools has given brands the ability to reach their audiences, interact with them, and track their behavior all the way to conversion- all in a cheaper package than traditional advertising channels ever could. I guarantee you this won’t be the last big company that readjusts its distributions in ad spend to more representative levels.

Do you work for a Fortune 500 brand?  have you seen the beginnings of this shift in your own company?  What are some glaring examples of other brands that need to shift their advertising dollars towards digital?

Social curation is a concept in which users are empowered to present their own content in a simplified, organized way, to social circles, enabling engagement and viral sharing across digital platforms.

The most fitting example of social curation has manifested itself in a site called Pinterest. For those who are unfamiliar, it is a virtual pinboard that lets its users organize and share visual content that they’ve found online.  it looks like this:

I’ve been spending some time on Pinterest, getting to know the platform and seeing how actively it is being adopted by my peers. It’s become a popular portal for fashionistas, foodies, and home decorators.  How popular?  Check out Pinterest’s recent metrics (Via Hitwise):

11 Million visits During the week of December 10th- a 40 fold increase from 6 months ago. It’s now on the top 10 list of visited social sites that Hitwise tracks.

So what’s so significant about Pinterest? While it might seem like a pretty simple concept, at a structural level it’s a significant evolution in how social groups share and curate content. Pinterest is the latest digital tool that enables the masses to curate content in a simple, meaningful way. Its overt simplification of a structured visual set is something that caught the eye of Elad Blog:

“2010-Now Structured Sets And Social Curation.
Pinterest (launch 2010) was one of the first sites to take push button content generation (via bookmarklets and “re-pinning”) and structure it into sets of curated content called “boards”.  This allowed users to collect content from across the web, as well as from other users on the site.  In some sense it took what a site like Tumblr had been doing but transformed blog-like streams into structured, curated collections users could share.  Importantly, it was easy for new users to consume these sets of content visually as structured sets, and to share these sets with others.

David King has pointed out an interesting insight – by constructing content in a structured set versus a stream, sites such as Pinterest and Snip, it has prevented stream-based sites such as Facebook from becoming a compelling place to consume Pinterest or Snip. It’s content (which contrasts with e.g. Instagram or other stream based sites).”

As demonstrated in the chart above, Pinterest iterates on existing content platforms by simplifing it even further.  I would also contend that you could replace the X axis with “Engagement.” Liking, commenting, and reposting on Pinterest is just as easy as pinning something, and the two go hand in hand.

So what now?  Where is social curation going to go? How is it going to evolve further?

Social curation is a shining example of how emerging digital platforms are now focusing on “Discovery.” Discovery, simply put, is the next iteration of search. Instead of an engine that finds exactly what you’re are looking for, discovery platforms focus on providing you with content that is tailored via social curation, geo-localization,past behavior and history.  Google’s acquisition of Zagat is a great example of how the big search engine is evolving in that general direction.

By facilitating the submission of interesting content and democratizing its popularity via engagement mechanics, we are able to freely share what we like with ease. It’s digital peer-to-peer contact at its purest.

It doesn’t end there, though.  As discovery platforms evolve, the next step is to integrate and enable transactions on these discovery platforms.  For example, while photos can link directly to online product pages, I envision Pinterest developing a more universal, integrated e-commerce platform internally. Some brands have already been at work integrating Social curation with e-commerce.  As my friend Zach points out, Fab.com has already been at it by building a community with their “Live feed.”  You can bank on other brands jumping in and putting their own spin on Socially curated content sets.

The future of social discovery and e-commerce looks easier, prettier, and more integrated- I can’t wait.

The patent infringement, stemming around data recognition, involves a feature in which the phone recognizes a telephone number so it can be stored in directories or called without dialing.

Apple’s underlying motivation for this move is quite obvious:

“The fight can be traced back to a decision by Jobs in March 2010 to file the HTC case, the first patent complaint by a device maker targeting Google’s Android operating system. Jobs, who died Oct. 5, made it his mission “to destroy Android,” which he said “ripped off the iPhone, wholesale,” according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of the Apple founder.” -via Bloomberg

This recent going-on got me thinking about how patent law has evolved (or devolved) within the confines of our country’s capitalistic framework.  Patent law, which is supposed to protect the interests of innovators and inventors, should be have a bolstering, accelerative effect on technological and economic development.

But the more I see and hear about the myriad patent infringement cases that all of these companies are embroiled in, the more I think that it has the opposite effect.

Last August, Reuters published a graphic that visualized all a veritable “who’s suing who” in the tech world:

There you have it:  Apple certainly isn’t the only one suing.   Collectively, these companies are probably spending tens of millions for lawyers, all in the name of disrupting competition. I was having a hard time correctly verbalizing my issues with how these companies leverage copyright law, but it comes down to this:

Our country’s current iteration of patent law undermines the ethos of antitrust law. Blocking others from building on a technological process innovation lays a red carpet out for monopolistic situations.

Is it wrong to allow companies to “copy” or further develop ideas that weren’t their own?

I’m reminded of something my high school art teacher said to me over ten years ago:

“Art isn’t created in a vacuum.”

I think the same holds true in technology.  Almost everything in art and tech is derivative.  They are by their very nature evolutionary constructs.  To restrict this growth in the name of hoarding an idea is counterproductive and damaging to technological progress in general.

If any one of these companies had its way and was able to block all the technology it claimed as its own, it would be effectively be operating as a monopoly player in the cell phone market.

I wonder if this motivation goes beyond greed.  Are all of these companies scared and paranoid of the others one-upping their initial innovations?

The thing is, this back-and-forth one-upping is a core component of working within a capitalistic construct,  it’s also the main accelerant of technological innovation.

Without it, the needs of the public are overshadowed by tech companies who act monopolistically.  Without the catalyst of competition, the rate of new innovation is bound to slow down. I wish all of the tech players would stop suing each other over technology patents and instead concentrate on creating the best products and innovations with them. Let the marketplace determine who the true innovators are, not the courts.  If you’re worried about not coming out on top, then your product doesn’t withstand its ultimate litmus test- the marketplace.

The writers at Gizmodo said it best in today’s post:

“I’m all for seeing Apple defend its intellectual property. But Android is a healthy force in the marketplace. If Apple can destroy it there, more power to Tim Cook and company. But if Apple beats Android in the courts rather than the marketplace—if it out-segs Google instead of out-innovating it—that may be great for Apple, but it will be bad for society, bad for technology, and ultimately bad for Apple.

And of course, the great irony is that so much of the amazing innovation that Apple pulled off over the past three decades can be traced back to its willingness to swipe ideas from Xerox. Steve jobs was fond of quoting Picasso, saying “good artists copy, great artists steal.” If Apple does succeed in crushing Android in the courts, where will it get its next great idea? My guess is that it won’t come from a lawyer.”