In praise of the free flow of human ingenuity
The American founding father Benjamin Franklin famously declared that “as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously”. In that spirit, he declined to patent his own inventions, from bifocals to the lightning rod.
Some 250 years after the US Declaration of Independence, Silicon Valley should give thanks. Instead, its biggest companies regularly find themselves in ugly courtroom scraps over the theft of industrial secrets and the poaching of their finest minds.
The latest high-profile case pits iPhone-producing incumbent Apple against ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which has ambitions to become a hardware giant, after its 2025 acquisition of design studio io, co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
Apple’s lawsuit claims its rival has used former and current Apple employees to steal hardware designs as part of a “co-ordinated pattern of misconduct”. (Ive is not mentioned by name in the suit.) “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business [is] rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” the suit alleges.
