Patent Wars and Ecosystems: Metaphor and “Black Boxes”

Abstract

Traditionally, the role of metaphor in rhetoric has been seen as recasting the unknown into the realm of the known. Metaphor as explication has been well documented in scholarship of the rhetoric of science. This article argues that scholars interested in the rhetoric of technology should view metaphor as akin to “black boxes.” Relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “conceptual metaphor,” it analyzes one episode in the so-called “Smart Phone Patent Wars,” focusing on two metaphors: “ecosystem” and “patent war.” Ultimately, the article finds that as black boxes, these metaphors constrain the possible options that people see for their relationships with technology.

Notes

1. ¹I thank RR peer reviewers Stephen Bernhardt and Hugh Burns for their helpful and encouraging feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Portions of this article have been drawn from my dissertation.

2. ²To be sure, other companies such as Apple and Samsung have stakes in these disputes that are at least as large as the three companies involved in this article. However, the Microsoft-Motorola-Google complex of lawsuits is especially helpful for understanding broader shifts taking place in intellectual property and technological innovation.

3. ³Several of these lawsuits involve patents for portions of the 802.11 protocols, which make Wi-Fi possible, and for the H.264 standard, which involves digital video.

4. ⁴Smart phones are differentiated from feature phones by capability. Generally speaking, smart phones have advanced features such as fast cellular and Wi-Fi Internet connections, email access, web access, still and video cameras, and music and video players (Paik and Zhu 12).

5. ⁵M-CAM is a consulting company “that advises corporations and investors on corporate finance and asset allocation by underwriting intellectual property (IP) and intangible assets (IA)” (M-CAM Global Holdings). David Martin is M-CAM’s chairman.

6. ⁶Although outside the scope of this article, it is important to mention that in September 2015 Microsoft and Google agreed to drop all of their pending patent litigation, thus closing this particular chapter in the Patent Wars (Decker and Bass).

7. ⁷For translations of Rhetoric, I follow Jonathan Barnes’s The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Barnes).

8. ⁸Lakoff and Johnson’s idea of conceptual metaphors does not play a role in Shaver’s analysis; however, it is worth noting that patent race is also an ontologically bounding metaphor.

9. ⁹Note that phrases such as “supercharge the Android ecosystem” and “supercharging the Android ecosystem have been combined” in this list. However, instances where the metaphor did not involve the term ecosystem are not included in this list (for example, “Supercharge Android” [without “ecosystem”] is not counted here. In some instances, the original phrase appeared as participles (that is, “supercharging” or “breaking”). I have presented all of the phrases with infinitive verbs.

10. ¹⁰Note that the second appearance of this phrase is cited as a quotation drawn from the first blog post in which it appears.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Welsh

Joshua Welsh is an assistant professor in the English Department at Central Washington University. He researches and writes about rhetoric and technology, with special interests in intellectual property, open-source software, mobile computing, and online technical writing pedagogy. He earned an MS (2009) and a PhD (2013) from the University of Minnesota. His current projects include investigating the rhetoric of the so-called “smart phone patent wars” as well as working to develop a pedagogy and practice.