[makecheck]

One big reason is because the whole world runs on prior work. We have cities full of things built before we were born. We are only able to do what we do now because of massive amounts of work by millions of people who probably did not foresee what all their efforts would lead to. Should we be forever obliged to funnel millions of dollars to the estates of the dead because they contributed (like so many others) to the success of today's products?

The current system unreasonably rewards arbitrary subsets of the total group of people responsible for making useful things. It also manages to include essentially middlemen in the rewarded set.

[HiLo]

Something of a straw man when speaking of paying off people who are long dead, versus people are were actively trying to get their products to market at the same time as you.

You also assume that there is an alternative to having arbitrary subsets. We're dealing with the law, which is almost by definition an imperfect compromise that we put up with simply because it's better than the alternative.

Kind of like how some people are arbitrarily thrown in jail, under the same legal system. Without rambling, I feel like you are just assuming an impossible and nonexistent counterfactual.

Furthermore, in this case, we aren't talking about paying off the guy who set up the sewer system 100 years ago, we're talking about paying off the people who had a patent 7 years before you, and you decided to say "screw them" and use it anyways. As if Apple didn't know it was violating those patents? Come on. Why should companies be allowed to operate outside of the system we, as a society, set up?