[jerf]

The tone of this letter, combined with grellas' comments above, give me the troubling feeling that Apple is not certain they would win. Only two arguments are made, one based on terms we're not privy to and as grellas pointed out you'd expect them to quote if it's solid, and one based a doctrine that the Apple license is extended to the app developers by virtue of the app developers using the licensed product, but there's enough ambiguity in the law in terms of what software "contains" (for lack of a better word) other software that I don't think I would have a hard time arguing that the app instances are still legally separate instances of the patented capability. I could argue either side pretty forcefully if I wanted to.

IANAL but by lawyer standards this strikes me as very, very tepid. If I were an app developer, I would at least feel a bit better that Apple has acknowledged the problem and has taken some position on my side... but I wouldn't feel much better.