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by illumin8
5439 days ago
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With a market cap of 23.06 billion, Samsung isn't exactly a small company. I think Apple is going after companies where it believes it has a significant chance of winning. Whether you believe software patents are a bad idea or not (I certainly don't like them), Apple has aggressively patented a lot of key features in iOS and it seems that many Android handsets are infringing. |
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To take the current example that drives me nuts, the 2 (of 10) patents Apple asserted against HTC that were "upheld" (air-quotes specifically intended) as part of the initial determination at the ITC are from the 90s (94 and 96, IIRC) years before anything innovative meaningfully related to iOS was a gleam in anyone's eye.
Even better, as asserted by Apple, Hacker News is infringing on one of those "upheld" patents when it turns this text into a clickable link: http://www.google.com
Apple's lawsuits have only an accidental (at best) relationship to any IP that is part of iOS and nothing to do with any key features of iOS whose related IP Android handsets might allegedly be infringing. Instead, Apple rummaged around in their archives to find everything halfway-plausible that they could throw at their Android competitors. It may be understandable business and legal strategy, but it is also deplorable and the patent system needs to be fixed so that it is not exploitable in this way (as well as many others, of course).