[mattmcknight]

Many of us still use a slider phone with a keyboard. Yet those have been found infringing of Apple's illegitimate patents.

[bdcravens]

"illegitimate patents": perhaps, but like others have pointed out, it sounds like your beef shouldn't be with Apple, but with patent system. If Apple has illegitimate patents, I suspect some of the 24,000 patents Google acquired from Motorola Mobility are as well.

[mattmcknight]

I don't begrudge Apple the necessity of obtaining patents for things that shouldn't be patentable in our broken system- otherwise they would be the ones getting sued. However, the use of them to attack competitors that independently developed technology is what bothers me, whether it's Google, Apple, Microsoft, or a do-nothing patent troll that is doing the suing.

[batista]

"illegitimate" in some novel sense? Because the courts seem to think otherwise.

[sukuriant]

To be completely honest, I'm not really sure the courts finding Apple's patents non-obvious makes them any less illegitimate in some cases...

Some of them, sure, are legitimate; but not all of them. :-/