| > You can't accuse Apple of doing anything that abusive. Apple has been defending patents for inventions copied by people without a license and which are not standard essential. Sure I can. Apple has been getting patents on obvious ideas that, often, they didn't event invent like: - "data tapping" anticipated by both Netscape Navigator 2.0b1 (Live URLs in mail and newsgroup messages) and the Sidekick TSR from the 80s ( http://www.articleonepartners.com/patent-research-community/... ) - slide-to-unlock (anticipated by the Neonode N1m) - universal search And then Apple takes advantage of the weaknesses of the US patent system and uses these bogus "patents" as legal weapons against their competition. This is the same sort of chaos we would see if someone with a big checkbook decided to start trolling some of the many linked-list patents. What Apple is doing is just as bad (or maybe worse since Apple is more interested in market control than money). > Basically it seems that to a lot of people since Google needed to rip off the iPhone for android, in order to compete, therefore patents are suddenly bad. Just because you weren't aware of the history of software patent opposition doesn't mean it sprang up out of nowhere post-Android. Lots of people have been against software patents for a long, long time. Take a look at the history of the League for Programming Freedom, "Burn all GIFs", the Eolas web patent case, BTs hyperlink patents and on and on and on. Many have seen this nonsense and concluded that patents in software just don't work long before Android was a gleam in Andy Rubin's eye. |