| > [...] and a good amount of that work can be copied for free by competitors in the absence of patent protection [...] Really? I would guess a good amount of that work was writing millions of lines of code, electrical and circuit design, designing for manufacture, and all that stuff you actually can't copy. Patents account for much less of that real _work_. To circle back to the beginning: > I don't know enough to truly defend Apple's actions You're right. > I do see Android as basically a piece-by-piece copy of the iPhone. Straight-up batshit absurd. People don't give Android enough credit for its Danger heritage -- Andy Rubin's previous company -- they developed a whole line of phones with hardware keyboards, web browsers, and downloadable applications. It was also built on top of a JVM. This sounds like the first incarnation of Android (the G1), doesn't it? The popular notion that Android was a copy of the iPhone or Blackberry is stupid and wrong. If Android was inspired by anything, it was from Andy Rubin's own past. |