I seem to remember when the iPhone first came out, Jobs had a big Apple event and everyone oohed and ahhed. Jobs made a big point; that beyond the awesomeness of the iPhone to be excited about for fanboys, there was also manna for shareholders. Unlike the previous era of grievous lack of bothering with patents, and the inevitable consequences of other companies cloning Apple’s precious DNA, now, finally, they have learned their lessons, and created the almighty PATENTS. Lo and behold, THIS TIME, there shall be only one.
Fast forward only a few years ahead (and long long before any patent would expire), and every smartphone in existence is a clone of the iPhone. So what happened to all these supposed patents?
There are a bunch of lawsuits that are currently in process related to those patents. Apple just filed another one last month against Samsung, who has also filed a counter-suit against Apple.
Some of Apple’s patents are full of crap and basically too broad to be enforceable. Some of them are valid though and other reputable companies license them. Not the chinese knock-off manufacturers of course. If I remember multi-touch was one such patent, but I could be mistaken as I stopped following that story ages back.
The mobile phone industry seems to spend a lot of time suing each other these days.
Check out this somewhat old chart showing who is suing whom, it looks like a lawyer feeding frenzy.
There are also plenty of patentable things in a phone that aren’t apparent to the end user. Just because the phones all look like clones of the iPhone doesn’t mean that they actually are, under the surface.