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Apple Sued Over iPhones Making Calls, Sending Email (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: A company that seemingly does nothing but license patents or, if necessary, sue other companies to get royalties, has taken aim at Apple. But here's the kicker: the lawsuit alleges that Apple's last several iPhones and iPads violate a slew of patents related to seemingly standard features, including the ability to place calls as well as sending and receiving emails. A total of six patent infringement claims were brought against Apple by Corydoras Technologies on May 20, according to Apple-tracking site Patently Apple, which obtained a copy of the lawsuit. According to Patently Apple, the counts against Apple cover every iPhone dating back to the iPhone 4 and every iPad dating back to the iPad 2. In addition to taking issue with Apple's devices placing calls, the lawsuits also allege that the tech giant violates patents Corydoras holds related to video calling, which is similar to Apple's FaceTime, as well as displaying a person's geographic location through a feature like Find My iPhone and the ability to block unwanted calls. Last year, Apple was ordered to pay $533 million to Smartflash LLC for allegedly violating three patents related to copy protection.
Remember though that in the past you had to actually show a model of your invention, and have a patent inspector pass on it. Meaning that you had done some non-trivial amount of work first, you had the idea and also the means to demonstrate the idea, and now needed time to get manufacturing up and running. Today the patent inspectors just rubber stamp everything, no one needs a working model, or even a non-working model. That's what's broken.
The limited time for exclusive access was very useful in the past. That is, if you think that supporting the little guy versus the large conglomerate is useful for society. The actual purpose of patents originally was not to lock everything out from everyone else, instead the purpose was to make the patent free and open once the time period expired. Before patents inventions were kept locked up and controlled, guilds were formed to protect the secrets, and so forth.
The patent term was long enough to get up and running and get into a competitive position before the rest of the world started making copies (but long enough to be more lucrative than hoarding the invention). Twenty years was also a very short period in the past, it just seems extremely long today because people are rushing new crap out as fast as they can and planned obsolescence is the status quo.