> Everybody else is paying the mobster, why don't you ? The patent system is set up so that innovators (like Nokia) share their research in exchange for a limi

> Everybody else is paying the mobster, why don't you ? The patent system is set up so that innovators (like Nokia) share their research in exchange for a limited time monopoly on the fruits of that research. You can argue that the system is fucked up, but if Nokia hadn't been promised that monopoly, they probably wouldn't have shared all that research. They did, and now companies like apple can make phones with no need to do basic research, instead letting them concentrate on building UI's and such. This is how it works, and this is how every other phone manufacturer in the world is comfortable with it working. > If Nokia had a leg to stand on they would have sued apple the day they first released the iphone. Not only do they have a leg to stand on, they have successfully defended many of the patents in question in court in previous cases. And why didn't they sue earlier? I'd be ready to bet you a lot of money they have been in talks with apple all this time trying to make a deal without having to resort to a legal battle. > I can't wait until we reach the 'lawyer event horizon' when progress outside of open sourced hardware and software grinds to a messy halt because all the time and money is taken up with lawsuits. Or then, people who clearly use other people's research to build stuff could pay for it without wasting time taking stuff to court like every other phone manufacturer does. > The phone was an invention worth patenting, the cell phone is variation on a theme, and the research that went in to it was largely funded by the public. The cell phone was not worth patenting? Please. There is ridiculously lot of manhours spent in thousands of little details that had to be worked out so that lots of people can be served over limited radio channels in a noisy environments. And, while it's true there was a lot public funding early on, there were also many private companies spending a lot of money getting basic research done, including, but not limited to, Ericsson and Nokia. > LONG before Nokia got in on the act cell phones were a reality, it's true that the current crop is a serious improvement over what was available at the time but we're talking incremental improvements here. Actually, Nokia has been in mobile telephony since NMT, and when things got digital they were on the leading edge -- for example, the first ever commercial GSM call was made on a Nokia phone in 1991. > In the name of interoperability that stuff got standardized, after that point you compete in the marketplace, patents should get tossed out. Or, people could agree on fair terms to licence each others patents like the cell phone manufacturers decided. Nokia pays other people for using their patents. > Otherwise patents become a measure to control the competition instead of a device to foster innovation. When you refuse to license them for reasonable terms, that's exactly what happens. Good thing that's not what Nokia is doing.