While I would agree that the current IP licensing environment could be vastly improved, I am not sure I consider putting out phones with whacky features "innova

While I would agree that the current IP licensing environment could be vastly improved, I am not sure I consider putting out phones with whacky features "innovation" in the technical sense. This is, however, a natural outcome of the Shanzhai culture. For the life of me I cannot find it now, but there is a fascinating article (by a well-known sci-fi author, I think... William Gibson? Neal Stephenson?) about Shanzhai, aspects of which TFA alludes to. It gives very good insights into the pros and cons of the culture of sharing that underlies today's Chinese tech industry. While one of the pros was the dizzying array of remixes it produces, one of the cons was that it essentially removes the incentive to invest in expensive R&D. While China is very good at the former, the West is still where the latter happens, and I tend to attribute this to the different cultural attitudes regarding IP. Regarding the references to fair use and reverse engineering, there may be a lot of FUD out there and TFA helps in dispelling some of that, but there is no shortage of reversing in industry today. Companies regularly reverse their competitors' products, either to ferret out technical secrets or to detect infringement of their own IP. IANAL, but with few exceptions (like those clauses in the DMCA regarding DRM-related mechanisms), IP laws do not forbid prevent reverse engineering per se. Generally it's only when you leverage the knowledge gained from reversing in a commercial product that you can get into trouble.