"Patents are often like art. You can see a painting and think, "I could do that!" You can look at a patent and think, "I could code that." But you didn't code i

"Patents are often like art. You can see a painting and think, "I could do that!" You can look at a patent and think, "I could code that." But you didn't code it before you saw the patent, so you don't really know for sure. Hindsight is 20/20." This may be the case in some fields, but it clearly isn't for most software patent cases. There is very little chance (for this exact reason) that HTC's or Google's engineers read Apple's patents. And yet, they implemented something that Apple considered similar enough to sue over. Outside of a very special cases (like encryption algorithms), it seems that nearly all software patent infringement is accidental, the result of people trying to solve the same problem and happening to run into the same solution. Combine that with an incredible store of over-broad and obvious patents, and you find a world where it is virtually impossible to write anything without violating somebody's patent (actually, if you are writing gui applications, this is literally true).