I think one reason that this legal brouhaha generates so much invective is because of a few fallacies about patents. At least, I think they're fallacies: 1) If

I think one reason that this legal brouhaha generates so much invective is because of a few fallacies about patents. At least, I think they're fallacies: 1) If a patent is easy to copy, it must have been easy to create. Samsung's 3G technology sounds hard to copy, so it must have been hard to create. Slide to unlock is easy to copy, so it must have been easy to create, right? The classic counter example is Viagra: formula is C22H30N6O4S. Easy to copy. But hard to create; clinical trials alone provably cost $100M, and billions of dollars were lost exploring other drugs which were failures. Similarly, I think slide-to-unlock is but the tip of the iceberg of Apple's expensive R&D machine; without the entire machine, it's hard to create, but easy to copy. 2) The value of the patent system is in the disclosures. People assume that because they didn't need to read a patent to recreate an invention, the patent is useless. But I would argue that the de facto value of the patent system is not the disclosures, it's the legal protections that allow the damn thing to be invented in the first place. If SmallCo is pondering whether to invest $100M to develop an innovation, and they know that DominantCo can quickly copy it for $1M, they won't proceed; they'll gave spent $100M for no benefit in the marketplace. Innovation suffers. Patents allow SmallCo to proceed with expensive investment by documenting the protected result. Similarly, if Apple couldn't protect their investments, we might all still be using BlackBerries. Personally, I think the patent system should be modified so that the amount of protection is proportional to the monetary investment in the innovation--but that is hard to make game-proof.