Lots of companies "patent whatever is remotely patentable". If your business is intellectual property, it's common practice. My experience with patents comes fr

Lots of companies "patent whatever is remotely patentable". If your business is intellectual property, it's common practice. My experience with patents comes from working at a number of engineering companies whose approach truly was: patent everything you do. It's as crazy as you'd think: your daily work is not that novel but you're asked to describe it as though it is. It is ferociously hard to read patents (for everyone: lawyers and inventors included) and people get confused by the patent titles (which are deliberately vague and have no legal meaning). Since these titles are ridiculously broad, people think the patent is trying to clamp down on everything the title describes (which is never the case). However, non-design patents play a game of making the claims as broad as possible (even when the described embodiments are quite narrow). The claims often become a game of starting unenforceably broad and only subsequently narrowing to something reasonable. Of course, it is the broadest claims that get tested in court. Why are design patents different? They don't really have claims in the same way. A design patent can be flawed (by having prior art or by failing the novelty test) but can't greedily try to expand its claims to cover everything in the world. Of course, many patent lawyers think design patents aren't worth the paper they're printed on precisely because they can't expand to cover everything in the whole field. As for Apple's situation... they write software. The questions: how novel is it? How much protection does that novelty earn? These are subjective questions. Of course, Apple will always think the answers are "Very novel and lots of protection". Their competitors will always disagree. And there is no way of saying who's correct expect dragging the whole affair through the court system for years. I don't think Apple's patents are of worse quality than most patents. But the patent system never has a clear "this is protected and this isn't". It's always contentious because everything has a precedent of some kind -- but does that count as prior art? Who the fuck knows.