The Next Step in Apple's Thermonuclear War Against Android

> These Four Horsemen of the Android Apocalypse are patents for what Apple claims are “key” product features -- “Slide to Unlock,” “Text Correction,” “Unified Search,” and “Special Text Detection.

Wasn't "Slide to Unlock" invalidated in the process against HTC?

somehow Apple reminded me of monsanto. Maintain your dominant position on the market by agressively suing everybody.

Some companies will have to pay a slightly higher per device royalty than they had wanted to and/or remove/modify some functionality. It's the Apocalypse! It's Thermonuclear War!

I don't think so, because the dysfunctionality of the patent system is working out extremely well for Apple.

However, I do hold out some degree of hope that the high-profile nature of these products, along with the self-evident insanity of these patents that give one company exclusive dominion over basic concepts (rounded rectangles, pinch-to-zoom) may be enough to make more people aware of how broken the patent system is.

So while I doubt Apple has any intention other than to keep exploiting the flaws in the patent system to attack its competitors, if there is an upside to any of this nonsense, that would be it.

Edit: Even though most of us on this forum probably reserve the most contempt for patent trolls like Myrhvold, with his zombie horde of non-practicing entities, I actually think that these cases resonate wayyyyy more with the non-programmer mainstream audience.

Indie programmers having to pay royalties behind the scenes to some shell company? For most people, that's not too interesting. The Galaxy Nexus getting pulled off the market because it can search for things? This is at least something that people have heard of, can understand, and can see doesn't make sense.

That's the thing: It doesn't really matter. Take any given software patent and throw a research team at it, chances are you'll find invalidating prior art. Take any given software patent and give it to a CS major, chances are you'll have a work-around inside of a few days.

But that's not the problem. The problem is that you never know which patents will be asserted against you, and by that point the horse is out of the barn. You've now got to spend millions of dollars on lawyers for years to invalidate their improvidently granted patents. And the work-around doesn't do much good when they're asking for damages for past infringement on the millions of devices you've already shipped or suddenly having your trucks stopped at the border (and interrupting your business and straining your relationships with retailers) during the period before you can retool your supply chain to incorporate the work-around. Especially when the second you release a new product with a new set of work-arounds, they come at you with a new set of patents.

Software patents have got to go.