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Comment by smiler | Hacker News Reader

The article only looks at it from the 'Apple is evil' perspective. I wonder if Apple are patenting these purely so that others can't and thereby allowing freedom for developers to develop these apps without worrying about patent infringement

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I'm looking at this from the "ANYONE who tries to patent generic ideas is evil" perspective.

No offense, but that's not a very nuanced or useful way to think about the situation. It's the same line of thinking that makes 16-year-old kids declare that they'll never work for The Man. Idealistic and perhaps admirable, but not very practical.

Opposing any individual player in a game for acting in their own rational best interest is dumb. If a big company with good products didn't act defensively in these situations, they'd be eaten alive by patent trolls who have no such qualms. Until the laws are changed, these kinds of patents are a necessary evil.

A complication with patent trolls is that they're immune to defensive patents: they don't practice, so they can't be countersued or bargained with. I think you probably mean "other companies that develop mobile apps." In this case, especially in the context of the direct copy of the TapTapTap app as shown above, it looks like this means "our own developers."

I think we are getting pretty cavalier with the word evil these days, its not like apple is killing babies here. I'm not saying its right, but evil?

Right.

Because Apple never capriciously brings down the hammer on the small guy.

I'm not saying that either way - I was just pointing out the alternative. Until Apple state their intentions we won't know either way will we?

We can extrapolate their intentions based on their history of actions, just like you can with real people or any other corporation / group of people. We can't predict with 100% veracity but we can have an educated expectation.

Still, I'm more saddened by the fact that if Apple didn't do this, patent trolls probably would, so taking a stance here is a matter of picking a lesser evil.

You should probably start by looking at Apple's history, which suggests that the alternative isn't likely.

What if Apple skips sueing the guys on their own platform but does sue the guys making apps like this for Android? Thats more worrisome to me than the prospect of Apple using them against iPhone developers, which is probably something they would never do.

They probably won't sue ios developers over this, since they can easily block their apps.

Alternatively they could allow freedom for developers on their own platform whilst aggressively pushing for licencing fees from rival platform providers. Bearing in mind their lawsuits against HTC for the alleged violation of broad and trivial patents I can't see why anyone would expect them to use it purely defensively

That, and in the current business climate, and the way the US patent system works, they pretty much have to do this - it's just good business strategy. If they don't patent it, someone else will, and will go after apple for buckets of cash.

In general, it's just a patent cold-war style arms race between large companies - they all keep huge patent portfolios so they all don't bother suing each other for patent infringement, because they're pretty much guaranteed to be infringing on a bunch of each other's patents - it creates a legal situation that neither party wants to get involved with in the first place.

Given Apple's suits against HTC for using Android, I see no good reason to give them the benefit of the doubt like that.

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