Thomson Reuters has a very interesting and confusing graphic chart on who is suing whom in the mobile world.
It seems like every week we get a new lawsuit over some insane patent that may be years, or even decades old! A lot of mobile users are getting tired of the lawsuits and just wan the various companies to duke it out in the market.
Notice how many arrows are coming to/from Apple. You might think they hold so many more patents than everyone else, but according to the following chart that’s not necessarily true.
As you can see, Apple is nowhere near Samsung as to number of patents, but they sure are busy with the ones they do have!
At the end of the day I feel these companies can spend the millions in legal fees on more R&D or even giving away free phones for some great pub or more of those “if you don’t have an iPhone” commercials or something.
Apple, as well as every other company on that chart, does feel the need to protect what it deems its intellectual property, so we can just sit back as consumers and watch the sideshow unfold.
Apple is not the only company doing this though and certainly every mobile carrier it seems has some kind of lawsuit going.
What do you think about this?