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Comment by teilo | Hacker News Reader

Is it too much to hope for that there will be a back-room mediating deal where, essentially, both companies drop their existing patent lawsuits and grant one another license to the patents in question? I think that would be better for everybody.

Then they can compete on the merits of their respective products. What a novel idea.

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If the patents are what HTC says they are then it will probably come down to a cross-licensing situation. I would expect Nokia / Apple to happen the same way. People are adding a little too much drama into this stuff.

Yes, what do you mean "too much to hope for"? It would be downright weird if anything other than a cross-licensing deal came out of this. All these suits and countersuits are just the lawyerly version of a threat display:

http://www.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

I just had this vision of lawyers in courtrooms that do patent litigation sporting mandatory extra-large Baboon style mandibles.

You are absolutely right, that is exactly what it is.

Never even thought of it that way, brilliant insight.

One can always hope for an invalidation of the patents involved...

The real issue is that it makes it impossible to compete if you don't have a patent portfolio of your own. You couldn't start building your own handset and incorporate features every other phone on the market has, because you have nothing to fight with when you get sued, thus ensuring that only large corporations can sell those products.

Yep, the same has happened in other industries. If you aren't there at the start, you have to be part of a second wave after the first group's patents expire.

Hope for? That's nothing more than the formation of a rent-seeking cartel. It's decidedly not better for any small newcomer that wants to make a smartphone whos not in the cartel.

Its the exact opposite of competing on the merits of their respective products. Its attempting to never have to do so again.

It is called a cross-licensing deal. It is what Intel/AMD have, plus 1000s of other companies.

If you are a newcomer, you are probably going to get HTC or some other company with a deal like this to make it for you.

But yes, it does make it hard to get into. Notice Dell and Apple have managed to get into this space in the last few years, so not impossible.

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