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> The only way these patents are going to matter to you is if you hit it big enough to be worth taking to court -- it's a millionaire problem.

Not really. Big companies can use patents to send a cease-and-desist letter to any small company. You don't need to be big company to be afraid of software patents.

There have been quite a few examples of patent trolls taking exactly the opposite approach. They know they can't win a court battle against Microsoft, so they do a distributed shake down for a smaller amount on all the small vendors infringing on the patent.

Small companies can't afford to fight the big ones, so they tend to either back down or fight and go bankrupt before the case is concluded.

Apple has done this in the past -- one example is IIRC NuTech, assuming that I remember the company's name correctly. (They duplicated the mac.)

PIXAR did it also with their patent on Catmull-Clark subdivision surface algorithms.

pg puts forth a similar view in his essay on software patents:

http://www.paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html

But I don't think that logic applies here. Sure, if you're a small operation going head to head with some huge corporation, that attitude toward patents makes perfect sense.

But that's not the order of things in scenario; Apple doesn't see small app developers as their competitors, rather they see Google's Android and possibly Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 (and the manufacturers who build the corresponding devices) as their competitors. So Apple's most likely use for these patents is to threaten developers building apps for Android and other non-iOS platforms. And that, in light of Apple's recent history of patent abuse, gives startups every reason to worry.

I think Apple has been forced to patent everything they can: Nokia sued Apple for e.g. "using positioning data in applications". If Apple did not create a huge portfolio of patents, then Apple would very vulnerable from attacks from Nokia et.al.

Patents are the business equivalent of the cold wars nuclear weapon: we have peace because if you bomb us, then we will make sure that you are completely bombed too: The thought was to keep peace by having lots of weapons and mutually behaving like no weapons existed at all. In the end, it was all just wasted money.

http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?n...

To be fair, Nokia sued Apple because Apple refused to license their multi-touch tech to Nokia, knowing that they were themselves using many Nokia patents (according to Nokia).

Apple's patents aren't merely defensive. The recent suit against HTC comes to mind.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/190590/apple_sues_htc.html

While your post gets a lot of facts right, you seem to be giving Apple the role of the good guy a bit too quickly.

Apple has been flooding the mobile phone space with patents ever since they started working on the iPhone and the industry has been suffering from crippling stifling of innovation ever since (in case you were wondering why it took so long for Android to get "pinch to zoom").

As for your other point:

> but it's pretty difficult to imagine them going from retail hardware company to professional patent troll

There is an in-between: they are working on apps that they are not sure they will be able to ship in time, so they are filing these patents to make sure nobody will beat them.

If you have a great app, the only decent way to execute is to ship it and to grab the market. Using patents to stifle competitors or blanket the market with a chilling effect is lame.

>The only way these patents are going to matter to you is

...if you want financing.

The investment community keeps a close eye on patents, because it's a major potential liability.

>Obviously, I don't know if Apple is being defensive or offensive here, but it's pretty difficult to imagine them going from retail hardware company to professional patent troll

It's easy to imagine. Microsoft went through exactly the same metamorphosis. Originally their patents were "defensive" (which is a spurious to start with -- simply documenting making an idea public is just as much of a defense), but as the growth curve started to peak they started looking at that portfolio as a way to assure their continued success, if by less productive means.

> which is a spurious to start with -- simply documenting making an idea public is just as much of a defense

The idea behind defensive patents isn't that they defend your use of that idea, but that they defend you from competitors who have patents that might affect you. (Since they hopefully allow you to countersue.)

I thought the "defensive patent" idea was less about "this idea is safe for me to use" and more about Mutually Assured Destruction (which doesn't work against Non Practicing Entities such as your typical patent troll, of course).

"...if you want financing."

Not really. Patent litigation tends to come out of nowhere. Investors don't know about applicable patents unless the patents are particularly high-profile (like certain video compression patents) -- in which case, they're probably known to everyone in advance, and part of the business plan.

I'd wager that most internet startups are violating at least one software patent, but that doesn't stop investment in the slightest. And while you could argue that these patents by Apple poison the well for future iPhone app developers, these particular patents are all extremely similar to popular iPhone apps. If you tried to pitch these ideas to an investor, you'd get laughed out of the room for other reasons.