For a long time the major players have all held loaded guns pointed at each other's heads, with nobody willing to fire a shot because they knew it would be more trouble than it was worth.
And then Apple decided to take the first shot. The big question now, is whether the politicians will let this drag out, costing everyone a fortune, or step in and call an end to it by changing the patent system.
This implies that Apple was some naive child entering the Big Bad World of Business. I doubt they were unaware of how to play the game.
That's not exactly how it happened -- every other major player pays Nokia licensing fees. Apple refused to purchase a license on the terms Nokia offered (mostly, Nokia wanted a cross-licensing agreement for Apple UI patents. Nokia actually cares about patents, and tries to not infringe on them.), so Nokia sued them to force it.
At this level - All the major players try and license on FRAND terms first and foremost - limits your risk, and keeps your legal bills down - but Nokia was asking for more than Apple was willing to play - so they go to court.
All the players are looking at this from a Game Theoretic position, and, at the end of the day, Patent holders _have_ to send some of their negotiations to court, if only to make it clear their FRAND values would be held up.
Apple is somewhat unique, in that they aren't as keen on getting license value for their patents as their competitors are - and, FRAND values on a design patent is a lot more "mushy" than a radio chip function.
Not saying Nokia is the good guy here -- just pointing out that the fact that they sued is unrelated to the fact they couldn't compete in smartphones. Based on the history of Nokia, if they had never tried to compete with Apple, they still would have demanded the licensing costs. Simply because they care about patents and consider them one of their normal sources of revenue.
I thought Apple was 'think different' and 'we play the game our own way'?
The goal here has to be achieving a sane and stable status quo for "obvious" IP law in consumer hardware; not punishing Apple for being jerks about things and upsetting the previous status quo.
This court case is just a proxy war fought by Motorola as a client company of Google.
Google gets to fuck with Apple and if they lose they just roll up the company with out exposing the real profits to judgement. Moto bears the risk, Google reaps the rewards, classic proxy war.
Either way I don't think German politicians are ready to intervene.
If it's as bad as you say (and it's not, this is one ruling in one case and not a final one) then the companies will simply stop and put down their guns. They're not run by stupid people, when the cost of legal actions and settlements outweighs the possible benefits, they'll revert to the previous position - only the most outrageous violations will be followed up.
This specific situation - the recent upsurge in actions (but NOT the more general issues with patent) is something that the market can sort out.
The real problem with patents isn't multibillion dollar companies slugging it out, they've got the legal muscle and licensing budgets to be OK, it's with the small players who can't or won't develop products out of fear that they're going to violate some patent they're not even aware of owned by some multi-billion dollar organisation who'll squash them without thinking.
Eventually, once a lot of those unknowns become accurately estimable, then yes the market can solve these problems. But there's a giant cost associated with waiting around for that.
By that logic the market couldn't work for 98% of products.
Legal action I'd suggest is certainly no harder to predict than that and probably easier.