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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to save everyone the trouble of reading the inevitable comments. Here’s everything that has already been said 2^n times before and will continue to be said:

1. Fuck Apple, they deserve it for trying to use patents themselves. All they do is make overpriced pretty black plastic toys, there’s nothing remotely innovative about selling jewellery to metrosexual fanboys.

2. Patents are fundamentally broken. They should all be thrown out, and miraculously everyone will rush to build great products with razor-thin margins.

3. INAL, but <<Insert two paragraphs of dense legal opinions>>.

4. Apple is innovative and deserves its patents, these people are just leeches and trolls.

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"miraculously everyone will rush to build great products with razor-thin margins"

Not a very neutral reproduction of a hypothetical comment! I would even say that it is suggestive.

Feel free to make a different comment, I’m just reproducing the ones that are made on a regular basis. I don’t judge whether they’re correct, just whether they’re frequent!

"Patents are fundamentally broken. They should all be thrown out!"

Nonsense, just throw the obvious ones out!

No, we should only grant obvious patents! They expire the 3rd Sunday after the second full moon. Also the application should cost 1 billion dollars and must be written is Sanskrit.

More seriously, rather than trying to only throw obvious ones out I would suggest applicants submit a bounty on each patent to be paid out when prior art is discovered. Or returned after 5 years. The patent office can then charge a small fee to compare prior art to a patent or patent application and it becomes expensive and pointless to submit most dumb patents without costing the taxpayers anything.

They are obvious because someone (the patent holder) MADE them obvious.

It's not Motorola [MOT] who is suing Apple, it is Motorola Mobility [MMI], aka "Android's fiance."

It is my understanding that the prenup prohibits MMI from settling existing suits or initiating new suits without MMI's future mother-in-law sending blessings.

Thus, there is ample opportunity for calling Google "evil."

In response, we may expect prayer rugs to be turned toward Mountain View.

I think extending the analogy of runtime to argument repetition is interesting. Are there any n^2 comments?

>2. Patents are fundamentally broken. They should all be thrown out, and miraculously everyone will rush to build great products with razor-thin margins.

The build cost for an iPhone 4s is roughly $190. The device retails for $649.

That is hardly razor thin.

That comment parodies a debate wherein some people argue that patents grant Apple the right to make this margin, and if you remove the patents (and IP monopolies in general), other companies will clone everything, driving margins down to effectively zero. Some people agree with this but argue that somehow, companies will still invest money in R&D and create great products.

It’s a debate, it’s a complicated situation with a lot of hypotheses to toss around. I was just trying to find a risible straw-man comment to share.

>1. Fuck Apple, they deserve it for trying to use patents themselves. All they do is make overpriced pretty black plastic toys, there’s nothing remotely innovative about selling jewellery to metrosexual fanboys.

The first sentence is independent from the rest. See below:

>4. Apple is innovative and deserves its patents, these people are just leeches and trolls.

That might be true, but that implies Motorola isn't inventive and doesn't deserve it's own patents. There has been a lot of innovation into packing such advanced technology into a palm sized device that Apple had nothing whatsoever to do with, but is leveraging. If Motorola is a leech, then so is Apple.

By firing the first salvo, they have needlessly stirred the hornet's nest.

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