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Comment by mryall | Hacker News Reader

More interesting than a bunch of chatter on Google Plus is this article on Forbes, "Could Steve Jobs actually win his thermonuclear war?":

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/30/could-steve-jobs-actu...

I don't think this will be the last of Apple's actions against Android. When Steve said they'd "patented the hell out of" the iPhone, I got the sense he really wasn't joking.

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They've patented the hell out of everything that they've done in the last decade with the iPhone, but the very foundations that they stand on have been patented the hell out of by Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, etc for the decades prior.

Standing on someone else's foundations isn't the best place from which to start a thermonuclear patent war.

If you have enough lawyers it is. You can do anything with enough money and lawyers.

In other worss: the justice system is no longer a monopoly of the state on violence. But a for hire entity, where the highest bidder can buy their preferred form of "justice"

This is not a good development, and we can wonder how long it will take before the bric countries choose a radical new direction towards IP.

If it's decades then you're in the clear since patents have a more finite lifespan than copyright.

The initial iPhone patents only have another ten years or so left in them, if that.

Especially as the people you are aiming your thermonuclear weapons at happen to be part of your supply chain (or trading closely with them)

But if those patents are part of necessary standards, they're required to license them to Apple. Apple is not required to license any of its UI patents to competitors.

How are you equating standards essential 3G patents to software UI? They don't really have any correlation whatsoever.

There is no content in that "article". He doesn't even attempt to answer his posed question. It comes up only in the last paragraph and all he concludes is "Apple may be tempted to request preliminary injunctions against newer products". What insight.

Gotta get more page views, and based on the comment count vs normal forbes posts, this is the right formula.

This came up not that long ago on Hacker News. If the article headline is posed as a "yes/no" question, the answer is "no".

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092880

Reply on news.ycombinator.com