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Comment by andyking | Hacker News Reader

I'll likely get downvoted so far I pop up in New Zealand for this - but zzzzz.

These expensive spats between huge companies just aren't interesting, or in any way relevant, to my life or business. They're just billion-dollar corporations flexing their muscles and making lawyers a bit richer every day.

Every other day now, it seems like we get a story about some shiny flashing trinket or other being 'banned' by some judge in $country, or one massive corporation suing another over three lines of code, or something.

It just feels like irrelevant corporate politicking between super-rich corporations, and doesn't have any grounding in the real world.

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> It just feels like irrelevant corporate politicking between super-rich corporations, and doesn't have any grounding in the real world.

"the largest punishment for those who are not interested in politics, is that they'll be governed by those who are." - Arnold Toynbee

These irrelevant politicking with no grounding in the real world, directly affects the revenue of app developers in the opposite side of the globe.

Downvoted for breaking guidelines.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you."

I read it that he's saying he expects people are going to disagree and down vote rather than encouraging it - the difference between "I expect this is doing to go down badly" and "I don't care what you all think".

"I know I'm going to get downvoted for this" is not appropriate on HN.

In another thread on this general topic, someone made what I think is the best point about why these cases are relevant to small developers: the patent system has now gotten so absurd that it seems everyone is infringing everything; so now the incumbents will simply settle with each other and use the patent system as a way to hamper new entrants.

Essentially, when these cases end up with both sides infringing, it simply strengthens the position of patent trolls and incumbents, while doing nothing in practice to harm distribution of any of the incumbents' products. It's not like either Apple or Samsung are really going to not distribute their products in South Korea. But could they enjoin a new entrant from doing so with this case as precedent? You bet. This just made entering the phone/tablet market in South Korea a lot more expensive.

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